I had really enjoyed my brief tenure at MSNBC’s Lean Forward blog. Good audience, nice venue. Sadly, it’s over now; last week’s column will be my last for them. From now on their blogs will be written by their on-air talent. I assume it’s a combination of cost savings and integration; why promote writers who aren’t bringing in on-air revenue? I dunno.
I have to look at my weekly column to see if it’s worth continuing. The client list has steadily fallen for the last ten years—a reflection of the state of print media—so even though more people read it online than ever before, it has never paid as little. The revenue is back to 1995 levels.
I honestly don’t know what to do—about the column or my career in general. If there is a way to make money online, I haven’t been able to figure it out—nor has anyone I know.
2 Comments.
A few months ago, Mr Rall observed that newspapers began having big problems in the ’60s. I’ve been thinking about that, and realised he was wrong: the economies of scale changed with the development of new, faster presses and distribution networks. When the optimal scale for most newspapers was quite small, cities had dozens of newspapers, each with a basic press capable of printing a few thousands of pages per hour. There would be a Democratic Polish paper, a Republican Polish paper, a Democratic Norwegian paper, a Republican Norwegian paper, etc., etc. The English language papers ran the gamut from far left to far right.
As the optimal scale became 10s of millions of readers rather than 10s of thousands, the paper with the plurality of circulation grew until it was the only newspaper in most cities, so the newspaper industry wasn’t shrinking, but the number of different papers shrank. The leftist papers that would publish someone like Mr Rall folded, and the mainstream papers like the New York Times, which briefly ran Mr Rall’s cartoons, soon decided he was too far from the mainstream for a major newspaper.
And now MSNBC has consolidated and compacted its reporting staff.
The only place left for people producing content as far from centre as Mr Rall seems to be gocomics, which doesn’t pay the rent.
Which I find distressing, since the US desperately needs to see Mr Rall’s content, even though, or rather because, it vehemently disagrees with it.
You might have to actually, “Get a job Hippy!” It sucks. I know. I’m driving an 18 wheeler these days. It’s hard. Long hours. Being away from home. But, it’s the real job that I hate the least. I’m not stuck in a cube, or under a bosses thumb. I don’t have to play nice with customers, coworkers, or bosses. As long as I pick up and deliver on time and safely, I am left alone. And, it’s actually fun to drive the truck. And of course I get to look outside and see the world go by.