Get out of blogging free

Get out of blogging free

The Million Dollar Bloggy?

I'd like to follow-up on the question I asked Professor Darr yesterday in class. My point in asking "What's the worst I could do with a $2M blog?" wasn't to be facetious... it's that a blog, as we understand it, ceases to function in the same way once it has been co-opted by a million dollar investment. I'm willing to bet that the minute a corporation seriously invests in a blog to exploit the media exemption, the following things will happen:

• Some enterprising bloggers will tell everyone that said blog has sold out to corporate money
• The blog will become so media-heavy and feature-rich that it will cease to be perceived as a "blog" and will instead be perceived as a mainstream site
• The blog will lose credibility as a blog

So does anything really change? I've been reading political blogs since 2003, and my favorite blogs are the ones that are written well, focus on issues I care about, and have a strong style and message with which I can connect. Some of my favorites--Atrios, James Wolcott, AmericaBLOG, Andrew Sullivan, and to some extent Kos--are absolutely primitive by the standards of today's web sites. The old Dean blog, during the primaries, was incredibly simplistic... but I loved it.

The effectiveness of a blog, as an outside perspective untainted by political hackery, really is dependent on the extent to which it is perceived as anti-establishment. I consider myself representative of the mass of political blog readers... and I don't read ABC's "The Note" because I don't like that it's affiliated with the mainstream media. I don't read Keith Olbermann's blog, nor do I read the DNC/RNC blogs. The appeal for me, as it is for many others, is the individuality of the blogs. If the blogs I read started having corporate investors, I would stop reading them in a heartbeat.