Those are not the only reasons that people write, but they are powerful motivators. I don’t believe that many people set out on the grueling task of writing a novel hoping that they will become “mute inglorious Miltons.” They hope to be known; they hope to be read.

And they hope, in the end, that being read they might quit their day jobs and write full time. Writing full time is not an easy row to hoe. It’s  bloody hard work if you’re trying to do it clearly and well and  day after day.

Here at the TucsonCitizen the majority of the content providers are unpaid bloggers. (Columnists, Reporters, Citizen Journalists.) It’s always been “no pay” in the blogosphere. Bloggers have something to say that they want other people to read and for the most part have been grateful for a platform that allows them to grind their own axes without the benefit of editorial supervision. Being paid was not a primary requirement.

But…and there’s always a but…being paid is no bad thing, and not for the reason you may suspect. Being paid, even at pitiful freelance rates, keeps you working at the craft.

MS DataPort and I have been writing for pay for the best part of 35 years. Not enough to leave our day jobs, and not always the grandest material, but certainly enough to allow us to call ourselves professional writers. Here’s what we’ve found.

When an editor says, yes she’d like a piece on the latest trends, and she’d like it in two weeks, you deliver in two weeks and cheerfully do the rewriting she requires. Why? Because, even though you’re getting paid in pauper’s pence, that’s what professionals do. The promise of a buck or two keeps you writing despite the demands of your day job.

If you are only a volunteer it is too easy to put off until tomorrow what you put off again until the day after that.

Regular visitors to the Tucson Citizen may remember more than one blogger who joined us all excited  and enthusiastic only to fade from view when it turned out that blogging was harder and took more time than expected.

Two of my favorite blogs, gone but not forgotten, were  “God Blogging” and the ever conservative “Fort Buckley.” These were wonderfully written blogs…but I imagine the demands of day jobs put paid to their appearance here. I don’t know if being offered a buck or two would lure them back…but it would be worth a try.

Next: Bulletin Board or Newspaper?

The TucsonCitizen.com is a community of bloggers. Belonging to such a community has both advantages and disadvantages and in the course of time The Data Port has belonged to three different communities.

The first was the Salon Blogs group, which is where I did my first blogging. The writers were pretty much what you might expect from a group of Salon readers. Softly leftish, literary, and as likely to post about poetry and music as about politics. For the most part the individual  blogs were pretty to look at.

Looking back I don’t remember that the web was characterized by what we know today as “social media.” I suppose the the first blogs were the social media. You advertised and promoted your own blog by reading other blogs and writing the authors to tell them that you were adding them to your  blogroll. The hope, of course, was that they would respond in kind.

Salon wound down its support for the blogging community and many drifted off to Blogspot, but the sense of community was lost in the sheer size of the Blogspot universe.

The Data Port was happy with Blogger, which was easy to use, and it became active in the blogosphere that grew up around Gabrielle Giffords’ first run for Congress. The blog became much less general and more political.

Eventually, after the emotional Sturm und Drang of that first campaign subsided, The Data Port was picked up by Lefty Blogs and anything of a strictly left wing political nature appeared there. If I blogged about motorcycles, poetry, or the little disturbances of man I wouldn’t make the cut. (Lefty Blogs seems to be dead, by the way. If not, I’d be glad to hear from readers where it’s gone or what has taken its place.)

Being part of a blogging community has advantages and disadvantages that vary according to the nature of the community. One advantage trumps everything else: If you want your blog to be read you’re better off writing cheek by jowl with others in a community of writers. If your blog is posted on a site that regularly attracts readers, your own blog is more likely to be read…or at least looked for. The Data Port has had more readers since joining The Citizen than it had in its other communities.

There are disadvantages, however. Your blog’s appearance is largely out of your hands, constrained as it is by something that roughly resembles a newspaper column or news story.

There is another constraint that’s largely psychological but fairly strong: Once you establish your blog as about some particular topic…politics, dogs, religion, the environment, Hispanic affairs or auto racing…you’ll find it hard to shift gears to something entirely different. You feel that this “something different” is not what your readers want from you.

Two examples: This series, probably; and and an attempt to write a short story in continuing installments. This last seemed so uncomfortable that after a couple of sections I moved it to an alternate Data Port location. No one read it there, either. So, no more short stories.However, you’re stuck with these retrospectives for a while longer.

The one constraint that is significantly lacking is editorial control by Gannett or our editor Mark Evans. So long as you do not utter palpable falsehoods, commit libel or violate copyright you’re good to go. Simple bone-headed errors are cheerfully corrected by our readers.

Next: Writing for Fame and Writing For Money

Thinking back to the early web world I  remember that there were no blogs, and community on the electronic frontier depended on mail lists. If you wanted to homestead there you depended on e-mail.

During my own tentative journeys on what was then being called the “information super highway” I found that personal web sites were rare. They required a good deal of technical knowledge and most newcomers simply lacked the skills necessary to code and maintain them.

The development of blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger opened the web to a broader public presence. The personal website was within reach of just about everyone, thanks to easy-to-use templates and simple control over how the site looked…background colors and images, type styles and sizes, and arrangement of sections of the blog on the page.

Those first blogs were intensely personal. People wrote about themselves, their daily lives and passions. Considerable attention was paid to the blog’s appearance and each blogger tried for a unique look.

Bloggers had different special interests of course…poetry, child rearing, politics, cooking and so forth…but they also wrote about themselves and the blogs were their way of telling the world what was happening in their lives.

Blogs were the first Facebook pages and it seems to me that the original, highly personal, function of many blogs has been replaced by Facebook pages.

The writers that you read here at the Tucson Citizen are called bloggers…the reason for this we’ll discuss in a subsequent post…  but as they exist, in the context of an e-journalism enterprise, they more nearly resemble newspaper columnists or freelance journalists than they do the earliest bloggers.

At the risk of laboring the obvious the columns you read here are very unlike traditional blogs. Consider: Unlike free blogs they can only be reached in the context of their location in the Tucson Citizen; bloggers have very little control over the appearance of their blogs, except for the banners that head them. There is no control of typeface in the body of the article. In other words these “blogs” are exactly like news stories or opinion columns in a newspaper.

Most significantly, TC.com writers write very little about themselves. We know what interests them, or what their particular social or political concerns are, because those interests and concerns are the subjects of their articles. But if you want to know what they had for dinner or what their vacation plans are you’d better look at their social media pages.

Next: A Community of Bloggers