"Making blogging pay"

Offered without comment, a piece from The Nation entitled "Making Blogging Pay". Peer-produced media like blogs and Wikipedia have become the cornerstones of new creative projects that largely depend on the coordinated work of volunteers. But can they thrive without financial backing? Moulitsas says no. "There has to be a financial incentive to stick with blogging," he says. "There will be a subset of blogs that will be OK on their own, but there is a larger group of bloggers who need to be taken care of. There are bloggers like Digby who should not have to work a day job given what they bring to the progressive movement." It's the same old story: progressives tend not to put their money where their mouth is. "On the left, there's a tendency to think that political operations should work for free," says Chris Bowers, a blogger for MyDD. Susan Gardner, a fellow at Daily Kos who once observed that money is to liberals what sex is to conservatives, says that not paying bloggers devalues their effort. "The left looks at money as so suspect that it expects a lot of volunteer labor. That's dishonoring the work." The left's attitude towards money is, of course, in direct contrast with the right, which has systematically poured money into conservative media and think tanks for decades. Click here for the rest.