Image by Jeffrey Keefer via Flickr

There are many (non-exclusive) reasons to blog: money, fame, narcissism, SEO, product placement and advertising, journaling, self-discovery, passion… The specific reasons for blogging are as varied as bloggers themselves, and arguments about whether one should be blogging at all are equally diverse, especially since so many bloggers give up in frustration because their audience is so small. But a small audience is only a problem for certain kinds of blogging, of course, most especially blogging for dollars (or euros, shekels, or pounds).

As someone who does not blog to earn money (I like to pay my hosting fees, but that’s only because I’m a poor grad student), I thought I’d run through how and why I blog, and why I find it a critical part of my “real” work of academic research and writing. (If you are looking for how to make money blogging, there are better sources out there.)

Why I Blog

I blog primarily for three reasons, in increasing order of importance: (1) to give me a visible presence on the Internet for my (potential) colleagues and students to see my work;  (2) to get feedback, not all of it visible on my blog; (3) to capture interesting and potentially fruitful Internet finds (i.e., as part of my research — which is mostly online anyway these days); and (4) as a rough-draft medium that I can draw on when eventually need to actually produce a piece of writing.

(Oh yes, and because I enjoy it.)

Like many personal bloggers, I sometimes use my blog to capture interesting finds. More often, I try to integrate this with my primary purpose, and turn my research immediately into writing by creating short articles about my finds. That way I have ready-made rough-draft material to work from when I go to write. For those who may primarily focus on this purpose, a so-called “tumblelog” like Tumblr or Posterous (both of which I use from time to time) may be the ideal blogging service.

Making myself visible on the Internet may be a form of vanity, but it’s increasingly important to “brand” oneself today. I want colleagues, students, employers, etc. to be able to find me and get insight into my professional persona easily, and I want them to see what I produce. It also helps connect me to various larger communities, including academics, other bloggers, lawyers, and so on. It’s a networking tool that doesn’t need to be awkward or self-aggrandizing.

Feedback is useful, though comments may or may not be. Sometimes this comes in the form of blog comments, sometime in terms of email, and more often it gives me a medium in which to share my drafts with “real-life” colleagues. The more readers you have, of course, the more feedback you might potentially get — but that isn’t my primary purpose, so I don’t care so much about raw numbers of visitors.

How I Blog

My most important reason for blogging (use as a rough-draft medium) has developed into the primary driver of my methodology. So, while I do sometimes simply capture the barest details about new publications or interesting articles, more often I use other tools for that purpose: Google Reader or TBUZZ to Twitter to Delicious via Packrati.us and Pinboard, or Read It Later or Instapaper.

I’ve realized, though, that simply capturing lots of small amounts of information in the blog medium is less useful for me than writing fewer, longer write-ups. Spending more time on each potential source, writing up a more detailed and in-depth analysis or reflection provides me with effective, highly useful material when I need to write an article later.

Image by krisnelson via Flickr

This kind of writing is in-between the quick summaries or reactions of Twitter or a tumblelog, but less detailed, analytic, or proof-read than a true article. These are more like the “reflection” assignments I give my undergraduates, and are intended not so much for consumption by others as they are to capture analytic ideas and details that may help me later. The focus is not on perfection, which makes writing them easier, but I do try to have an audience beyond myself in mind, which vastly increases their reusability.

What does this look like? Try posts like the following — none are perfect, but they’ve all proved useful later:

• Judge Noble Hand hints at the move from property to people
• An argument for the “Inviolability of Telegraphic Correspondence”
• Smallpox inoculation and quarantine in colonial America

Obviously, this approach is not right for everyone, but for anyone who needs to produce written work (that doesn’t need to be secret!), it’s wonderful, practical, and (relatively) easy.

Conclusion

So there you go. I blog mostly so I don’t have to stare at a blank page later, and to a lesser extent so that I can be found online. (Also I like tech.) If you do decide to blog, I highly recommend you think about the why and the how for yourself.

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Who better than those snarky peeps at Woot to call them on the implications of such a scheme?

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

via Woot® : One Day, One Deal™.

One might argue, I suppose, that somehow the material produced by “the media” is different from what the rest of us produce. While certainly such a scheme could be implemented, it hardly seems fair. More importantly at the moment, of course, copyright law makes no such distinction (even if some have attempted to embrace/extend the so-called “hot news” doctrine to create the potential basis for such a distinction).

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The core constitutional issues in the case are whether signing a ballot measure petition is a form of political speech, whether, if it is protected by the First Amendment, it includes a right to sign without official public disclosure, what standard is to be applied when judging regulation of such a First Amendment right, and what government interest supports disclosure rather than confidentiality for signers’ identities.

via SCOTUSblog » Court to rule on petition-signers’ rights.

Opponents of gay marriage and similar laws argue that the state should not release the names of those who sign petitions (such as those supporting their position), because doing so might make signers targets and thus stifle their sense of freedom to freely express their opinions. (The argument is, in essence, the core of why we have secret ballots in actual voting.) Exposing signers to potential harassment for their views, then, would stifle their ability express their political views by signing petitions they support.

But is this really a free speech issue? That is, should anonymity of expression be protected as part and parcel of the First Amendment? After all, we’ve seen a number of instances where corporations and governments have tried to force journalists to reveal their anonymous sources, and have even jailed journalists who refuse. And many of us have witnessed or experienced the de-anonymizing influence of the modern Internet, where everything posted online tends to become public. So how can signing a petition  — usually in a public place, often with witnesses  —  give you protected anonymity? Is this even a Constitutional issue at all?

The Supreme Court has granted protections in the past to anonymous communications as part of First Amendment protections of free speech. For example, in In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the Supreme Court struck down an Ohio law that prohibited the anonymous distribution of campaign literature, writing:

Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. … It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation  —  and their ideas from suppression  —  at the hand of an intolerant society.

First Amendment law can be complicated, and involves balancing a number of factors. In addition, there is a difference between government involvement (in this case, Washington acting as a state to enable publication of names), private actions (your employer discovering your anonymous criticisms of the company, and firing you), and court involvement (subpoenas, rulings that order journalists to reveal sources in court, and so on).

Personally, I always assumed (without ever giving it any deep thought or legal analysis) that my signature on a ballot initiative was a public record. After all, I’m signing it in public, it needs to be verified as legitimate to count, I’m providing my name and address  —  it certainly never felt anonymous to me. That’s why I always insist on reading what I’m signing, considering the issues, and only signing what I actually agree with, instead of signing just to make the petition-gatherer go away.

So my gut tells me that such signatures should be public, but only because I always assumed they were anyway. I’ll be curious to see where the Supreme Court comes down on this, since the lower courts have gone both ways.

For more on this, see:

• U.S. Supreme Court could be next stop for R-71 from the Seattle P-I, quoting legal scholars giving their opinions
• Ninth Circuit Overturns Preliminary Injunction Restraining Release of Names of Anti-Domestic-Partnership Petition Signers in Washington State at The Volokh Conspiracy
• The Ninth Circuit decision that concluded that Washington could release the names of signers in the interest of transparency and accountability, and that this was not a question of “anonymous free speech” anyway, since signing a petition was not anonymous at all.

President Obama signed an executive order on Tuesday that sets new rules for when government agencies can keep documents classified. The order is full of provisions that should make government transparency activists swoon. For example, within the next four years, the government will strive to declassify 400 million pages of historical documents.

via Executive Order Reduces Total Of Classified Papers : NPR.

The White House blog has more details after introducing the new order:

President Obama has issued a new executive order on “Classified National Security Information” (the Order) that addresses the problem of over-classification in numerous ways and will allow researchers to gain timelier access to formerly classified records.

via Promoting Openness and Accountability by Making Classification a Two-Way Street.

Of particular importance to historians is the “principle that no records may remain classified indefinitely and provides enforceable deadlines for declassifying information exempted from automatic declassification at 25 years.” It directs the Archivist of the United States to “develop priorities for declassification activities under the NDC’s purview, with input from the general public and after taking into account researcher interest and the likelihood of declassification.”

As an historian with at least a passing interest in U.S. government documents, I believe this will help to, at the very least, establish a new sense of priorities in executive agencies that may counter their tendencies towards secrecy (if in doubt, classify it) that was bolstered under the Bush Administration.

The order may have less of an impact on contemporary transparency issues, despite the White House blog posting calling this the promotion of “openness and accountability.” The order specifically recognizes the importance of secrecy in the name of national security, for example, and certainly there have been instances of continued resistance to FOIA requests recently. (For more on FOIA battles, see: EFF’s FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government and the Sunlight Foundation on the Freedom of Information Act.)

In short, this will be good for historians, but may be of limited use for those more interested in contemporary issues.

According to Rob Salkowitz of Internet Evolution, in the so-called Hamburg Declaration issued July 9, publishers argued that services like Google are “using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it”:

Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism. . . .

Universal access to our services should be available, but going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.

We therefore welcome the growing resolve of federal and state governments all over the world to continue to support the protection of the rights of authors, publishers and broadcasters on the Internet.

Salkowitz points to Google’s simple response:

“We agree,” wrote Cohen on Google’s European Public Policy Blog on July 15. “If a webmaster wants to stop us from crawling a specific page, he or she can do so by adding '<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">' to the page. In short, if you don’t want to show up in Google search results, it doesn’t require more than one or two lines of code.”

He points out that, basically, if newspapers want to go back to the “old way” for themselves, they can. No need to change the law to prevent Google from indexing their content. But of course, this isn’t really want publishers want.

In truth, publishers get value from Google – value that is necessary for them to compete and market themselves today. So they need Google or services like them. This makes their attacks on Google a distraction from the real issues for them, which really involves a business model that can’t compete well in today’s marketplace.

There are a number of choices, two of which seem most obvious: change the law or change the model. Unsurprisingly, publishers want to change the law.

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Judge Richard Posner has recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded to protect the news industry, including barring linking to copyrighted content or paraphrasing it. I view such protectionism as effectively enabling “rent seeking” by the established news industry. Ultimately, such acts harm society more than they help it. Certainly, at times legal intervention is important to improve markets (banning monopolies, establishing and enforcing safety standards, regulating financial institutions), but this is one case where I am more in favor of a libertarian/”let me market decide” approach. Perhaps this is because I am more confident that alternatives to traditional newspapers will emerge to provide new venues for professional journalism, even if the exact form that will take is still unclear.

Posner, and many in favor of expanding copyright and intellectual property, are generally obsessed with the “free rider” problem: people other than the original creator (or owner) scooping up their labor and profiting by it., without adding any additional value. Free riders undercut the incentive to create.

Jeff Jarvis thinks Posner’s view of free riding in this context is backwards:

Schultz and the Marbergers complain about what they call the “free-riding” of aggregators, et al. But they simply don’t understand the economics of the internet. It’s the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links.

These newspaper people are the ones trying to act as if they own the news and can monopolize it. Those days are over, thank God.

via First, kill the lawyers – before they kill the news.

I think, though, that Posner’s free rider worry is a indeed concern to be aware of, just as worrying about those who may seek to exploit welfare systems are cause for concern. But an over-obsession with this problem can lead to overly restrictive policies that stifle innovation and hamper new ideas, new approaches, and keep society stuck in place. This is good if you are a “have,” and bad if you are a “have not” – or if you’re an entrepreneur with a new idea.

I am not the only this troubling. There has been a vigorous reaction his idea that expanding copyright laws to protect newspapers “might be necessary” to avoid a duopoly on “news and opinion”:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

via The Becker-Posner Blog: The Future of Newspapers – Posner.

Economist Gary Becker instead argues that, while “the printed newspaper business is doomed,” this does not mean the end of independent and accurate news sources:

Although the printed newspaper industry is doomed, and will be missed by those of us that remember newspapers in their heyday, they are being replaced by good substitutes in the form of blogs, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, online news gathering by various groups, including newspapers, and other electronic forms of communication.

via The Becker-Posner Blog: The Social Cost of the Decline of Newspapers – Becker.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt responded to Posner’s idea by saying:

Wow. Now Posner has always been a stronger believer in the need for intellectual property to “solve” the “free rider problem,” but this is still stunning. He’s usually a lot more balanced in recognizing the downsides to greater IP protectionism. Here, he seems to ignore it completely, while also brushing off the ability of other sources of information to step into the void created by newspapers. Right before the statement above, he oddly assumes that there’s no way to support news production in an online only situation. His mistake, though, is assuming that it needs to have the same type of profits as monopoly newspapers used to have. For such an economically literate person, this is a surprising statement.

via Judge Posner Recommends Extending Copyright Law to Protect Newspapers | Techdirt.

And Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch is highly critical as well:

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

via How to Save the Newspapers, Vol. XII: Outlaw Linking.

As I suggested above, I am not in favor of Posner’s idea, but I do share some of the worry that quality journalism might be threatened, at least in the short term. I, however, do not blame “linking” or “paraphrasing,” but rather a combination of a rapidly changing business landscape with a certain reluctance by newspapers to adapt. Change is not easy, and protectionism always seems easier to hold on to what one already has. But radically changing long-establish legal precedent around the copyrightability and protection of “facts” is not the best way forward in the long term. A similar push against change backfired on American car manufacturers; I predict a similar fate for newspapers even if the law is changed to “protect” them.

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Martha Sperry of the Advocate’s Studio writes:

Yesterday, I read something that riled me up. A tech blog post with an inflammatory title designed to ensure click-through and “opinionated” content marginally “based” on “facts” with an equally inflammatory bent. On a well-respected and highly viewed tech blog.

via Honor Among Bloggers « Advocate’s Studio.

She goes on to note that this kind of pandering to increase clicks is not without harm:

I surely don’t begrudge anyone their income opportunities, as long as they are not hurting anyone in the process. Are these manipulators hurting anyone here? Umm, yes!  Whether they choose to be or not, bloggers populate the new wave of journalism.

She goes on to point out that professional journalists adhere to a code of ethics, which includes ideas like: be honest, avoid misrepresentation, distinguish news from analysis and commentary, and keep advertising distinct from news. This last certainly raises questions about paid reviews in blogs and other similar ventures.

I understand her point that as traditional news sources fade in importance, alternative sources of news and analysis – like bloggers – have a greater ethical responsibility to take their place. But bloggers are far more varied that journalists, so perhaps it is unfair to expect all bloggers to adhere to such a standard?

Personally, I feel the current newspaper troubles are temporary, although what will emerge out of it may be nothing like current newspapers. Situational, economic and technological changes often cause extensive disruption to entrenched industry, but eventually new business models emerge, even if old players are replaced by new ones. I believe this is what will occur with journalism, but it may take time.

Meanwhile, bloggers who maintain high standards of ethics have the potential to contribute for the benefit of us all. How can one translate the traditional code of journalist ethics into blogging terms? Cyber Journalist has a proposal that makes sense, and I recommend you read and consider it.

But how can we tell which bloggers uphold high standards of ethics? In the traditional world of journalism, newspapers had a reputation to maintain such that failing their readers could bankrupt them. Of course, an alternative business model is to specialize in not honestly seeking to inform readers – but most such “news” sources are well known for this. (Very unfortunately, even as obvious as these may be to informed individuals, some members of the public are nonetheless easily confused.) But nevertheless, there are a limited number of such sources, and over time it becomes possible to sort them out and keep track of reputations.

In blogging, sources come and go quickly. Anyone can set up a blog. Anyone can write and be read. Potentially, this rapidity better allows for quick market decisions that separate the “good” from the “bad” sources – so perhaps ethical bloggers will simply rise to the top.

The market (and the public) often needs help with this sifting, though, so hopefully reputation-ranking and publication services of some kind – ”hopefully based on more than simply number of readers (as many crowdsourcing approaches currently do) – ”will emerge to assist.

Sperry has more about how this might apply to legal bloggers specifically (who she suggests likely already adhere to higher standard, due to the greater importance of their reputations to their businesses). She also suggests you leave the “wild assertions and crazy opinions” for social media (like Twitter) or cocktail parties. I might go just a bit farther, given the permanence of online speech, and suggest you stick to the cocktail parties, but otherwise, I second her advice.

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Should so-called “shield laws,” intended to provide protection for journalists from being forced to reveal their confidential sources, apply to bloggers? The current answer seems to be “no,” although the question must be asked on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.

In the United States, there is no federal shield law, for journalists or bloggers. There are, however, many shield laws at the state level. (For more on this, see A Guide to Journalist Shield Laws from Poynter Online, an excellent compendium of such laws.) Some states have already recognized the important of blogging to modern journalism: New York is currently debating whether to pass a bill to explicitly extend protection to bloggers.

In Australia, such laws are currently being debated for adoption at the federal level, according to Peter Timmons, a consultant working on freedom of information and privacy protection issues. It’s unclear to me whether the proposed Australian law would cover bloggers, however.

Cearta.ie, an Irish legal blog, has several good articles discussing “journalists’ source privilege” from an international perspective. I recommend you read through it to get a better idea of the global status of the issues, especially in Europe.

From a “free press” perspective, the privilege is incredibly valuable. On other hand, like any evidentiary privilege rule (spousal testimony, for example) it can be very frustrating for law enforcement in certain situations. Overall, I think it would be a net good, if written sensibly, and it would also be a net good to extend the privilege to bloggers who act like journalists – but again, with some specific language defining what that means.

From the Wall Street Journal comes an article cheerfully titled Bloggers, Beware: What You Write Can Get You Sued – WSJ.com

Be careful what you post online. You could get sued.

In March 2008, Shellee Hale of Bellevue, Wash., posted in several online forums about a hacker attack on a company that makes software used to track sales for adult-entertainment Web sites. She claimed that the personal information of the sites’ customers was compromised.

About three months later, the software company—which contends that no consumer data were compromised—sued Ms. Hale in state court in New Jersey, accusing her of embarking ‘on a campaign to defame and malign the plaintiffs’ in chat-room posts.

In her legal response, Ms. Hale, 46 years old, claims she is covered by so-called shield laws that protect reporters from suits, because she was acting as a journalist and was investigating the hacker attack while researching a story on adult-oriented spam.

It’s unclear generally if “shield laws” for reporters protect bloggers or not. It’s also unclear to me, based on the WSJ article alone, how they would help Ms. Hale. The point of such laws is to protect journalists from being forced to reveal confidential sources, not to provide them with immunity from defamation lawsuits.

In any case, WSJ articles comes across as rather alarmist in my opinion, but it does contain an important reminder: what you write online is generally public, and that you should be aware of the potential implications of what you write. This is as true about avoiding potential defamation or similar suits as it is to think about the permanence of what you write on line in terms of future employes. So think before you write.

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In an article entitled, Lawyers: To Save Newspapers, Let’s Destroy Pretty Much Everything Else Good, the always-interesting Techdirt reacts to a recent Washington Post opinion piece about “saving” newspapers, and argues, “It’s time to stop having Congress keep passing laws that stop innovation in hopes that legacy industries magically come up with faster horses.”

The article Mr. Masnick is reacting to, Laws that Could Save Journalism, is in Saturday’s Washington Post. It was written by Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown, two lawyers with a great deal of experience in the laws impacting the news industry.

Mr. Sanford is an attorney at Baker Hostetler and is general counsel to the Society of Professional Journalists and has advised many media clients, as well as worked on First Amendment and libel cases throughout the country. Mr. Brown is also an attorney at Baker Hostetler, focusing on media law, privacy, newsgathering and copyright.

They begin by saying that massive changes are needed in the law to save journalism:

Unless Congress embarks on far-reaching change in public policy to maintain the viability of journalism as it evolves online, we will soon find ourselves with the remnants of a broken industry incapable of providing the knowledge necessary to manage life in a complex world. Journalism does not need a bailout, but it does need a sort of “recovery act” to bring the legal landscape in line with today’s publishing technologies.

They have a very good point when they say, “Google’s products (and profit) would look a lot different if, for example, the law said it had to obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index Web sites.” In fact, it seems very likely in this scenario that Google would not exist at all, and we may never have had the Internet revolution (with both its positive and negative aspects) at all.

After suggesting a number of other protectionist changes, they propose loosening antitrust laws to “protect the public interest:”

As noted in the Kerry hearing, publishers need collective pricing policies for their Web sites to finally break out of the expectation of free content that is afflicting the industry. Antitrust immunity is necessary because most individual news sites can’t go it alone by walling off their content for fees – readers will simply jump to sites that are still free.

A temporary antitrust shelter would serve the public interest by enabling the industry to take steps today to preserve for tomorrow the journalism that benefits us all.

The article strikes me as a misguided attempt to maintain the status quo in the face of competition from new competitors. Buggy whip makers tried desperately to cling to the old ways when the automobile began to cut into their business, and the music industry has been fighting the same sort of losing battle for years.

This is not to say that I believe journalism does not deserve protection and support, even government provided support, during the current climiate of shifting business models. It is easy during such radical shifts to lose the good with the newly inefficient, and journalism is too critical to our society to allow it to fall by the wayside.

But is it really going away? Blogging serves the role of early newspapers and pamphlets in this country. They too were quickly written and widely distributed, often outside of traditional business entities. (Think of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, or the Federalist Papers.) Why should the existing corporate structure of the newspaper need to exist merely to protect journalism and the free press? This is corporate protectionism at its finest, buried under an honest desire to protect and preserve journalism and the First Amendment.

While I am certainly not a libertarian proponent of the glory of the free market, I do believe that markets are key indicators of viability, and often better than the government at selecting more efficient and more optimal outcomes that benefit society as a whole. Changing the laws to protect newspapers from market forces is, I think, the wrong approach. Business must adapt. Permitting them to do otherwise merely creates GMs and Chryslers. On the other hand, changing laws to protect the concept of journalism – that I could support. I bet such suggestions would look very different from those proposed by Sanford and Brown.

Techdirt has more point-by-point rebuttals, as does Public Knowledge.

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