Pro Tips From the Blogosphere

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate