Who says you can't make a living blogging? The AnnArbor.com just announced the selection of a blogging leader. Edward Vielmetti is a sometime commenter here. He has always been positive and respectful here so we congratulate him on his new job.
While the article does not say how much a blogging leader will be paid, it might be a nice touch if Edward would tell us so we would have some idea what our future would hold should we decide to become a full time blogging leader.
After all, there's a lot of unemployed writers out there trying to figure out how to cash in on this Internet deal.
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8 comments:
Jim - you should know that the first rule in salary negotiations is never to tell people what you are making in your previous jobs until they come up with an offer first.
Thanks for the good wishes. It's been a good start, but this is all before the launch of the new annarbor.com site, and the real test is when coverage starts for real.
Edward:
I guess the hope is, especially for the young folks who are still holding out hope for journalism/blogging as a career (unlike us old dogs who are done) is that it will provide the same livable wage - I made about $1,100 a week - at the end of my career.
From what I understand, the wages have been cut 25 to 50 percent at the Booth papers. What I guess what folks are hoping to hear is that perhaps the AnnArbor.com model might provide the hope for a $60,000 a year job and good benefits like the old model did.
I didn't really expect you to post your salary, I just know that there are a lot of people curious about how the new salary schedule for AnnArbor.com compares with the old Booth newspaper salaries.
Perhaps you can convince my old boss, Tony, in the interest of transparency and openness, to give people some idea of the range of salaries for the 'new' media without giving specific salaries for specific people.
Two months ago I put ads on my blog. I only get about 2,000 unique visitors a month here, so I'm not a big player. So far that has translated into $7.03 (as of today) and they won't even send me a check until I get over $100.
So this blogging thing is not exactly putting food on the table. But then I don't blog for that reason.
But best of luck, as you can guess we'll be watching and I am somewhat hopeful that perhaps you might be able to lead them to the promised land.
If you can't get them to drop the 'Deuce,' at least see if they can do something about the little Frenchman with the beret they picked for a logo.
Keep in touch.
Jim, hopefully Edward will help Annarbor.com avoid embarrassing things like the following. This was on the "Detroit" section of Mlive as of a few minutes ago. It's "borrowed" from the Free Press, except it was screwed up in the summary, as follows:
"Andy Meisner rode a wave of popular support to, well, nowhere fast. An odd 1954 Michigan law kept Meisner from taking office until this week, despite winning the Oakland County treasurers race on Nov. 4.
Freep.com, June 28: "It's a little bit twilight zone," Meisner said last week as he prepared to take over for Patrick Dohany. "It's unusual to get a six-month break in the action in your life."
Meisner is the first Democrat to to win a county-wide office in decades and is the son of former longtime county treasurer C. Hugh Dohany."
I'm sure Andy Meisner will be surprised to learn that he is C. Hugh Dohany's son. That would make him the brother of Pat Dohany, the real son of C. Hugh Dohany and the guy Meisner beat in the election.
I hope those crazy kids at Mlive aren't running with scissors. But the real question is, where are the adults?
Off Topic - but wasn't John Foren scheduled to leave the FJ on 6/1/09? I just noticed he was still there. Has he decided to stay there?
Yes, but he is staying on so his replacement can complete a family leave. That's as much as we're going to discuss that here.
As far as I know, the regular bloggers are not being paid anything at this point at annarbor.com, they will just get increased traffic to their blogs for posting on annarbor.com. Which is fine for volunteer bloggers, maybe, but not if you are trying to make a living at it.
Ed is blogging team leader, a paid staff member under the community director. They must have had to shell out since so many seem to think he was a great hire, connected to the high-tech community. Tech geeks make great money compared to journalists.
The word on annarbor.com bloggers is that they get to 'profit share' - that is, if your blog is on annarbor.com and you write a lot of content for their site, and eventually an advertiser wants to advertise on your annarbor.com blog page, you get an unspecified share of the revenue. In other words, send us your stuff, and if it's really good and you get out there and market and sell it yourself and it starts to make money, we'll let you have a little bit of it. After we take our share. (I presume this is different for Edward of course, as he is a staffer).
I guess if you're blogging anyways, you have nothing to lose.
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