Saturday, March 28, 2009

Union Of Bloggers?

From Open Left, in a discussion of the increasing amount of deaths among local newspapers:
One counter-argument that does make sense to me on both a political and personal level is that local newspapers provide good local jobs. The blogosphere, by contrast, is giving rise to something akin to a digital sweatshop. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans are producing enormous amount of content for pay that is just above, or below, minimum wage and includes neither benefits nor weekends. That is not a sustainable model for the people producing the content. If that is the brave new future we face, then maybe instead of talking about saving newspapers, we should be talking about creating a national union hall for paid blogging. If a news outlet, or a computer company, or a progressive organization want to hire someone to blog for them, maybe there need to be standard, minimum rates of pay that everyone is forced to observe. Any website that does not observe that policy gets de-linked, or something.
I don't think it would ever happen. There are too many people that would do it just for the pretense of prestige, and would be more than happy to undercut the competition. But the article is thought provoking.

2 comments:

  1. There are two many people

    I believe I see a typo, just like in the Journal...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Heh. Thanks, old man. It has been duly corrected.

    ReplyDelete