I haven’t had a newspaper subscription since the early nineties. I occasionally buy the local paper, but it is usually because I want the car or the grocery ads or because I have some time to kill in a restaurant. I certainly don’t buy the local paper looking for journalistic excellence. For the most part they run the same AP wire stories that everyone else does, and their local coverage consists of mostly basic police/court coverage, business stories, road construction updates and reasonably good coverage of the sports scene. None of these are things I can’t do without, and I can find any of it on their online version when I bother to go to their site, which I rarely do. For the record, I also don’t bother to watch the news, local or national, on television.

New News Sources

I am, however, far from uninformed. I read the news just about every day, spending at least ten minutes and as much as an hour reading. For several years now, however, I have done almost all of my reading online. Google News is my primary source, but I also subscribe to feeds from a number of specific publications and quite a few blogs. I would subscribe to my local paper’s news feed, if they had one. The weekly paper does, but the two daily papers have yet to figure out the technology I guess.

A Very Long Decline

Print journalism is in the middle stages of what I expect will be a very long decline. Newspaper readership has been dropping for many years now, but over the past couple years that drop has been accelerating. There is no reason to expect this drop to end any time soon. Sadder yet, newspapers are having trouble online as well. People aren’t just leaving their print version behind, they are leaving their online versions behind too.

An Outdated Model

The biggest problem is the lack of real journalism. For years now, newspapers have been getting by on wire feeds from AP, Reuters and a variety of smaller news services. Back before the Internet, this model worked because a person in Tucson wouldn’t have access to a newspaper in San Antonio, so it didn’t matter if they ran the exact same stories. Now, however, all that duplicate national and international coverage can be accessed by anyone anywhere. Why read your local paper’s limited international section when you can access the news from anywhere in the world through the web. With Google News and other news aggregators, it is just as easy to find out the news in England from England as it is from your local paper. As for that AP article, it is repeated so endlessly online that you are bound to catch it too, if you bother to look.

Raw VS. Canned and Bland

Print journalists endlessly deride bloggers, and some of their criticisms are valid. Many, though by no means all, bloggers have less news experience and greater political and personal bias than newspaper reporters do. They make up for those shortcomings, however, by being more timely, more passionate, and more detailed in their coverage. The world of journalistic blogging (there are many blogs that have nothing to do with the news) is uneven, but when it is good, it is far better than the canned, bland news stories that the newspapers reprint.

Decline and Rebirth

Newspapers are going to continue to decline in readership and relevance as long as they continue to follow the old model of wire stories and short, uninteresting local articles. The only reason to pick up a newspaper (or visit a newspaper’s website) in Fresno is to find out what happened in Fresno. Only newspapers that invest heavily in local coverage and allow their writers to spend more than 300 words on an article will be relevant as the years pass. That probably won’t happen until the giant corporations that own most newspapers lose interest in these unprofitable entities and move on to other media. It is difficult to image any conglomeration of newspapers embracing individual voices and local reporting. Once it becomes unprofitable enough, however, I predict that as newspapers begin to fold and be sold, passionate local people will return to print. Until then, I’ll continue to get my news online.

Advertise

Advertising is an obvious and easy choice when you want to drive traffic to your blog. There are hundreds of ways to advertise. Both Google and Yahoo offer context-sensitive advertising services that allow you to spread the word about your site. There are plenty of other online advertising services as well. A more time consuming, but possibly more rewarding system is to look for web sites (blogs and otherwise) that appeal to similar users and contact them directly with an offer to pay for advertising space on their site. Don’t limit your thinking to the web though. You may find you get more mileage out of a well-designed newspaper or magazine ad. If your blog is more about a locality, you may even consider radio advertising (television is probably out of your range).

Have your site redesigned by a professional

An attractive and professional looking web site lends authority to a blog. A quick check of a site such as elance.com reveals that there are many web designers willing to create attractive web sites and logos for under $1000. Just be sure to find a designer who has created sites that you consider to be attractive.

Give the money away

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to hold a contest. Problogger.net has gotten a lot of mileage (and links) out of its Group Writing Projects. The latest project offered a prize of $1000 cash and resulted in 893 other bloggers writing for the project (and linking to problogger). Not only does a contest like that attract new visitors who want to join the contest, but the links generated by the contest will pay dividends for years to come.

Hire an assistant

For $1000 you can hire a virtual assistant to spend 20 hours a month for 5 months helping you with various blog related tasks such as research, basic web design, web marketing, webpage maintenance, optimizing web pages for search engines, accounting and taxes.

Release a book

Finally, for $1000 you can use a service such as Lulu to print and distribute a book. If you have been blogging steadily, you may find that you have enough material for a book already on hand. There are several advantages to publishing a book. It gives you something that you can sell through your blog, having a published book adds to your stature as a blogger, a book gives you an additional marketing and public relations tool, and a book gives you something you can show to your parents and friends to prove that you actually have been doing something worthwhile with your time.

Do you see the multi-colored letters that form my name at the top of the page. I did that on purpose. I was trying to recreate the look and feel of an early nineteen sixties cocktail bar sign, the sort of thing you would find in a Rock Hudson / Doris Day movie or (my personal favorite) the Kim Novak, James Garner, Tony Randall classic, Boy’s Night Out. It may or may not be the best look for a site by a 21st century writer, but I liked it. This all leads me to a conversation being had over at ProBlogger about how much design matters during the early stages of a blog. I subscribe to the philosophy that the first, most important thing to do is start writing quality posts and worry about fancy design earlier. Read: Does Blog Design Matter in the Early Stages of a Blog?

Somebody Out There Made it Work

Have you wondered whether or not to try freelance writing for other blogs? In my opinion, it isn’t worth the effort. It is far easier to write and market your own blog about things that interest you than to try to squeeze money out of the notoriously tight-fisted blogging community, but Leo Babauta claims to be making $2000 a month freelancing for blogs, and he offers a boatload of advice for people who want to follow in his footsteps. In my opinion, there are far easier ways to make $2000 a month, but I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to try the exciting world of freelance writing. Read: How to Become a Freelance Blog Writer

28 Years Later

When I was a kid watching Meatballs for the first time, I thought it was an instant classic. After 28 years or so, it turns out the movie was merely great, which is why I still don’t want them to remake it. Unfortunately, Hollywood continues its self-devouring ways and has commissioned a script for a new version. I wonder if this one will have the lead character laughing and joking his way through a date rape scene. Read: Who’s Ready for Another Serving of ‘Meatballs’?

The Book is Flat, and Thick

On the traditional book front, I am reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. After reading Timothy Ferris, I became more interested in the influence of outsourcing on the technology industry.
Friedman’s book discusses the benefits and challenges of a truly global, mobile economy. I’ll be discussing it in more detail once I finish reading it.

Would you rather be writing articles or query letters? The process of querying publishers can take months and there is no guarantee that it will lead to a sale. With blogging, you spend your time writing actual articles (or stories or poems). You don’t spend your time trying to convince other people to publish you.

You can write about whatever you want

The beauty of blogging is that you are your own publisher. You determine what you write about and then you go and write it. You don’t have to tailor your writing to a certain magazine’s style, space or content rules. You can write in your own voice and develop your own style.

You don’t have to answer to an editor

While an editor can add value to your work with good suggestions and revisions, just as often you can find yourself the victim of arbitrary cuts determined by either an incompetent editor’s ideas or the publication’s space limitations. These are not problems bloggers have to deal with. Bloggers have the freedom to determine the length and style of their work.

You get published faster

The beauty of blogging is that you determine your own publishing schedule. You can publish an article as soon as you finish it or push it back to whenever you want it to appear. The decision is yours. You’ll never get that kind of freedom as a freelancer. In many freelancing cases you have to wait as long as a year to see your work in print. The reverse works as well. If an article is taking you longer than you expected, you don’t have to worry about an editor or client calling to wonder what happened, you simply keep working on it until you get it right.

You can connect with your readers

When you write for traditional print publications or business clients, the best you can hope for is one or two sets of comments. In many cases, you will receive no feedback from your readers at all. With a blog, it is possible to develop long-term relationships with your readers. Not only will they comment on one article, in many cases they will come back again and again with their own ideas and opinions.

I run several blogs, and thanks to a good deal at Dreamhost, it costs me less than $300 a year to host them all. My computer equipment, internet service, advertising and office expenses run a bit more than that, but my yearly overhead is still around $3000 most years. You have to love a business that allows you to enter the market for so little money. Blogging is a business that relies more on effort and intelligence than money, although a $10,000 a year advertising budget would probably help my blogging business considerably, it isn’t necessary.