As if things weren’t already strange enough at the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, now comes the news that some of the leftist bloggers in attendance want to form a union for bloggers. The goal would be to gain prestige, bargaining power, the ability to buy health care insurance at a discount and all the other “benefits” that come from being in a union.
What I find so curious about this proposal is that it seems to undermine one of the core tenets of blogging: independence. The majority of bloggers don’t work for a newspaper or other media outlets, but on their own and for themselves. Most don’t do it fulltime either, and usually aren’t paid.
Now there are exceptions of course. James Lileks wrote for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for years before being reassigned to head a new blogging project. Popular talk radio host Hugh Hewitt blogs on the side, and both of these gentlemen are paid staff members of their organizations.
Corporate-sponsored blogs are going mainstream meanwhile, and some news sites are even made up primarily of blogs (Politico.com or RealClearPolitics to name a two). In this sense, bloggers are increasingly moving into the ranks of journalist and will most likely continue to do so for some time, until the two are one and the same to the average reader. But does this mean we should create a bloggers union? What benefits do the journalist receive from their union?
For the sake of argument I’m going to assume that journalist derive some benefit from being members of unions, and that such benefits are fair and deserved. Perhaps a fallacious assumption, but I’ll still use it. Such journalist unions are formed for the authors of a newspaper, which is a company with stockholders, employees, directors, managers, and finally, reporters. A union for newspaper employees has something to represent the reporters’ case too: the corporate leadership of the newspaper. Bloggers have no such captive audience. They don’t receive a salary or benefit from their readers, nor are they responsible to anyone but themselves.
It seems to me that the idea of a “union” for bloggers may be mislabeled and misunderstood. If what they want are discounts for health insurance and a trade group, perhaps the term “guild” would be better suited to their purpose. Trade guilds in 16th century Europe were the predecessors to trade unions, and represented the independent merchant and tradesman to the consumer and not some corporate body. Independent bloggers could easily form the same thing with the same intentions.
