On Blogging
Today I finally got around to reading Emily Gould’s engrossing NY Times Magazine essay, “Exposed,” about her life as part of the Gawker brain trust. One part in particular really struck a chord with me. It was right after she quit Gawker, a period during which she says,
I lost the will to blog altogether.
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.
If you’ve ever wondered why my once prolific contributions to TurkeyMonkey (ok, biweekly, at the very least) have slowed to a trickle, Gould’s quote pretty much sums up the problem. It isn’t that my life has become exceedingly boring over the last three years, or that I’ve been too busy. The problem, I think, stems mostly from the fact that about two years ago (October 2006, to be exact), blogging became something other than a semi-regular, random vehicle for venting and photo-sharing. In short, it became a job.
It was on that fateful month that I started a blog at work called Suburbarazzi. Co-written by my former colleague Robert Zeliger, it was an ambitious project, a kind of Gawker for suburbs (in case the name itself didn’t already make that clear). In fact, I even pimped out a few of my posts to Gould herself back in the day.
Right from the outset, Suburbarazzi was a hit. Though it never quite reached the indomitable traffic levels of Pete Abraham’s LoHud Yankees blog, it did manage to rise to the No. 2 or 3 blog out of the Journal News for a while. Suburbarazzi landed us a weekly stint on RNN, a local cable news broadcast; won an award; and led to a kind of dubious noteriety throughout the newsroom.
One thing I want to be clear about: I’m very proud of what we accomplished at Suburbarazzi. Even though I know next to nothing about the celebrity beat, we managed to track a staggering number of stars who live in the Lower Hudson Valley (from Richard Gere to DMX to Stephen Baldwin to Rosie O’Donnell). And while I suppose some people might have found our tagline — “Stalking Lower Hudson Valley celebrities … so you don’t have to — repugnant, I found the blog to be an excellent outlet for experimenting with the kind of snark that had little to no place in the magazines I edit. I never experienced the kind of burnout of invasion-of-privacy self-loathing that Gould described.
Now, maybe I feel this way, in part, because I never had Nick Denton breathing down my neck and docking my pay if my posts failed to generate tens of thousands of page view. To be sure, Suburbarazzi never became anything more than a voluntary extra-curricular work activity, something I did when all my writing and editing for InTown was in the can. The newsroom higher-ups were glad I did it, but it was never even close to being part of my job description. Still, it did lead to some unexpected, career-changing side effects. In my efforts to embrace the backend, techincal side of WordPress, I accidentally became my company’s defacto blog manager — a role that, in turn, led me to take on other techie projects (podcasts, mobile, SMS alerts). And believe it or not, it’s now lead me to a full-time web gig working for the six Gannett NJ papers (I begin down in Cherry Hill on August 11).
In other words, blogging is still very much one of my passions. I’m as big an evangelist for WordPress as ever before. Only now, thanks to Suburbarazzi, it’s become one of my career pursuits. My days as a celebrity stalker are numbered, but I expect that once I get the Gannett NJ blogs up and running, I’ll turn my attentions to a new topic — real estate, say, or the gambling industry. Or maybe I’ll just go all meta and write a blog about newspaper blogs.
The sad victem in all this, of course, is TurkeyMonkey. The biological impulse (as Gould put it) to write my personal blog has faded away. I’ll still return here from time to time to post updates and random thought, but it’s been my experience that I just don’t have a mental stamina to keep up more than one blog. As Gould wrote in her essay, she has, at times, had at least three going simultaneously, but I have either not enough brainpower or not enough of the over-sharing instinct to make that happen.
But, dear readers (if there are still any of you out there reading this), I still love you. I just won’t get around to saying it any more than once or twice a month.
