Online publishing is no 'crock'

It's a point of view that I, selfishly, love to read in mainstream media. Because the longer that mainstream media managers fail to understand what is happening online, the longer individual journalists and independent Web publishers have to establish their own publishing businesses on the Web.

Like many writing in the mainstream media, Butterworth mistakenly conflates "blogs" with "web publishing." Blogging represents just a fraction of independent publishing online. Online journalists and other web publishers use a variety of publishing tools to communicate with their audience, including blogs, discussion boards, wikis and even trusty, old-school flat HTML files.

Yet too many people opining on web publishing rarely venture beyond sites, usually blogs, that provide the bulk of their content linking back to "old media" writers and publications. Take a look beyond the parasitic Web and one can find independent journalists doing investigative reporting. As well as reader-driven story collections, discussion boards (personal link), wikis, and yes, even blogs, breaking news.

Of course, breaking news is one thing. Making money is quite another. And Butterworth repeats the common criticism that "blogging" is not a viable business.

"Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable businesses, the economics are daunting," Butterworth writes.

"After talking to various people in the new media world, it’s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics," he continues.

Yes, the economics are daunting -- just as they are in the offline publishing business. (Ask anyone who's started up a magazine lately.) Most new publishing ventures will fail to become economically viable. But political/gossip blogging is just one publishing model to make money publishing online.

Speaking from personal experience, Butterworth's numbers are quite low. An informative website well-targeted to its niche (and, by the way, politics is a lousy niche for making money outside an election year), easily can pull in two to three times that, with the same number of visitors. Sure, that's nothing to a multibillion-dollar corporation. But how many journalists would love to leave behind the hassle of their corporate bosses for a salary of $70,000 a year?

The trick, of course, is targeting. Web publishing, at this moment, does not follow the traditional newsroom publishing business model. At this point, this is a field for individual entrepreneurs, who can elicit and manage tips from readers, building a low-cost "virtual newsroom" to gather and publish information to audiences who have not found their need for news met by increasingly generalist mainstream media.

Successful web businesses target well-defined niches and construct their coverage, publishing systems and page design to communicate that focus both to human readers and to the automated agents that drive readers and advertisers to websites.

Butterworth closes with a depressing vision of blogging as "instant obsolescence." But what is more obscure, a Web document that can be found by billions through Google or Archive.org, or a newspaper article or academic journal that persists only in a paid archive, accessed by a shrinking audience of researchers?

One can make the argument that access in an archive of terrabytes provides little hope for recognition. That's true. Welcome to the new marketplace of ideas. Unlike the old marketplace of monopolistic newspapers and a handful of national magazines, publication no longer provides a guarantee of public visibility. You've got to compete with every single post you write.

This is no "virtual tomb," as Butterworth writes. It's more like a vibrant nursery, where all individuals can have the chance to plant a few seeds, to grow public discourse. And, yes, make money doing it, too.

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