I am distressed to read that Chad Dotson, one of the bloggers who inspired me to launch the Bacon’s Rebellion blog, will stop making daily posts on Commonwealth Conservative. The demands of his job and obligations to his family make it impossible to keep up the pace. Chad says he will continue participating in the blogosphere mainly through posts other blogs.
Chad’s move to blogging semi-retirement underlines a fundamental weakness of the blogosphere. Over two years, Chad had built CC into what is probably the most heavily trafficked conservative blog with a Virginia focus. His latest metrics indicate daily readership of 1,850 per day — and it was probably higher before the election. All the more remarkable is that he accomplished this with only a couple hours of work every evening.
The work-to-reader ratio is remarkable. Think about it: A small weekly newspaper with a circulation of, say, 18,500, or 10 times CC, would employ 10 full-time editorial employees, not to mention sales staff, administrative staff, printing/production employees and people to deliver the newspaper. Ten times the readers but 30 times the number of employees and 100 times the number of man-hours worked.
Here’s the rub: CC, like other state-level blogs, was a labor of love. As successful as he was, Chad did not develop a sustainable business model that would have allowed him to engage someone else to keep the blog going. With competing real-world priorities like advancing his career and spending time with his family, passion could take him only so far.
The end result will be the dissipation of what could have been a valuable franchise. What a shame. Other conservative voices will arise to replace Chad — OK, no one could ever replace Chad, but others will arise to take his place. Maybe they’ll build a franchise over time, but they’ll face the same tension between passion and obligation. Until we can develop an economic underpinning for blogs, we may be destined to see even the best blogs wink in and out of existence like fireflies. Such a blogosphere may act as a corrective to the excesses of the Mainstream Media, but it is not likely to ever surpass the MSM as a source of authoritative information.
Update: Bart Hinkle ruminates on the role of blogs in light of the Gannett media chain’s announcement that it would begin incorporating reader-generated “citizen journalism” into the news gathering process.