Wise “Old Media” links to Wise “New Media”
From the April issue of “Reader’s Digest” Magazine
In an article about new ways of ‘cashing in’, Good Old Media (my mother loves Reader’s Digest– especially the jokes!) links to New Media and who better (my apologies to Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Polipundit, Publius Pundit, Athena,…) than the “Great One” Glenn Reynolds at “Instapundit”…
I’ve included the whole segment here of the interview with Mega-Blogger “Instapundit”…
Blog for $$$
When he’s not teaching Internet and constitutional law full-time at the University of Tennessee, Glenn Reynolds, 44, can be found “blogging” on his computer.
Reynolds, creator of the conservative instapundit.com, is one of a growing number of bloggers (blog is short for web log) who post commentary, reviews, photos and more on a wide range of topics on websites throughout the day. Imagine a cyberspace soapbox, and you get the idea.
Blogging is something of a Seinfeld experience — enabling anyone with a website to write about nothing and everything on a regular basis and receive feedback from readers. What did you do today? That’s a blog. What do you think about today’s headlines? That’s a blog too. “It’s like your own printing press, without having to worry about paper, ink or postage,” says Reynolds.
Technorati.com, a San Francisco-based real-time search engine that tracks web logs, estimates that 12,000 new blogs are created each day. They range from engadget.com, which features consumer electronics news and reviews, to boingboing.net, with posts on everything from spring-loaded women’s shoes to novelty records.
To attract and hold a large, well-defined audience that advertisers will want to reach, a blogger needs a strong point of view, an engaging writing style and a gift for smart analysis. Reynolds says his site receives up to 500,000 visits daily and earns income — $3,000 a month — through contributions and posted ads.
“I put a tip jar on my site in 2002 after a friend suggested it,” he says. “I thought it was a dumb idea, but I earned $1,300 in the first few days.”
Last year, instapundit.com generated so much daily traffic that blogads.com, an Internet ad-sales company, convinced Reynolds to accept ads on his site. Blogads.com takes 20 percent of the fee paid by advertisers.
Reynolds devotes two to three hours a day — between classes and at night — writing entries and reviewing upward of 200 e-mails. “When your site generates enough buzz, you start getting great links and opinions from others that you can post,” says Reynolds. “At this point, my site is almost a group blog with a strong editor.”
Does Reynolds dream about giving up teaching and blogging full-time? “This is just a hobby, not my life’s work,” he says. “The only difference between this and my other hobbies, like scuba diving, is that blogging makes a little money.” Reynolds’s advice: Keep it fresh “so your audience will keep coming back.”
In a world where many of the monthly magazines have gone so far left, it is still refreshing to see the monthly stories in ‘the digest’. Besides the write-up on “Instapundit” in the April edition, there is a terrific story in the May edition on Laura Bush. The May edition also has the courageous story of Captain Rozelle.
You can order your subscription to Reader’s Digest here.
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