If the Netroots enables ordinary citizens to get around the traditional political, economic, and media gatekeepers, its also true that the denizens of the Blogosphere are so fiercely egalitarian and anti-elitist that they resist delegating any authority, moral or political, to leaders that emerge within the movement. Bloggers that make money are resented. Bloggers that gain fame are mocked. Bloggers that have access are suspicious. Bloggers that are hired onto campaigns or get real paying jobs with health care benefits are accused of selling out. The movement is actually starved of cash. And capital investment is desperately needed to take the movement to the next level, as well as to keep bloggers afloat. Somehow we have to figure out ways to overcome our own instinctive opposition to becoming or supporting new gatekeepers. We should be growing much faster than we are and we should see more people getting trained in the skills they need to seed a new progressive infrastructure. I’d welcome any ideas people have on how to improve the culture of the blogosphere, as well as on how to attract the capital needed for investments in technological improvements. Thoughts?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Now don’t holler at me but, why shouldn’t the Democratic Party help fund us. Or does it?
I guess I’m rather ignorant about it. Seems like it should.
I think that speaks to the problem that BooMan is writing about. If the Democratic party did help fund the blogosphere, that would automatically put to question the integrity of said blogosphere.
Right. I see. Oh. Crap and dammit.
Well, I guess we’ll have to do it on the cheap then.
heh. Yeah, that’s not exactly the solution I was looking for ‘)
The Democratic Party doesn’t give us a dime. I think the DCCC may have run blogads at some point, but I can’t even remember. Individual candidates advertise, but not nearly enough. What is needed is for readers and supporters to donate money to bloggers, or coalitions of bloggers. Of course, the bloggers needs to make the pitch and deliver something even better in return, including increasing the power of the Movement for each and every user.
I hate money. I really do.
That’s an interesting perspective.
Do you hate heat in the winter and food in the refrigerator, too?
I’m not speaking for invisible here…but in the spirit of the discussion, doesn’t it depend on who is providing the heat in the winter or the food in the refrigerator? 🙂
I see your smiley face indicating snark, but then you also said it was in the interests of discussion. So, I’m not sure of the spirit of your remark or what you’re driving at.
Personally, I have too many scruples about asking for money and for who I will allow to pay me. But faced with no heat and an empty fridge, people don’t have the option of scruples.
Perspective is the thing, Booman. Don’t confuse scruples with pride. People want to help, so let them – doesn’t mean you’re selling your soul.
I’m sure most of us here (even Arthur) would gladly kick in a bit to keep the place going. The hard part is finding a solution that you can live with.
It’s not fair for the rest of us to sit back and let Daddy Boo bear the whole burden. The netroots is not the first effort at counterculture to face this kind of problem. Eventually the people with skill and talent withdraw from the idea of public service when that public offers nothing back.
Just keep this conversation going, and I’m sure your righteous solution will come. You can get by with the help of your friends.
Of course, the bloggers needs to make the pitch and deliver something even better in return, including increasing the power of the Movement for each and every user.
speaking only for myself, I am not interested in any more gate keepers, we already have too many. I am interested in having more information.
It is good for bloggers to have money, it is scandalous that the Democrats don’t do a better job of supporting netroots. It is scandalous that advocacy groups do not do a better job of supporting netroots.
but if high traffic blogs are getting mocked, those bloggers should entertain the possibility that there might be cause for mockery.
All the loose money in this nation is going upward to the top 1%. If the netroots are starving for cash and infrastructure, it’s because there’s been negative wage growth for the last 10 years in the middle and working classes that likely compose 90% of the blogosphere.
We can support ourselves, but as Booman says, we’ve got to keep the heat on in winter, and food in the fridge. So extra cash for exciting virtual spaces like a blog or a blog-based progressive movement really aren’t a high priority.
Americans, because the government has been privatized, are being marketed more and more to volunteer and donate for causes like tsunami relief when 30 years ago, the public felt that the US government, via our tax money, contributed. Now, with the privatization of the entire globe, it’s up to the market to alleviate human and planetary suffering. Americans give more and more and more to charity (I don’t have the facts in front of me) because otherwise, relief efforts would never get off the ground if they waited for neocon governments to donate aid.
And these neocon “free market” types will always use aid money as leverage to privatize and buy up markets where aid is needed or disaster occurs. To what end? Further enrichment of the 1%. I guess this is the real meaning behind Cheney’s “1%” doctrine.
the other thing is that the left is a bunch of cheapskates. I think The Nation did a bit on this recently, or maybe it was actually Booman Tribune.
The right wingers set up think tanks and actually pay people a living wage, while the left has people knocking on doors.
Wealthy right-wingers like Scaife and Vigurie spend their money well and invest in infrastructure. The left… well, Think Progress and Media Matters are a start (and wasn’t MM founded by a former right winger?), but in general, not so much.
I think that the Dems are so ideologically whishy-washy, and adoptive of “free market” neocon principles, that it’s impossible for the biggies to open up think tanks and fund them. The Dems don’t want to support liberal values like universal health care, wind and solar power, etc.; they want to suck off the status quo just like the Reps.
Like I’ve said for a long time: Republicans feed their young, while Democrats starve theirs because they’re afraid of any competition from new and younger blood. When you add in the attitude that anyone who can afford dinner, health insurance, and/or a family must be a sell out, it becomes increasingly hard to change the equation.
I love that the candidates/dem organizations are all happy to get the free online publicity and fundraising, but are nowhere to be seen when it comes to supporting and growing their base.
And this hits big time on a discussion I’m having with a local group. They keep sending me press releases to blog on or at least to pass on, yet the idea of them working with bloggers creeps them out. I’m tired of running meetings between them and local bloggers with nothing coming of it. And I always mention that the GOP would have adopted and invested in these youngsters years ago, instead of using them as photo-ops.
another issue is that the Republicans and the right don’t really act as embarrassed about their base as the democrats do (I’m sure that in reality they see their GOP base as slack-jawed yokels). That’s made for some discomfort for the GOP, like with the Schiavo nonsense, but usually it works quite well for them, and the GOP and the right has been remarkably successful at getting people to vote against their own interests.
Whereas the democrats… well, look at how they treat the netroots when it comes to FISA. Or the war. Or just about any issue. It’s always “we must move to the right, let’s ‘stand up to the left'”, which is kind of like choosing to beat up on Milhouse rather than face down Nelson Muntz.
And until the Democratic Party stops seeing the left as a bunch of Milhouses, we’re going to get the same treatment: they want our money, but not our issues. They want us to give them free PR, but they don’t want to return the deed in kind. In short, they’re not scared of us the way they are scared of the right.
that’s why I’m hoping the August 8 money bomb is really big. Big enough to scare some of the shitty democrats into realizing we mean business.
Republicans feed their young, while Democrats starve theirs…
And they recognize that part of that care and feeding requires, well, that the folks recruited to shape and drive policy are cared for and fed. Retention is important.
I think part of our challenge is structural: conservatives–by definition–have little need for activists, i.e. they’re not going to be doing activist work for activist causes (civil rights, environment, humans rights etc.) like us. Power is already on their side; they don’t need spend their resources that way.
Further, doing “good” work or the “Lord’s work” has no big economic payoff. Defense contractors, e.g., don’t support peace groups, and it’s not because they inherently like conflict and war, but because there wouldn’t be as many weapons to sell.
Anyway, this discussion has been percolating in some form or fashion for the last decade or so. The netroots is definitely part of the answer of the larger question of developing progressive memes and messages and changing right-wing narratives. But money and our attitude toward it is an issue too. (Wingnuts aren’t burdened with whether they’ve “sold out” or not. They have their own brand of socialism that keeps them quite comfy.)
See also (may be a bit dated, but still instructive):
Michael Shuman: Why do Progressive Foundations Give too Little to too Many? (The Nation, January 12, 1998)
David Callahan: $1 Billion for Conservative Ideas (The Nation, April 8, 1999)
David Dyssegaard Kallick: Progressive Think Tanks–What Exists, What’s Missing? (Report for the Program on Governance and Public Policy, Open Society Institute; January 2002)
an observation: the obama campaign, perhaps in collaboration with dean and the 50 state grassroots effort of the dnc, have developed a very successful model for netroots fund raising. the obvious point being: how can that be applied to the “independent” bloggers?
l certainly don’t know the answer, but on a large scale, as this political campaign has shown, it’s demonstrably doable. how can those lessons be scaled down and applied to a site such as BT…or a consortium of sites?
certainly sites such as dKos, huffpost, C&L, and others are generating income that’s significant enough to keep them going…is that private donations/fortunes at work, advertising? l really don’t know.
l think a systemic problem that has to be overcome is the amount of chaff…noise…that has to be waded through, and overcome, to get to the people who are analytic, thoughtful, fair, reliable and relevant.
food for thought.
My initial thought is that this is mistitled. I don’t think it is the culture of the netroots that is self-defeating…rather, I think it is that the netroots have sprung up in opposition to a system that is much larger, more entrenched, and geared to suppress something exactly like the blogosphere. In that sense, it’s a rigged game.
So, you can look at it two ways. The optimist will say that the blogosphere has to change the system, or at least perception, to a point where the power shifts, and we’re not there yet. Of course, that power shift will bring along another host of problems, most of which come down to trust. The pessimist will say that the blogosphere is simply self-defeating by its very nature, and that its fate will eventually be to be quashed by the very system that it opposes.
The essence of the problem seems to be making information communal yet trustworthy in a capitalist system. It’s a tough nut to crack.
there’s a transparency issue.
A poor-ass blogger in his flip-flops can be trusted, for the most part, to be telling you the straight scoop as they see it.
A funded blogger cannot.
And that is the root of the problem.
Another point. I blogged for three straight years without a vacation, rarely asking for donations. When I did finally ask for some cheese to help pay for a vacation, Arthur Gilroy told me it was my lowest moment as a blogger. Now, AG is curmudeonally, but he’s not alone in imposing a vow of poverty on the bloggers as some kind of test of credibility. It’s a widespread feeling shared by denizens of the blogosphere and it helps explain why bloggers have to fight tooth and nail to raise paltry sums of money for their own readership.
The expectation is that all content should be free and that anyone that gets paid has lost their virginity.
And then there are the people that insist that bloggers turn down ads that aren’t ideologically pure.
I’ll just respond here to both comments.
My smiley face above was not meant as snark, I was trying to generalize a discussion that I know is of great interest and importance to you personally. I apologize if that was taken the wrong way.
I think for the most part we are agreeing on where the general problem lies. I think it comes down to trust, and money can pollute that.
At this point, this is the only political blog that I visit at all. I’ve been here long enough, read enough, and know enough about you to trust you to be honest. For those reasons, I have done what I can to support this site, and if you started wearing Birkenstocks instead of flip flops and having good health insurance that wouldn’t change.
I didn’t take offense. I just wasn’t sure what you meant. And I thank you for all your support.
We did a lot of brainstorming at Netroots Nation, but asking the audience their opinion is essential in discussions of this sort.
And that’s why it’s an interesting topic. Because in this case, you’re asking the audience’s opinion of…the audience’s opinion.
I’m exhausted…I have a lot of random thoughts on this, but they’re not congealing into any sensible points, so I’m going to bow out.
A funded blogger cannot.
Huh? Are you saying atrios isn’t trusted?
I can think of a bunch of well-funded blogs who i and a lot of others find to be trustworthy.
I was a little sloppy there. I was trying to convey a certain mindset rather than make that argument myself.
Yeah, I know that mindset, and I reject it.
The people that say stuff like that are like the same people who told me “property is theft” when I bought my house. You know, the one built in the early 20th century and lived in by several families before mine.
The democrats should be contributing something, and it doesn’t have to have strings attached either.
Instead they get to have their cake and eat ours too.
We need a sort of WPA for bloggers. A non-profit agency that would perhaps collect dues(?) and/or contributions and distribute funding via a competitive selection process. But then again, it would involve an administration of a type that would be anathema to some bloggers. Hmm.
perhaps more along the lines of the NEA with a grants program, ideally non-governmental, but who knows.
there are a lot of programs out there that are funded exclusively thru grants from various foundations. my son is a development director for a non-profit in denver, and a large part of his job is grant research and writing. he’s been successful at it and is well respected in the non-profit, community service profession around here.
l’ll have to pick his brain about this next time l talk to him.
I love the idea of a trash pickup drive, wearing slogan shirts. Say, Obama shirst on a dozen or more people, working in a team along a neglected urban road, picking up trash.
I’ll be idealistic for a moment. What we need is an economy that is not so crushingly brutal that every adult male and female has to go to work 50 weeks a year to make ends meet. Then we can have some blogging done without the threat of financial collapse hanging over our heads.
An economy of peace rather than competitiveness.
the first serious progressive blogger to deal with progressive sexual politics will become a kajillionaire
like prostitution on the ballot in San Francisco? Or..? what would be a hypothetical example?
First, “gatekeepers” might itself have negative connotation, since down the page you mention the SF mayor wanting to skip around the corporate media gatekeepers… maybe a new role that goes beyond gatekeeping needs to be defined, broadened, and made into a word or phrase that people want to invest in?
Two ideas. Bill in Portland Maine got enough funding from DKos users to justify being a pure blogger, right? His schtick garnered sufficient funding, during a time-delimited drive, to set up a years worth of work, or something close to that, if I’m recalling correctly. Is his model akin to public broadcasting(PBS)? Are there other funding models that might appeal to the ethics and aesthetics of the target audience?
Also, another one-off, but a TOTAL freaking knock it out of the ballpark kind of win, you’ve heard of Sean Tavis? His faux-XKCD.com style comic strip spread like wildfire, across blogs and within 37 hours he hit his 3,000 donors goal. At this point, he may nearly double that goal. Partly it was the goofy-cute cartoon, with sentiments that his audience could really click into; but party it was the combination of a deadline (28 July 2008) combined with a clear dollar figure, a nice low figure that had people besides myself going “$8.34?? that’s a sandwich and over priced soda. I’d buy THAT for a random guy who proved through legwork that he was willing to stand up to some schmuck conservative who can’t even spellcheck his website!” Somehow I also got the impression that he’s helped others in his local area running for office, and if they don’t offend his sensibilities (pro choice, anti tax on food, pro-science, etc) .. then I’d hope that any donations he doesn’t use for his campaign could perhaps be leveraged to help is fellow local politicians. (If that’s a legit way to spend excess funds, after a campaign has ended.)
Thinking of it, Bill in Maine also had a specific dollar goal, and a deadline. And people on DKos pimping his offering in various posts, so he wasn’t hollaring down a well.
Another way donations seem to happen is “in kind” — donate money to a sustainable food shelter, or donate non-perishable food items. If not money, what services or goods could the audience offer? Particularly something commodity/small, like food in cans or boxes of food mix — the random nature of donations sometimes reflects “this is what I have to give, it seems to fit the general criteria, I hope it helps!” In an internet/online world, what small acts could build to bigger and better impacts?
From what I understood, that was the fucking point of YearlyKos in the first place. What happened? BBBs got more access and more walls were built. Last year was such a fucking joke and waste of time that it was proven that building the party or giving blogger-activist access isn’t in the interest of the people running YK (now NN). People who were doing good writing on important bread & butter issues were (ARE) swept aside so that some asshat who has a lot a readers and his claim to fame is the ability to make a mean hyperlink can be swooned upon.
So, yes…the netroots in general and that crowd in particular are sorta laughed at among most activists. The people I work/interact with almost daily don’t see any use for this arm of the netroots. There’s so much inanity, ignorance, elitism and straight up uselessness that they’re not even bothering to look to hiring from this arm of the liberal blogosphere.
I tried to hook a blogger from NM with a job, I know he’d be a perfect fit for. What did I get? “Well, besides blogging does he actually do anything useful?” That’s how the liberal blogosphere is looked at by a lot of people. If people have no actual action, they have no real cred as activist and therefore useless. People like John at Cottonmouth Blog are what the party and activists are looking for, not 98% of what the liberal blogosphere is.
This really makes me think that the blogging phenomenon is still in a very youthful position in our rapidly changing society, and we are too anxious to carve out defined, prosperous roles for bloggers. It’s too “early” to see where we’re going, and what values and cultural structures will come out of blogging.
Blogs started out as an HTML-based voice mail box, when, 1999? It’s evolved into what we use today, but our impact is new, experimental, dare I say.
I don’t have any good answers, but I know this is urgently important to deal with now. Some means of loose, overarching organization for networking and fundraising needs to be established. Too many good bloggers and activists are having to quit promising careers.
IIRC, Susie Madrak was going to be working on this with some seed funders, or entrepreneurs, or both. This was months ago. What happened to that?
she submitted a proposal to blogpac (i helped write it) but it wasn’t selected for funding.
If you look at the “first staff” of many successful pols, what you see is a coterie comprised largely of young adults, working full-out on the campaign. Many if not most of these can afford a year or more of the strange life of full-time days & nights of work by virtue of personal funds, lack of an established life, and willingness to live almost exclusively within the campaign.
A goodly number of successful blog-runners seem to be like that, having the financial and personal support system that permits running a blog, or managing it somehow, for a brief time, just like the political campaign staffers do. As you say here, Booman, it has to be a very hard life if you don’t have that sort of base. At another time you and others might have attached yourself to a person you supported politically, or you might have thrown all of your free time into being a volunteer or advocate for some issue. But you eventually, you would have expected regular life to begin again, with a regular job, family, friends, etc.
In fact, that’s what most of us who are part of the blogging community have – regular jobs, a regular life, and the array of responsibilities and delights that go with ordinary life. If we are also blog-runners, our blogs don’t consume our time the way yours and others do.
We are the lucky ones. We get to read, to comment, and some of us even take a stab at writing once in a while. We are, to put it not so nicely, living off what you blog-runners give us: a public voice we wouldn’t otherwise have. Some of us get addicted, too. It’s a kick to find interesting and compatible folks reading and commenting and coming up with common ideas, across the country. It’s our little taste of the excitement and influence felt by those full-time, full-out campaigners. We just do it on the blog-runners backs – without needing a personal trust fund, generous parents, unencumbered lives, connections with powerful friends, etc.
It’s a great bargain, really, for bloggers, to have such inclusive blog-runners.
However, we tend to want our blog-runners to be the sort of ideal persons we’d like to be: pure of heart (believing as we do), incorruptible (meaning taking no money from the dirty hands of advertisers), and yet having great influence. Might as well expect vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity – well, not so much for that last one.
So…it’s an unrealistic system, and cannot hold. Blog-runners can’t be breatharians. You deserve real lives. The mistletoe will die if the tree it’s attached to doesn’t get any nourishment.
I think a good first step would be a collective organization that provides insurance and retirement. Not much, really, to ask for. Blog-runners need those things now and later. Given the number of good progressive blog-runners, that should be possible, too. It’s not likely that progressive politics is going to get us universal, single-payer health care soon enough to make this need a silly place to start.
The Act Blue folks probably wouldn’t like it, but it is the sort of organization that could expand to take on this basic protective function.
There are some other thoughts about what comes next, but this is already too long. . .
This is my analysis as well. We are privileged to be coddled by blog-runners.
If I paid a small fee, a cent-demominated fee, I could feel like I’m contributing more than just words and ideas. But the money that The Times wanted, or Salon, seems just too prohibitive.
What about $3 a month?
I have a user that sends me ten bucks every two weeks. And I appreciate it a lot. Everything helps.
People are going to need to pay money to participate.
Sorry, that’s the truth. Ad revenue is not enough.
You pay for the paper. You pay for magazines. You pay for things of value.
Blogs will need to find ways getting people to pay.
I would have subscribed to the NY Times pay wall, but they made it too expensive. That’s the thing – you can get people to pay, but just not as much as a magazine.
You realize the American Way is to squeeze the maximum amount from unsuspecting consumers so that the proprietor can enter the top 1%? Does everybody here want to make an unfair profit? Does the concept of “unfair profit” even exist?
what would be an unfair profit for me to make?
For instance, health care had about a 7% profit margin in the 1970’s. Now, corporate control and management consulting has driven health care profit rates up to 15%. (All numbers are approximate.) Thus, about doubling profitability. That’s a lot of money.
It’d be nice, in 2008 dollars, to see you make a 60-100K salary. Is that reasonable? I think. But getting into the 140K range might be more than comfortable.
My numbers are broad, because to be exact would smack of a communistic great leveling of work value, taboo to even mention in the US. My personal belief is that all our services are valuable, and when we are disabled from contributing service to society, the profits of all our work should support the few who can’t — that’s where I’d like to see profit reside and be spent.
and all the blogs that are serious should get together and make a decision.
However, and here I am a little annoyed, the TR thing has got to stop. You do not do the TR thing. But, if you are gonna charge, people should not be able to police the blog like at DK. The PC police are very active.
How much? Well, I think that people should pay a sliding scale. If you are 20-30, and don’t have much of a job, it should be 20/year or so. People like me should pay 40/year.
Yes, these seem like reasonable numbers, reasonable ideas.
God forbid, what do people spend per month on dating sites?
Just read an interesting take on this same issue by Dana Blankenhorn.
http://www.danablankenhorn.com/2008/07/the-golden-rule.html#more
“Bloggers that have access are suspicious.”
“Suspect?” Or that they, themselves, are suspicious of others?
genuinely wondering…
of the details of the bloggers who got hired and then dumped. What was the deal there? And what was the blog?
They were lewd and crude, but so am I.