A few people have asked about my lack of recent blogging. My holiday hiatus seems to have turned into a permanent vacation. Just for the record: Blogging here will be light to nonexistent for the next few months, if not longer.
Something has to give. I start teaching German again next week, and I need to be reviewing irregular verbs and noun genders. I’ve been struggling through Thomas Mann for the last week – tough enough in a good English translation, downright overwhelming in the original, and a stark reminder of how much work lies before me.
I also will be working in the writing lab at MSU-Billings a few hours a week. At least that doesn’t require prep time, but if I am going to be bright-eyed at 8 a.m. on Monday, I am going to have to finish The Outpost sometime before 6 a.m. That hasn’t been happening often enough.
At the same time, pressure on The Outpost keeps getting worse. I spend twice as much time keeping books as I did a year ago. Our staff size has doubled, which means I actually have to try to be a manager some of the time. I’m in charge of distribution again. One of our best freelancers, Linda Halstead-Acharya, has been hired away by The Gazette.
Worst of all, the Thrifty Nickel keeps cutting rates and signing up customers to long-term contracts in an effort to force us out of business. I don’t necessarily blame the Nickel, which now sees us as a real threat, even though the Nickel’s woes were self-inflicted. We pose no real danger to the Lee Enterprises juggernaut – Lee CEO Mary Junck earned enough in bonus alone last year, not to mention salary and stock options, to run this whole company for a couple of years. But we do pose a threat to the jobs of a few Lee employees who could be shoved out the door if they don’t meet Iowa’s profit expectations. And they have reacted like we were out shooting babies. We are fighting for our survival here, and victory is by no means assured.
The two best pieces of business advice I have ever received keep coming back to me. One was from Chris Dimock, who teetered on the edge of bankruptcy before turning Western Technology Partners around. “Businesses don’t fail,” he told me. “Their owners just give up.”
The other advice was from Outpost columnist Roger Clawson, who has committed occasional acts of capitalism. “You can get more work done in 80 hours than you can in 40,” he said, “but you can’t get twice as much done.”
That law of diminishing results has come home to roost – so much so that I am willing to resort to cliches rather than think out what I really want to say. I work more hours now than ever and get less done. More than six years into this, without a day off in sight for another six months, I’m just tired: tired of working, tired of missing nearly everything that goes on around me, tired of being broke, tired of being tired. I know that sounds like whining, but if you can’t whine on your own blog, where can you whine?
Something has to give. I don’t particularly want it to be blogging, which is mostly fun and sometimes rewarding. But it doesn’t pay, and I don’t see it paying off any time soon. I think the medium has promise, and may even become essential, even though I don’t know that it will ever reach the aspirations of its most enthusiastic practitioners. Despite the promise of the technology, bloggers basically remain pamphleteers. And no blogger has managed to do what an earlier pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, did 200 years ago, even without comments enabled.
The blogosphere’s level of ignorance about and antipathy toward established journalism continues to amaze and trouble me. I’ve even seen bloggers argue that it doesn’t matter if major media disappear because the wire services would still be around – as if the AP would keep cranking out copy all by itself for eternity, like a salt machine at the bottom of the ocean.
A week or two ago, a blogger wrote that the holidays provided more evidence of the superiority of blogging to conventional media, because paid journalists take the holidays off while bloggers keep plugging away. Amazing. I’ve worked more holidays over the last couple of decades than lots of firefighters and police officers, and I worked till 10 p.m. four straight nights this year just to get far enough ahead to take Christmas off. Some bloggers have no clue.
Of course, the beauty of the medium is that it is self-correcting. But I find myself wasting time responding to the lamest arguments. Last weekend I spent the better part of an hour crafting an intricate response to some ignorant posturing about the relationship between profits and objectivity in journalism. The next day I wanted to go back and see if my comments had drawn any response. But I couldn’t remember the blog or the path of links that had taken me there. My comments, as usual, had vanished into the ether.
Something has to give. It’s gotta be blogging.