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Grand Central Political Magazine
Living on Blog-o-Bucks: The Strange Death of Punditry (Part 2)
By Robert Stacy McCain
He presides over a merry pirate crew of contributors and commenters who proudly proclaim themselves "morons," but the conservative blogger known as Ace of Spades is no dummy.
Ace has a graduate degree and a legitimate profession, and when he's not busy hating on Scandis, terrorizing hobos or guzzling Valu-Rite vodka (these are all in-jokes beloved by the morons at Ace O' Spades HQ), Ace has to make a living somehow.
By the standards of right-center blogging, AOSHQ has become a smash success since its inception with a hysterical parody of Poe's "The Raven" in December 2003. Ace was named Best Conservative Blogger in the 2007 Weblog Awards and received the Blogger of the Year award at CPAC 2008. He's a member of the PajamasMedia.com network, and he routinely racks up 40K visitors per day, which is 16 times the 2,500 average daily visitors considered the breakthrough point at which blogging is more than a hobby.
Yet despite his astounding success, Ace occasionally still has to remind the morons to "hit the tip jar" via the click-to-pay contribution link. Otherwise, he's dependent on online ad revenue: "Blog-o-bucks," as he says.
This epitomizes a problem frankly admitted by everyone involved in online New Media. While more and more Americans are getting their political news (just as they're getting everything else, from music to stock tips to NASCAR tickets) online, advertising revenue has yet to match the surging readership.
At this point, making a full-time living in the blogosphere is tough enough for the very best bloggers, who've had years to build a dedicated readership. So it is important to disabuse yourself of the notion that you -- yes, you, the 20-something blogger wannabe -- can start from scratch tomorrow and become Michelle Malkin overnight.
Heck, even Malkin didn't become Malkin overnight, and despite presiding over two of the hottest properties on the Web (MichelleMalkin.com and HotAir.com), Michelle still writes newspaper columns, sells books, appears on Fox News and does public-speaking gigs to pay the bills. I'm sure she loves every minute of it, but it keeps her incredibly busy.
The thing is, if you start going down the list of successful right-center bloggers, you'll quickly discover that everybody does something else to pay the bills. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com is a law professor and his wife, the beauteous Dr. Helen, is a psychologist. RedState.com chief Erick Erickson is a lawyer and political consultant. Mary Katharine Ham isn't just a blogger, she's managing editor of Townhall.com. And when Rusty Shackleford of The Jawa Report isn't busy taking out jihadist Web sites, he's got a job in academia that he strives very hard to keep separate from his online persona.
This list could be extend indefinitely. Scratch a blogger, and a highly qualified professional bleeds. The myth of bloggers as a bunch of idiotic slackers lounging around in their pajamas is just that, a myth. Back in November 2007, I found myself at the Young America's Foundation West Coast Leadership Conference with a crew of bloggers including Ace, Little Miss Atilla, Rusty Shackleford, Midwest Jim from Gateway Pundit and Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom. Guess what? All of those guys have more prestigious educational credentials than do I, the successful Washington journalist.
Which at last brings us around to the point of GrandCentralPolitical.com, namely, helping people hook up with professional gigs in politics and political communications. What Rachel Marsden is trying to do here is to create a platform for smart people with valuable skills to showcase their abilities, their credentials, and their experience.
Rachel figured out that there were a lot of people trying to do what she's done -- build a promising career as a political consultant and commentator -- and she's created this site as a sort of clearinghouse to help people with solid skills find the people who will pay them money for those skills.
GrandCentralPolitical.com is based on a brilliant insight. The pool of political talent is much larger than the DC-based political elite, and there is no need for that talent to go to waste.
Furthermore, there are people with something to contribute to the online political discourse who are not contributing as much as they could be, because they haven't quite figured out this whole "New Media" thing. There are very intelligent writers (mostly older ones) who have allowed stereotypes about the blogosphere to scare them off. Maybe they're slightly technophobic. Maybe they're just too busy to bother learning basic HTML. Whatever. GrandCentralPolitical.com gives them a way to contribute, and connects them to people who can help guide them into this exciting environment.
Networking, job opportunities, election news, commentary and who knows what else? Just as the Internet has evolved beyond the wildest dreams of Al Gore (who invented it, you know), so it is that you can make GrandCentralPolitical.com into a whole new adventure in online political media.
With its multiple functions -- both online forum and career skills clearinghouse -- GrandCentralPolitical.com can be the magic ingredient that helps turn "blog-o-bucks" into real money.
It's lots of fun to help break the MSM monopoly and challenge the political establishment. Here's where you learn to get paid to do it.
Getting paid for doing what you love is the sweetest deal in the world. As my hero, Hunter S. Thompson once famously observed, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
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Journalist and blogger Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of "Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party." He blogs at The Other McCain ( http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/ ) and his e-mail address is r.s.mccain@att.net.