Curious to see the news that Ron Harper is discontinuing 5thestate.com, which has led to a long discussion here. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I doubt we’ve seen the last of Ron.
At the same time, though, if in fact he’s burned out… well, that happens a lot in the blogosphere.
In fact, I’ve been thinking that I need to update the local links over to the right here because several local bloggers seem to have thrown in the towel without announcing it, as Ron did. LancoYokels hasn’t posted since December; Lancaster Progressive hasn’t posted anything since early Februrary. A friend of mine whose blog I really enjoyed hung it up last year. And one of my favorite bloggers of all time, maybe the favorite, was a guy named Billmon who just stopped in January 2007, and really hasn’t been seen since.
Sometimes you can get the feeling you’re just shouting into the void - you’re doing good things and your traffic isn’t what you think it should be. It’s easier for someone like me to do it on a site like this - there’s already a community here, and if they’re interested it’s just a matter of a few clicks and they’re here. And then there’s already an audience, in that this is just an expansion of the print version, really, and the print version’s been around for more than a decade.
You strike out on your own, it’s tough - tough to get people to swing by, tough to retain an audience. There are TalkBackers who I’ve encouraged, on several occasions, to start their own blogs - their writing is that good, and I think they would have an audience (or at least should have an audience). But there’s some trepidation there, I think, because the community that enjoys their writing is here. Would that community - TalkBackers - visit their blog? Or would they, too, wind up shouting into the void - whereas here, on LOL, they can shout, in the threads, and actually get a reaction?
Ideally, and I’ve said this before, Lancaster Online would actually host TalkBackers’ blogs. And maybe that’s something we can look into in the future. Other newspapers do it; you get into questions of liability and that sort of thing. But it’s a way in which citizens/readers are actually made part of the product, here, on the Web. And for the people who might take advantage fo that, it’s a chance to reach out to an audience where that audience is at - versus striking out on your own.
Blogging is easy to start and easy to abandon, and ultimately I suspect the people who walk away from it do so not because it’s not making them any money - though that would be nice - but because they just feel like they’re busting their hump, producing good things, and no one’s noticing. Long run for a short slide; and when that’s the case, why bother? It’s easier to just walk away; though as people in the TalkBack thread on Harper have noted, and as I felt when Billmon quit, their contributions are missed - no matter how small or large the audience ultimately is.
