Yesterday, NOI Fellow and OpenLeft founder Chris Bowers shared his insights with our staff and 11th floor friends. After six years of daily political blogging, he had a lot of wisdom to share. I tried to type quickly, but these notes should not be considered verbatim quotes. Watch the video for a more colorful version.
1. Resources (time and/or money)
The first thing you need is TIME TO BLOG.
It seems obvious but it is the big difference between those that take off and those that remain hobbies – you need one person full time or equivalent of one full time person.
This is just as true for institutions and news organizations.
Almost all new big successful political blogs in the last 5 years are attached to large media organizations or nonprofits with significant funding.
The days of a blogger in his or her spare time becoming famous are virtually over – with exception of fivethirtyeight.com.
You can split this time various ways between people, but ideally, it's one key voice – people are driven to personality.
2. Clear topic area
Provide useful information that you can't get anywhere else. Useful is in the eye of the beholder. Original reporting is the best way to do this. Take on a niche topic area that no one else covers on a regular basis.
For example, NOI could look at new organizing from a personal careerist perspective rather than the technical tools, which TechPresident covers pretty well already.
Choose your topic carefully – You can't do the same thing for fun that you do for work indefinitely. Writing on topics that don't excite you becomes a grind very quickly. Choose something that you straight up enjoy or you won't keep up with it, and your readers will probably notice.
3. Expertise
Write about something you know and can defend.
If you're going to spend resources on it, you need to find an expert in the field to run the blog. Your commenters will be quick to tell you you're wrong – and they'll be right for once. It's a medium where you have nothing if not your credibility. You have to cite more than actual traditional media.
4. An initial audience
You need an established presence in a related area, whether that means personal connections with other bloggers or personal popularity on other sites to drive people to site in the beginning. Many of the top political bloggers started as diarists on DailyKos.
This is one main reason that only pre-existing institutions have launched successful blogs in the last 5 years.
Use Twitter, your email list (nonprofits especially), whatever you've got. Chris used one Twitter handle for both his personal tweets and the blog to consolidate it all into one stream.
Q&A
How do you get around the Catch 22 of soliciting guest posts before you have the traffic or brand that inspires them?
Literally go to your friends
How do you reconcile different voices?
Don't have them compete – have set schedule for each voice, let each have some time of exclusivity on the blog. Personal brand is inextricably linked. People trust voices and it's difficult to break through that trust with empirical stats.
How frequently should you post?
Here's the scary thing – as often as possible. Quantity trumps quality in terms of getting traffic. But you want to achieve a critical mass of quantity of quality writing.
Post between 9am-6pm (4 or 5 on Friday). Not before 9, and certainly not on weekends. You don't get big links on weekends. Maybe Sunday night. Within those time periods, update as frequently as possible.
A few people can pull off one spectacular article a day, but for the rest of us mortals, more content is better.
Anatomy of a post:
Lede, thesis statement in first sentence and headline, present information straight forward. Bullet points are fine. With the exception of the footnoting and the pay, this is the opposite of grad school.
Getting good incoming links – original reporting is the only way to guarantee it – if you break the story they'll link to you.
What role should comments play?
Need someone to spend time moderating the comments for spammers, two or three people dominating the conversation. On flip side, need to engage those who contribute worthwhile thoughts.
OpenLeft set up a structure where anyone who's been a user for over 30 days can post a news link with a little comment. Quick hits has become 8% of all traffic and an invaluable part of the site. Need to figure out how to offer your community a way to participate that no one else is.
Blogging as a living?
To get $20 CPMs and higher you need 2 million pageviews a month, leading to the rich getting richer. OpenLeft's new model is unique – partnering with other organizations and building out activist potential. Major groups like MoveOn have huge email lists that help fund campaigns, and blogs like OpenLeft and FireDogLake are moving in this direction.
When you're at a lower traffic level the available advertising sucks, so it's better to work with likeminded organizations for relevant sponsorship. You basically sell the ads yourself.
How are blogs reacting to social media and microblogging? Blogs scooped newspapers, now social media is scooping blogs.
People under 30 are reading blogs less, but people over 30 are reading them more. Makes you wonder if people who left blogs were using them in the same way they're now using social networks, and those who are still using blogs are those who were always more interested in long form writing.
How do you keep coming up with fresh content?
You've gotta follow the news. There's no other way. First of all, people are looking to blogs for various offshoots of the shared news cycle. Second, it's basically impossible to come up with general abstract takes on politics independent of the news cycle for 6 years straight.
Where do you get your news?
I max out at 15 websites a day. Lots of original reporting sites, but the new media ones. TPM DC, Politicalwire, fivethirtyeight, DailyKos, Political Ticker on CNN, MyDD, Swing State Project, The Hill. Twitter constantly. Can't stop looking at it. Facebook's the only area I still enjoy social media. That's where I draw the line.
Creating controversy
We used to say that mass media reinforces social norms, but social media seems to reinforce the crowd even more. Sticking out from the crowd will get you traffic, but it won't be positive links.
