Right-Wing Blog Coordination? Yeah, Like I Have Time for That.

Apparently, the only thing the left has learned from the sad tale of the JournoList is…umm…well, absolutely nothing. After The Daily Caller broke story after story this week illustrating, with honest-to-goodness evidence and everything, that a small, intimate group of 400 progressive journalists and pundits treated journalism like a cat treats a litter box, you would think the left might show some small amount of contrition. Perhaps a couple prominent left-wing web sites might have a post or two about how no group of journalists, or would-be journalists, should put their heads together away from the view of the American people, in an effort to swindle us into thinking the news is something it is not.

But no. That’s not what we have today. What the left has provided us, courtesy of the HuffPo and Media Matters and highlighted by The Anchoress, is a shaky finger pointed back at right-wing bloggers and a feebly-stammered, Y-y-yeah, b-b-but they d-do it t-t-too”. Her post, and this one my Little Miss Attila, are worth your attention today, if for no other reason than they illustrate just how unwilling the progressive left is to admit a transgression, even though it’s been caught with its grubby hand in the cookie jar up to the shoulder.

I do want to say a couple things about this silly notion that right-wing blogs coordinate their messages behind the scenes. The first thing I can say about that is blessedly short: bunk.

The second thing echoes much of what The Anchoress said in her post. The vast majority of right-wing bloggers, even those with a high-profile, only blog part-time. We simply don’t have time to do the sort of coordination the Democrats’ blogospheric lapdogs suggest we are. Ace wrote a post on this that lays my point out pretty nicely and Dan Riehl provides a link-filled chaser, but let me show you the blogosphere from my vantage point.

The Sundries Shack pulls down somewhere between 300 and 500 unique visitors a day (that is, not counting people who visit the site more than once a day). I generally write a post a day. Sometimes I write three or four and sometimes I don’t write anything (usually due to time and interest constraints). I do not send out what The Anchoress calls “look at me” e-mails, which are e-mails I send to a bunch of bloggers who I think might be interested in a post I’ve written with the hope that they’ll link my post and drive more traffic my way . I used to send out three or four a week, but the rate of return on those e-mails was so small that it wasn’t worth the extra effort. Most of the bloggers who whom I sent the e-mails generally ignored them, or at least they didn’t link my post nor did they answer my e-mail. I won’t name names, but they did include some of the bigger names in the blogospheric firmament. I get why they didn’t correspond with me, by the way, so dont’ consider that a great criticism. I’ll get into that in a moment. So, I stopped and redeemed the time I’d spend doing those e-mails, which often was as much as I’d spend writing a post. Sure, I could do more of it, and I’m sure my hits would rise a little bit, but I don’t find it worth the effort. Others do, and God bless them for trying.

I do get e-mails sent to me from other bloggers who want me to link their posts. Sometimes I do. Most times I don’t — not because I don’t like them or feel I’m too big for my britches, but most often because they’re either writing about a subject that doesn’t interest me at all or because I just don’t have time to write another blog post.

And the issue of time is key in this discussion. Grab up a bunch of “name bloggers” on the right: Ace, Allah, Ed Morrissey, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Dan Riehl, The Anchoress, John Hawkins, the guys at Power Line, Stephen Green, Ed Driscoll, James Lileks (when he writes on politics), Moe Lane, Stacy McCain, and so on. How many of them are full-time bloggers? Three? Four? How many of them are secure enough in their income as a blogger that they can afford to sit back, JournoList-style and coordinate their moves with other bloggers? Well, perhaps Glenn Reynolds can. Maybe Allah and Ed at Hot Air. Michelle Malkin certainly can’t (have you ever gotten a small peek at her schedule? She shared a small bit of it with me once. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want even half of it). Everyone else has some combination of a full-time job separate from their blogging or are spinning so many plates that the very notion they’d have a couple or three hours to spend on villainous moustache-twirling is ludicrous.

Let me give you some examples. Steve Green and Ed Driscoll both work for Pajamas Media, so they do get paid to blog. They also have to produce or provide content for several video and audio productions (PJM Political, Trifecta, The Week in Blogs) which chews up time like PacMan chews up maze pellets. Glenn Reynolds and Power Line are bloggers but also are working lawyers and write for other publications. Stacy McCain not only requires a tip jar made of pure Unobtanium to keep it from breaking, so hard does he rattle it, but he’s also one of the hardest-working freelancers The American Spectator has. Ace, man of mystery that he is, has a full time job outside the blogging world (no, I don’t know what it is). The Anchoress freelances and takes on other projects. Moe Lane is a honcho at Red State, but doesn’t, to my knowledge, get paid to blog there.

The same holds true for people farther down the ladder, folks like LMA, Troglopundit, Pat Austin, Bob Belvedere, Carolyn Tackett, No Sheeples Here, Cynthia Yockey…and me. None of us can blog all the time because we enjoy such luxuries as shelter and food. Only after we do our eight hours at whatever job pays our bills, can we scrape for a link here and there, tweet our brains out, and mull over news stories to see which ones might make for the next good blog post. When we’re not doing that, we’re living the rest of our lives. Contrary to popular opinion, Bloggers have friends and families who appreciate it when we spend time with them and grow hostile and stabby when we don’t. Many of us are active in our local churches or synagogues.

And let us not forget that a good number of bloggers are branching out into other avenues of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and podcasting. Podcasting, especially, requires a large investment of time and creativity (Each episode of The Delivery requires about ten hours, including topic prep, lining up guests, pre-production work with SMP Mike, setting up the live webcast, recording the show, and writing the iTunes blurb and summary blog posts).

What all that means is that most of us on the right don’t have the time the left thinks we do. We’re not so fortunate as to have a number of sugar-daddies paying our bills so we can hang around the virtual water-cooler and chit-chat. Heck, even the time we spend at conventions like CPAC and Right Online (which many of us pay for out of our own pockets) is spent more on chasing down grist for the blogging mill than it is hob-nobbing with our fellow bloggers.

The truth is, a vast gulf exists between how right-wing bloggers do business and how it’s done on the left. Most of that difference revolves around money, and the free time that money purchases.

Other Posts of Interest:

• So You Say You Want To Be A Blogger?
• When In Doubt, Link Your Friends!
• This, Folks, is What Blog-Fu is All About

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, JournoList, Media Bias

Category: Blogs and Blogging, Oh, THAT liberal media.