Would you like to know the secret of successful political blogging? Tanni Haas, a journalism professor at CUNY, asked a bunch of bloggers and then put all the interviews together into a book. Here’s my deathless advice:
You have to enjoy writing. You really have to enjoy sitting down at a keyboard and typing words. If you don’t, then you might as well forget about it.
This thought is not original to me. In my first real job out of college I was a technical writer for a computer hardware company. When I interviewed for the job, the department manager made something like this comment to me. At first it sounded kind of dumb, but it stuck with me for a long time. Because he was right: if a job requires a fairly high volume of writing — as both blogging and technical writing do — you’re not going to be happy at it unless you’re the kind of person who just constitutionally enjoys the act of putting your fingers on a keyboard and making words come out. If you don’t, you might do it anyway because you have to put food on the table, but you won’t enjoy it and you’ll likely never be all that good at it. And if you don’t have to do it in order to put food on the table, you won’t stick with it for long.
Pretty profound, huh? And I suppose that actually knowing something helps too, though that theory hasn’t really been seriously tested yet in the blogosphere. (Or in human history, some cynics might say. Though not me, of course.) In any event, Haas also interviewed lots of smarter people than me, including Tyler Cowen, Digby, Juan Cole, Jane Hamsher, and quite a few others. So there’s probably some smart stuff in the book too. Amazon, of course, will let you dip into the book a little bit for free if you want to test this assumption. Enjoy.
