Is Blogging Ready For a Unionized Workforce?
Is Blogging Ready For a Unionized Workforce?
Please, please give me a break? I don’t like to consider myself anti-union… lets call it union cynical, ok? At their best, unions give voice to workers who don’t have one. At worst, they’re an extra and useless layer of self-propelled bureaucracy that does nothing but suck money away from the company AND the workers.
What I think makes unions really necessary (in this country, anyway), is the pervasive attitude among most Americans that you need to rely on someone else to give you a job. Sometimes that’s true, and it’s more true in some classes and regions than others.
However.
Blogging is just like cartooning, fine art, and novel writing. It’s a creative endeavor, and just like all creative jobs, you can either do someone else’s work and pay what the market will bear, or you can enter the meritocracy and be judged by what all creative professionals ultimately compete with: marketing savvy. The only thing that keeps blogging wages low is the fact that bloggers are so convinced of their own brilliance and either incapable of or unwilling to market themselves that they’ll devalue their own time to absurd levels to “get the message out, man”.
Look, if you’re educated enough to string words together cohesively and you’re web-savvy enough to know what a blog is, you are most likely a member of the middle class, and richer than 90-something percent of the world. You aren’t restricted to either blogging or starving. You haven’t been elbowed out of the market by problogging overlords. Most likely, you already have a job that satisfactorily pays your bills. It’s not talent that propels a writer to greatness, it’s self-promotion. The evidence has been piling up for decades — nobody is going to do it for you without you getting screwed just a little bit. Shit or get off the pot, blogosphere, and don’t even try crying victim, because I’m not listening.
Edited-to-ad: I’m sorry, that may not have been clear enough. Writers write. Successful writers aren’t writers at all, they’re masterful marketers, promoters and PRers. Don’t confuse the two.
