Blog vs. blog, a blogger’s struggle
I’m still not exactly sure how this works. The other day, for instance, I wanted to post a blog, a Q & A with Paul Loeffler, the radio voice of the Fresno State Bulldogs, a man who wrote a book about the 2008 College World Series called “Underdogs to Wonderdogs.” It’s an outstanding story of underdog-ed-ness, I guess you’d say, and at some point I will do a book review here, along with the other two books about the Fresno State championship.
The problem is, you can’t read the Q & A here, because I didn’t post it here, mostly because I posted it here … http://fresnobeehive.com/sportsbuzz/matt_james/
That’s my other blog, the Fresno Bee blog, the one entirely devoted to sports. The one I get paid to write. Or more specifically, the one that gets mentioned in my performance review should I not post enough on it. You will notice the button at the top of this web site called “SPORTS BLOG,” which will take you over there at any given moment. But don’t leave yet. I’m not done. Here, I write about sports, too, but lots of other important stuff like Rip Torn’s hair and why motorcycle sometimes don’t set off the traffic light sensors and the best places to skip rocks in the Sierra Nevadas.
At my other job, we have some rules about part-time jobs. If I started reporting for Channel 30 in my spare time, it would not go well. My car would blow up in the parking lot, or possibly I’d get a stern warning to knock it off. Either way, it would be bad. But I don’t want to work for a TV station, partially because stuff like this happens …
You’d probably seen that clip by now of the TV crew in Cleveland as LeBron James was hitting that absurd shot the other night. (Playoff update: If not for that shot, the Cavs would be out of the playoffs already.) That would never happen in our newsroom. It just wouldn’t. Sure, we love sports. We each have teams we cheer for and grew up following, but we report on the local teams with a certain level of detachment. Our job is to bring you fair and accurate articles, and can you really look at those four people* in that clip and expect fair and accurate reporting from them in the future. I get the idea that local TV gave up on that notion long ago.
Sure, there were people in the Bee sports department crowded around the newsroom TVs at the end of that Cavs game, but the reaction was stunned bewilderment, not people running around and clapping. Of course we aren’t a Cleveland newspaper, but the reaction would have been even less if we were. And remember, that’s with no one watching, not live on the air.
*Go back and listen again and tell me if you think the woman in red really has a “Sports Illustrated” issue to cancel. I know she was joking, but the way she said it was so unintentionally funny. I’d bet you $100 she read it off the teleprompter and somewhere her husband was sitting in a bar telling his buddies, “Yeah, she let my S.I. run out five years ago because said it cluttered up the ottoman.” … P.s. Here is the S.I. cover to which she refers.
I’m getting away from the point. At my newspaper, we have rules against working for competing media (don’t) and rules about part-time jobs (don’t ask), but when I asked if I could run my own blog, I was told it was OK. The internet is a tricky beast. Because of the internet, newspapers are being read like never before. We have access to articles and newspapers that was never possible. Did you know that yesterday U.S. senator Max Baucus, a democrat from Montana, had a listening session about health care reform at St. Patrick Hospital? It’s the lead story in The Montana Standard. I’m just saying.
But we haven’t really figured out how to make money on the internet. Or at least not enough. We give away our product for free there. The internet enables competitors to take advertising. It lets businesses do their own advertising. I’ve half-joked that my goal is for my blog to become the most popular site in the history of the internet, but what if it did take off? What if it got 10,000 hits* a month, or 10,000 a week, or 10,000 hits before noon. Could I sell advertising? I don’t know why not. And at that point, aren’t I at least some sort of competitor to my own employer? It’s tricky.
*No idea how many hits I get. Too scared to look. It isn’t many.
So for now, I worry about these things. I don’t want to use my work hours to blog here, but then again, I don’t even have hours. If I wake up at 3 a.m. and have an idea, I start typing. If Fresno State coach Pat Hill says I want to meet you on the golf course on Sunday afternoon, that’s where I go. And what if I do 300-word blogs for the Bee and 3,000-word blogs here? What if I post here three times a day and there only once? (I know, I know, three times a week would be a good start.)
There are so many questions I don’t want the answer to. What if I found a great story idea and wrote it for this site instead of the Bee because I wanted to build traffic here? I’m not saying skip out on work, but write other story ideas for the Bee and the better one here. And who’s to say it’s better anyway? I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen, or where this all will go. I’m 85 percent positive that at some point I will end up in a room full of editors and possibly a publisher and will get the answers to all these questions. Until then, we happily march on, well under the radar.
