Great post Jessica! I agree payment of bloggers will be a benchmark in legitimising the form.

I am often asked why the EWF doesn’t blog, given that I am such a big advocate of the form. It’s because we don’t have the resources – I don’t have the time and we don’t have the money to pay writers. For us, that is paramount, as our writers get paid equally across the organisation whether they are appearing in a twitter event or on a panel; same rules apply to the blog. Plus at this point in time I don’t think the festival needs to blog… we will start blogging when and if there is both funding and a strong imperative to do so, not simply because it is seen as one of the things an organisation must do these days. I think a poor blog/twitter feed/whatever is a worse advertisement for an organisation than none at all.

Many lit journals/arts orgs are getting people on board to blog for them and not offering payment, and as you say the issue has been thrashed out many times before. So often it’s advertised as ‘exposure’ or ‘experience’ but unless the unpaid writers are working on big blogs and being supervised/mentored by someone actually experienced in blogging or writing for an online medium, then what are they really getting out of it? With a bit of creativity and hard work they could be making a name for themselves on their own blog, as many of our bright young bloggers are currently doing!

Of course there are exceptions. For example, the SPUNC blog is a bit of a different beast as it’s a member-based organisation and so the more members who blog and build the profile of Splog presumably the more benefits and exposure they will receive.

Yes, I think this raises some interesting questions. Blogs are incredibly time-consuming, and the time they consume only grows as they grow — especially since one tends initially not to factor in the effort that participating in debates and discussions actually requires. Furthermore, there’s also a real challenge in integrating blogs and other online interventions into the project of the journal, so that you don’t end up running a whole series of entirely parallel ventures. Sigh. Sometimes it all seems quite difficult.

Yes, I always forget the effort that goes into hosting and taking part in an online debate. You can lose a day or two on a contentious post (I’m thinking of mine on Deveny here) and the other work just mounts up.

i don’t think any established lit journal or brand-new (‘freshie’ in local slang [fresh from the womb]) journal can thrive without having an online presence. Yes, they may survive, but having a parallel and complementary web presence can now be marked down as a necessity. But this is great, i reckon: a) the journal/editor/volunteers have so many choices as to how to ‘go online’ – from straight-up blogging to podcasting or twittering, tumblring or things even more new; and b) the benefits of an online presence are manifold, both for the journal and its readers. And ultimately, the best lit journals around are punching hours every day for their readers (and their contributors), and anything that enhances the experiences for these two major stakeholders is king.

Jess, I also found your last paragraph to be spot on. While we can whinge about funding processes until dawn and dusk again, this is a major problem at the moment: funding bodies knowing that they should be aiming for ‘experimentation/innovationn’ but then also wanting to be able to see and log how their money is spent. It doesn’t seem to be enough at the moment to point at a blog and say, ‘this is what we want to fund’, whereas funding bodies will still throw money at producing paper-and-ink products.

I have been told there is interest within the funding body that matters regarding digital content, though how that works for existing publications I’m not sure. You need to make yourselves heard up there, I think. And speaking of being heard, there’s also a blog at the new journal Kill Your Darlings.

Can I also add that the Granta model is interesting, and I particularly like it – not a blog as such, just a ‘web-only’ set of feature articles every month or so (I think McSweeney’s does this too? not sure.) They are putting some great stuff up, of similar quality to the mag, so I imagine it’s paid for.

Great post, Jess. I agree that the payment of bloggers is a sticky issue. On the one hand, most people in the industry are very aware of the reasons why payment is often impossible, and the level of volunteer-ism in the ‘zine and journal world (at least as far as I, an outsider, can tell) seems to indicate that those reasons won’t go away any time soon. But as Lisa says, the unpaid work can result in a lot of different splinter blogs. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—more power to those who want to create a new voice—but it has the effect of fragmenting a community.

On the topic of community, I thought perhaps the new site that was launched a while ago—http://www.litmags.com.au—was going to be used as a way of bringing all the voices of different magazines together, perhaps in a communal forum (literally—get a bulletin board system up and running there) in order to foster some kind of community, but instead it’s a static page. How great instead to have had the respective editors, interns, whoever popping in and out and developing a rapport with the journal-reading public? I know the time issue comes into this, but it’s something to think about.

One point that I don’t think has been touched on here is how there are now kids that will be growing up with a Kindle or an iPad in their hands. They will be emerging into a world where digital information is the norm, and bookshops are (don’t tell Mum) a little bit weird.

In order to keep up with that, and make themselves available to the youth of tomorrow, establishing an online presence today is absolutely vital for literary journals, whose existence depends at least in part on engaging young people as subscribers and, possibly, the next generation of contributors. Having said that, I think that there still needs to be a real, physical end product—an ‘object of desire’—to anchor the publication. A name in print, bound in pages you can turn and feel, holds a lot more weight than anything digital.

Thanks again Jess, and I look forward to seeing what other people think.

On funding, I do want to stress that there is alot of enthusiasm from funding bodies for journals being ‘ digitial’ as in supporting infrastructure (websites etc) and an ongoing digital strategy. Where it gets tricky is in terms of finding money for the extra staffing hours, and for paying contributors for content on the blog. This raises another – fair – issue. Should we commit to editing the material that goes on the blog, as we do material that goes into the print journal. To some degree, i know, Jess does this already for Spike – but still it’s a bit of a minefield when it comes to work load. And do people expect it, or is a slightly different approach to blog material acceptable?

@sophie: Re: editing material for a blog, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has an interesting way of going about this, at least for some of its online content. It has segments that presuppose a particular style of writing, such as ‘Short imagined monologues’ and ‘Open letters to people or entities that are unlikely to respond’. By offering relatively narrow, but incredibly fun and often clever, limits such as these you could cut down on editing time.

Thanks for this feedback all. And yes, Lisa – the pressure is certainly on festivals as well. I also agree that the worst thing you can do is blog because you feel you ‘have to’ – a sure way to backfire.

I suppose what I wanted to point out was that while blogging is great, it comes with certain pressures too (which sometimes gets lost in all these optimistic narratives). The talk of ‘a casual form’ is sometimes deceptive too when it comes to time/labour/editorial feedback. Literary blogging is, I think, still in its formative stages, and we need to think on which direction we push it in – is digital expansion adding yet more pressure onto smaller literary projects, and if so does this threaten the diversity of the lit scene in future?

Excellent post, Jess, and thanks for the mention.

Blogs are undoubtedly time-consuming. I started working for SPUNC as a volunteer, but the task of writing and curating SPLOG proved large enough to warrant a paid position soon after.

I think blogs are uniquely rewarding: in the comment they generate (Sophie’s Deveny post is an excellent example) and in the sharing of knowledge/ resources between publishers, readers and the greater community. This alone suggests (to me at least) a great reason to increase funding in this area.

Commissioning, writing and editing the SPUNC blog takes up much of my time but we think it really enhances our members' visibility and generates important discussion within the sector.

As Lisa said, it’s in our member’s interests to utilise such a forum. Strangely some have been slow to come to the party, despite having websites and wanting more exposure. That in itself could be the subject of an entirely different (but related?) blog post…

This is a great post, and it’s honest, which I appreciate, since I am a blogger myself. The truth is I would love to blog more for Overland, and I have so many ideas for articles, but it’s just so time-consuming, and trying to fit it into mothering, school, job, my novel writing, poetry, short stories – it’s just not practical. If it was part of my income then it would reduce my burden. If funding bodies want journals to go digital they have to support the journal doing that by paying bloggers. Only then will we see what journals are truly capable of in the online space. Otherwise literary journals will remain in the limbo-land they find themselves in today.

So, tell them you want the money, Sophie – if you don’t put a value on it, neither will the Australia Council.

Don’t have anything real to add to this, but just wanted to say I like it when a website (blog or otherwise) tries to engage with all that’s out on the web, by providing links to diverse – and transnational (isn’t that the beauty of the web?) – articles and media, acting as a content filter for its readers. The internet can be a daunting place to browse otherwise. Brings to mind something a friend said – “I never got the hang of surfing the internet: I visit the same 5 sites again and again”.

Also appreciate how much (unpaid) time these activities take – so thanks!

I have asked for funding bodies for money for that purpose, Genevieve.

that is super, and all power to you.