An Iowa Blogger Perspective

Some of us follow Working Life, a blog about the economy and labor. In a post titled, “Organize – Don't be Distracted by the Unhinged,” Jonathan Tasini wrote about his lawsuit against Huffington Post, “Ms. Huffington’s fear is that bloggers will unite, thus ending her ability to exploit them.” Blogger exploitation?

There was no reason to believe Huffington Post is or ever has been anything but a money maker for Ariana Huffington. The same goes for The Daily Beast, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and many other popular and corporate-style blogs that lean left. There is nothing wrong with trying to make a buck and regardless of compensation, people write for free or for very little money, given a venue. People need a means of expression and the many on-line platforms, including newspaper forums, blogs, social media and Google and Yahoo groups provide an outlet. It is the lubricant of 21st Century social discourse bridging the distance that so often separates like minded individuals. There is an underlying assumption that seems to be that this is not really “writing.” Maybe if bloggers were paid as the article suggests, then it would be “real writing.” I disagree.

Writing in social media, and by this I mean all of the above forms, is its own reward subject to the same Sturm und Drang of life as we know it in any form. To seek to be paid a living wage as a writer raises questions about the sanity of an author. There are so few writers who make a living at it. The best hope is to develop a readership as part of an actual social network where a person can seek and get feedback on ideas.  If there is some compensation along the way, it is mostly to be spent in coffee shops, bars and restaurants, engaging in society and getting more grist for the mill. Writing seems more the process of living rather than a specific output in time. Few among us get paid to live our lives, nor should we.

A number of friends strive to be journalists, and I respect what they do to maintain their perspective and that peculiar form of journalistic ethics. Don't look for that here. Howard Zinn's The Politics of History, David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies and other works suggested historical writing, and by extension, most other means of expression, have some ideological viewpoint. Bloggers have an ideology even if it isn't obvious at first. As one blogger blogged, “What [else] are political bloggers for?“

My point is that when Tasini presses suit against Huffington Post he is missing the fact that much of our lives contain work without wages. Thing about a blog is that if we don't like posting on one, we can post on another or start our own and at the core of these posts is a notion that what we do is work without wages. Usually, the platform belongs to someone else. We can attempt to monetize this work, but that is fools gold.

~Paul
Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend
editor of Blog for Iowa. E-mail
Paul Deaton