From hobby to job: blogging as a business

Casual writers have used blogging as an active outlet for for decades — but in a changing job market, it’s increasingly becoming a viable career option. Call them the downfall of journalism, internet riffraff or harbingers of the apocalypse, but blogs have been earning money since they started emerging in the mid-1990s.

In addition to Penn’s many student-interest blogs, the University has also produced a handful of professional bloggers whose sites generate revenue. For example, Jezebel, a Gawker media site dedicated to women’s issues, was founded by one of our very own.

Former Daily Pennsylvanian staff writer Maureen “Moe” Tkacik dropped out of Penn in 1998 to pursue a career in journalism, but after she bounced around publications like the Philadelphia Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, Time and Philadelphia Magazine, she found a job opportunity at Gawker through her former college roommate.

Gawker had decided to launch a sister site focusing on women’s issues and Tkacik was hired in 2007, when the blog concept was still a funny site for women who were too smart to read women’s magazines. “A lot of our early posts were just like kind of explicit sex stuff … jokes,” Tkacik said. “We just didn’t take anything seriously. It was pretty fun.”

Jezebel was goosed by its mention on The Daily Show last summer and now has 37 million page views per month, according to the site. But Tkacik missed all that having left two years ago; she’s now a staff writer at the Washington City Paper.

Many popular national blogs generate revenue based on how much traffic they see, since companies want wide exposure for their advertisements. While ad sales present the most direct opportunity for blogs to make money, these sites have also become career launching pads. Think of 2002’s cooking blog the Julie/Julia Project based on an amateur cook’s journey through Julia Child’s recipes — three years later the blog was a bestselling book and two years after that, a $130-million grossing film. Popular national blogs like The Huffington Post (which receives around 40 million unique visitors per month, according to a Wall Street Journal blog) and The Daily Beast (around 3 million monthly viewers, according to the New York Times) are culling increasing numbers of web surfers because in addition to producing their own content, they also aggregate and analyze other mainstream news sources.

Even 34th Street’s Under The Buttonblog generates ad revenue, but Tkacik said she “wouldn’t hold a college gossip blog to the same standards as the rest of the professional media.”

Managing Editor Hillary Reinsberg insists that UTB has become newsier, less like the feature-y, pop culture blog it was launched to be. “We wanted to create something that you needed to read every morning, that could be updated in live time throughout the day,” said Reinsberg, who has written nearly 300 posts in her time at Penn.

A more optimistic alum than Tkacik, former Los Angeles Penn Club president Matt Rosler, 1996 College graduate, started Dueling Tampons in 2006 as a networking tool for Penn students and graduates interested in the film and music industries. “Now almost four years later, my inbox is constantly flooded with stories from alumni and undergrads about their latest creative films, shows, websites and businesses,” said Rosler, who ensures that posters include their backstories so aspiring student readers can learn from the career trajectories of like-minded peers. You can also sift through the blog through dropdown labels: Class Year and Names, Profession and Jobs.

You don’t even have to have graduated college to be a career blogger. Wharton senior Tony Wang, who calls himself a “semiprofessional blogger” said blogging launched him into the New York fashion circle. In 2008, Wang started a mass-culture Penn-oriented site, The 3st, named after his then fashion line. During New York Fashion Week in February 2010, The 3st morphed into post.fashionism, a blog dedicated to high-end fashion — Wang’s true passion, which is apparently more lucrative in its appeal to advertisers. Now Wang receives free merchandise all the time, some of which he models in his self-style shoots, but the decision to go high end has ushered Wang to a point in his blogging career where he can be afford to be choosy. “I would never say yes to a brand that I wouldn’t wear,” he says. As part of the transition from The 3st to post.fashionism, Wang decided to lose the staff he had acquired and “find [his] own journalistic voice,” having become irritated by the fashion-ideological discrepancies on his site. He felt that a November 2009 post touting Uggs negated his own comment only a week before disparaging the bulky boots, which, he says “are the worst thing in the world.” Wang’s site drew 3,314 visitors last month.

College junior and professional photographer Natalie Franke uses her blog to “share [her] art with clients around the world.” Between taking classing for her visual studies major and flying all around for professional shoots of weddings and bar mitzvahs, Franke finds time to chronicle her shoots with a dash of personal narrative and flair. “My approach to blogging is to let my personality shine through and to share who I am with my audience.”

Not only does this approach bring her clients, but it also recently snagged her The Baltimore Sun’s Mobbie award for best blog in Maryland, her home state.

Despite the opportunities for revenue and career building, Tkacick “would never advise anyone to go into writing anything for today’s ‘vacuous’ media.” If you dare, however, she suggests going with traditional print media, where she says there is more to learn.

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