Festive Metablogging
(Photo of Devon in the snow, Courtesy Chris Hodge Photos)
There’s a bit of a brouhaha going on in the liberal side of the blogosphere , or at least at the Booman Tribune, over advertising revenue. It hasn’t blown up into a full-fledged open flamewar, as yet, and it’s certainly not a crisis to even remotely rival the ongoing bonfire of vanities that is Open Sores Pyjamas Media. ( I would have been courteous and linked, had their site not crashed both Opera and IE.) It certainly is an object lesson, on the micro-scale, of what happens when punditry bows to money.
Markos and Chris Bowers created a MiniNetwork within Blogads that incorporated dozens of liberal bloggers that had pre-existing accounts with Blogads. The benefit of this is that liberal bloggers can advertise for each other by placing the ‘Adveritise Liberally’ icon on our sites, and advertisers can make convenient mass-buys of ads through the mini-network.
Wow, brilliant idea. Get the message out, and support your blogging as well. Bingo! But just wait a doggone minute…
As with any project, some things come up after a while that were not anticipated at the outset. After several months a decision was made to create some standards for members of the mininetwork. None of these standards had to do with content, but with layout, pop-up ads, placement of ads on the homepages, and with what makes up a blog versus a site like Drudge or Raw Story. Some members were told they would have to make some changes or they would no longer be welcome in the network. Most notably, Drudge Retort and Raw Story were essentially kicked out because their sites are not really blogs. I disagreed with that decision. I thought they should have grandfathered in the rules. But the sites were not kicked out for their politics. And they still are free to sell Blogads.
Oh dear. They said ‘standards’.
The effect on revenues for Raw Story and Drudge Retort may be damaging when politicians begin to buy bulk ads on the blogs next year, but that was not the intent. The intent was to tighten up the requirements so that only blogs would be in the network. Politicians can still advertise through Blogads on those sites and many probably will. So, Markos and Chris do not control where advertising dollars go and they have not played any games or played any favorites over whom can and cannot be in the network.
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There is indeed some money coming soon to liberal bloggers. That money is coming through Media Matters, which has received some funding through the Democracy Alliance (an arm of the NDN), but a lot of funding from other sources as well. The money is going to be made available for a variety of purposes that will potentially benefit all liberal bloggers. There are no strings attached, there will be no quid pro quos, and there will be no mandated talking points. The idea is really not that different from an artist cooperative where various photographers, for example, pool their limited resources to buy color printers. In this case, cheap or free technical support might become available. Or access to Lexis-Nexis. Maybe broadband can be bought in bulk. Who knows? These things are still under discussion.
I’m sure they are, but by whom? Who chose them? Where’s the democratic accountability? This isn’t grassroots organising, this is a nascent patronage machine. Are we looking at the new centrist Dem K-street Project? This may not be much money and on a small scale, but if a group of bloggers are holding themselves out as the potential financial saviours of the left, then it behoves them to be totally transparent in where the money came from and how it’s to be distributed. There’s no democracy without democracy.
I will make this blog’s position absolutely clear on this point. I would like to asssure readers that this blog is very unlikely to be sullied by mere vulgar money-making. Making money from a ‘generic’ blog – no problem. But If a political blogger blogs to make money, I haven’t a lot of respect for her or him. Advertising, and bending to the whims of ad agencies and advertisers, is what got the mainstream media into the current mess it’s in. Money and its interests militate against truth in journalism.
This does not mean we at Proggold will say no to any giant boxes of PG Tips teabags, Thornton’s toffee , bottles of HP sauce, half-hundredweights of Wiltshire dry-cured back bacon, the same of Jersey royal new potatoes , a bushel of Vidalia onions or a side of organic Devon beef.
No need for fancy Christmas wrapping. We’ll take it as it comes. And don’t listen to Martin’s sad bleatings. He has enough comics – though I’ll stretch a point if the comics come with bookcases attached.
