Abstract
What does it take to reach the stratosphere as a blogger on politics? How does one get onto what Tanni Haas, in Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World’s Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success, calls the ‘A-List’? Through interviews with 20 of the most successful political bloggers, Haas, a professor of Speech Communication Arts & Sciences at Brooklyn College, presents what appears to be advice for the neophyte blogger who wants to try to make it to the top of the heap, but what is really more of a reference tool for the student of the blogosphere.
The great strength of the book lies in the answers to his questions that Haas elicits from bloggers ranging from Arianna Huffington to Cheryl Contee, answers that tie together bloggers from a wide political and cultural spectrum, showing that there are similar attitudes running through almost all of them, no matter what their political differences might be. As a group, as Haas says in his conclusion, they stress planning, production, and promotion. They also stress passion, for it is through passion for a subject or a community that one is able stick with blogging long enough to succeed at it. Persistence, Haas also shows, would be a critical fifth ‘p’ for successful blogging.
Except for two of the interviewees, all those Haas spoke with brought something of a high-profile past to their blogging. Perhaps this could make a sixth ‘p’ for success: prominence. Best known before beginning to blog was, probably, Arianna Huffington, who had been in the public eye for well over a decade before founding The Huffington Post. Oddly, Haas makes little of this, or of Huffington’s brilliant decision to go against the grain of the egalitarian blogosphere of 2005, adding in something of American celebrity culture by inviting well-known people to become featured bloggers on her site, instead of raising people from the relative anonymity of the group blog.
Even though the blogosphere has often been cast as another great leveler, putting everyone on an equal footing at least at the start it has never been far removed from the general inequities of American culture. The people in the Rolodexes of schedulers for radio and TV shows are also the people who are going to get the most initial attention when they turn to blogging. One of the bits of advice many of those interviewed in this book give is to share your best blogs through email. But it is the people with recognizable names whose emails are going to be opened, especially if they come personally and not as part of an email blast. The assumption in the book that anyone, with pluck and persistence, can become an ‘A-List’ blogger probably needs to be taken with more than a single grain of salt.
The most useful aspect of the book, then, is found not in its putative purpose as advice for the amateur blogger, but in the picture it provides of the blogging elite, of both the breadth of their interests and of the singularity of purpose they show. As a whole, they care more about the number of readers they attract and the number of comments they engender than about the specifics of the topics they write on. It is this, perhaps, that sets them apart from most of the rest of the blogosphere, where the ability to express an opinion is as important as the numbers actually reached. Sometimes, for the non-‘A-List’ bloggers, numbers reached in the community are less important than the community itself. The ‘A-List’ bloggers are bloggers who have made blogging into a business, not simply a hobby, and they depend on numbers for their very survival. For most of them, blogging has become their career; for all of them, it is most certainly an important adjunct to their other activities.
Haas, in his conclusion, does write of the importance of the community to blogging, but sees community-building more as a tool towards success than the blog as a tool for building a community. That, however, is to be expected from a book whose focus is success in blogging, not success in community-building. Still, blogging, as a whole, is extremely intertwined with community – and success in it can be measured in ways quite distinct from the numbers of readers and comments that Haas uses as benchmarks.
Ultimately, this is a book for the student of the blogosphere more than it is a volume really providing something useful for bloggers themselves. It can be dipped into quite easily, especially when one wants to learn about – or refresh one’s idea about – any of the people in this important grouping of successful bloggers. It is handy, clear, and a good reference tool for those trying to keep track of the rapidly changing world of political blogging.