America's Newest Profession
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
There is absolutely no way that this is true. They say that "452,000 [use blogging] as their primary source of income." I would be very surprised to find less than half a million programers are working in the US.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/43888.html
2002 was the last year they had full data for the series ID given there (I checked at the Bureau of Labor Statisics), but it had been stable for a few years.
I wouldn't be surprised if blogging crosses over within the next couple years. It's a very labor-intensive profession, and as the article notes, many people will pay for a friendly opinion.
Edit: Look, whoever keeps downvoting this, would you PLEASE read the sources? Is that too much to ask? See my other comment below, explaining how the article arrived at its number, and why it doesn't sound right.
It's really disappointing to see HN devolve into such sloppy thinking.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/table1.pdf
there is a line item labeled "computer programmers" giving the number so employed as 394,710. However, I think most people would include the two categories of "computer software engineers", bringing the total to 1,239,660 (still not including researchers and people with more nebulous titles, many of whom, I imagine, would identify themselves programmers).
"Journalist" and "blogger" are not mutually exclusice terms. A journalist is one who reports the news, a blog is merely the medium.w
It is true that a journalist can blog his stories, but I doubt that a significant amount of blogging is original reporting. The vast majority is probably opinion or analysis of one sort or another.
"This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth."
- Just a noisy opinion, in my opinion.
"All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story."
- Nice job fitting in another baseless stance around a fact simply to legitimize said opinion by proximity. Conveniently left unsaid is the fact that the "twenty-four-hour news channels" he holds up on a pedestal are themselves 24-hour opinion channels. Have you ever stayed home from work for a day and watched CNN or Fox News?
"Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed."
- Again, assigning a label ("sensationalism") to blogs as if it didn't exist before blogs did. National Enquirer-type rags aside, all the major news channels before the internet have been perfecting this art for the past couple of decades.
The author is not presenting an unbiased report of facts. He is presenting his own viewpoint DISGUISED as a neutral report.
This report, coming from a "reputable" source like the WSJ is a great example of why the democratization of the publishing business is good for the public. There may be a lot of fluff out there, as he states, but the good stuff rises to the top.
I am almost certain these are the opinion channels to which he refers.
"All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story."
Also, I had no idea that many people considered blogging their primary profession. I was under the impression it was more like 1000 tops.
Yep, I was surprised to see a number that large for "primary source of income." I can believe that 20 million people tried blogging one or two posts then gave up, but half a million people making their living this way is a significant occupation.
Let's assume two authors per blog. So you'd expect some of those blogs to have a Technorati rank of 200,000 or worse. So far as I can see, blogs with that kind of Technorati rank usually have readers which number in the tens or (at most) hundreds. Good luck making thousands of dollars per year with that kind of readership...
It was not pretty...