Like some other well-known bloggers before her, Chris Nolan is working on turning her blog into more of a revenue-generating business. I like Chris’s stuff, even as I sometimes disagree with it, because it’s sharp and unpredictable and rooted in her years of experience as a reporter, and so I wish her well in her efforts to sell ads and subscriptions.
Lord knows it’s not an easy road. Reading Chris’s manifesto for “Stand-Alone Journalism” — she argues that’s a better label for what she does than “blogging” — brought me back to some distant memories from the dawn of the Web. After learning HTML and participating in the San Franciso Free Press experiment, I thought to myself, hey, there’s nothing to stop me from starting my own publication on the Web!
So I did. In January 1995 I took a week’s vacation time from my job at the SF Examiner and published a site. I focused on what was then quaintly known as “multimedia”; I called it Kludge, as a nod to its essential clumsiness and improvised nature, and I posted an issue. This was years before personal content management software, needless to say; it’s all just cruddy hand-coded HTML and crude self-designed graphics. But the articles weren’t so bad (hey, here’s an interview with Marc Canter! Here’s a satirical take on the CD-ROM explosion/implosion!).
What I quickly realized was that, as much fun as writing, editing and designing all that material was — bringing me back as it did to my teenage roots in mimeograph publishing — it was just the beginning of getting a Web site going. If I was serious about making it something more than a labor of love — if I wasn’t going to do all that work on my vacation days — I’d need to figure out how to get people to visit the site, and how to sell ads, and so forth. My best efforts involved dumping a pile of flyers in the lobby of a multimedia conference at Moscone Center. (While I was doing that, a couple of guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo stood at a booth under a big Yahoo banner, giving away T-shirts.)
After briefly toying with the notion of applying to AOL’s Greenhouse program for funding, I thought, nah. When David Talbot started talking about a new publication he wanted to create, I helped persuade him that he should do it on the Web instead of in print. Salon turned out to be a great place for me to write and edit and build Web sites without having to wear all the hats myself (though there have certainly been times during the last decade when my pate has felt a little crowded).
Today, would-be “Stand-Alone Journalists” can rely on much better software tools to create and publish their work. They can plug into far better organized online networks to spread the word of their activities. And they can even turn to simple plug-in approaches to advertising, like AdWords or BlogAds, to try to bring in some cash. But being a “Stand-Alone Journalist” still requires a combination of journalistic and entrepreneurial traits that’s rare. Being a good journalist requires the ability to not mind pissing people off sometimes (Nolan, whose career has had its share of controversy, is no shirker in this regard); being a good entrepreneur demands the ability to charm people as often as possible. Both pursuits, of course, demand persistence, patience, and, in the face of indifference, a stubborn belief in the value of one’s undertaking.
When I read Nolan’s proposed label for the solo-blogger-journalist, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Ibsen’s Dr. Stockman in “Enemy of the People”: “The strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone.” Standing alone has many wonderful advantages — it’s a stirring posture. But remember what happens to old Dr. Stockman: He is right to blow the whistle about the polluting of his town’s waters, but he’s dreadfully naive about the world around him, he’s ultimately ineffective, and he fails to accomplish much besides his own martyrdom.
So I’m not sure the “Stand-Alone Journalist” label is one that will stick. The linked nature of the Web is ultimately even more important than the independence of the blogger. Standing alone is useless without being connected.
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