In late September of 2004, MyDD's average daily traffic had just passed 40,000 readers a day. However, the traffic surge was new, and I was still finding it very difficult to live off the $650 in ad revenue I had pulled in for the previous month (and the couple hundred bucks I had made working as a canvasser for Grassroots Campaigns). I knew that the time was soon coming when the ad revenue would be enough for me to just blog full-time, but with no money in the bank and lots of debt, I had to take on a part-time job to help pay the bills as a stop-gap measure. Fortunately, a friend of mine at Penn hooked me up with a near minimum wage job usually occupied by undergrads. For two weeks, the job allowed me to work in front of a computer, so I could blog as I worked.
One day, as I was working at Penn, I received an email from someone working at Americans Coming Together. The person wanted to know if ACT could negotiate with me to secure a lower ad rate on MyDD. This was a progressive organization that had raised more than $125 million in order to get out the vote. As I worked a job typically reserved for teenagers in order to pay some of my bills (I couldn't pay them all back then, and my internet service was actually cut off on Election Eve 2004, one day before one million people visited MyDD), this incredibly well endowed organization was asking me if I could cut them a break. And you wonder why the progressive movement loses so many of its best and brightest to the private sector.
Even though that happened three years ago, thinking about it still pisses me off today. While most pitches I receive are nowhere nearly as obnoxious, being pitched to help promote / support X is a daily condition of blogging. For example, I was traveling during most of today, and did not check my email from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. During that interval, I received five unsolicited pitches for projects or campaigns that emailed me personally. There were another dozen or so solicitations, mainly looking to push a news story about a campaign, on which I was not emailed personally, but rather that were sent to a large group of bloggers. All in all, I would say it has been a pretty average day on the pitch front so far, although perhaps slightly above normal.
After three and a half years, I have come to pretty much accept this as par for the course. The lack of ads from people making the pitches does not even bother me anymore, as I have come to take attempted blogger exploitation as par for the course in the political and media world (or maybe I have just grown numb and decided to pursue other avenues of funding the blogosphere). By this point, rather than angering me into the occasional over the top rant as a heavy day of unsolicited pitches once might have, mostly I just wonder why on earth so many people think I can provide them with valuable support to their efforts. There seems to be a strange perception that I am some sort of major insider and decision maker who can move heaven and earth on pretty much any subject I put my effort behind. I don't know how this perception of bloggers came into being, but the truth is that even after three and a half years and 28 million readers, like every other progressive blogger I simply don't have much decision making power in the progressive ecosystem. While we have varying degrees of connections in progressive institutions, the truth is that pretty much none of us are "insiders," at least in the way I understand the term as referring to people with regular, behind the scenes power in American politics. And I still blog mainly out of my bedroom in West Philly, just as I did when I started blogging full time in 2004. And yet I am still consistently pitched as though I can make some enormous difference on pretty much anything and everything.
What insider power do I have? Well, I decide what I want to write on my blog, I participate in the Blue Majority page, I help run BlogPac, and I am a local elected official in the Democratic Party. While I listen carefully to any pitches specific to those subjects, as well as to pitches that could potentially result in me actually getting paid, the truth is that virtually all pitches I receive have, at best, only a tenuous relationship to the content of the blog, and no relationship top pretty much anything else I do. For example, about 5% of the pitches I receive are about new books, even though I have only ever reviewed about four books in my 3,300+ typically lengthy blog posts. Another 5% come from congressional email lists in places like Kentucky that I seem unable to ever extract myself from and have no idea how I ended up on them in the first place.
It all makes me think that there is some great myth or legend of progressive bloggers as super-human beings that is floating around in American political discourse. There seems to be very little understanding that we operate primarily as a mix of small business owners, petty freelance consultants, homespun media personalities, independent media activists, and other similarly sized activities. Generally speaking, it is a pretty small-time existence (or at least it has usually been such for me), and certainly does not result in much pay. And yet, somehow, it results it a huge number of people in politics wanting a piece of you. This makes me think that, if nothing else, bloggers have somehow established a pretty solid marketing system for ourselves, as our legend seems to regularly outstrip our actual stature. I am pretty much still the same under-employed guy who writes out of my bedroom most days, just as I was in 2004, only now there is some weird mythology surrounding my profession. I wonder if, when people start to actually figure bloggers out, I'll miss the flattery of the constant unsolicited pitches. |
