The downside of independent Web publishing
Time is the biggest obstacle for independent publishers because it attacks from two fronts. The first battle is waged with the daily grind. If you make ends meet with a real job, it's often hard to carve out hours for site updates. This problem is exacerbated if your day job requires a lot of concentration and energy. Many times, the prospect of coming home and sitting in front of a computer can be as daunting as a cold Monday morning.
The second battle is more subversive, appearing after the novelty of publishing subsides. It's at this point you'll see that independent publications are often time vacuums.
Norman Betito Weiss, publisher of the TV news site TVTattle.com, becomes a slave to his site every September. "The site is manageable almost year-round except when there are seemingly 5 million TV things going on," Weiss says.
J.D. Lasica, a freelance journalist who's been published in "Salon" and "The Industry Standard," encounters time obstacles year-round with his Weblog New Media Musings. "There's not enough time to blog in depth with my other projects going on," Lasica says.
Christopher Elliott, a travel writer who also runs Elliott.org, sums it up best: "It's like taking care of an infant."
Con: Content
With millions of sites offering information from every discipline and subject, the prospect of running out of content seems remote, but from time to time the well dries up.
Rebecca Blood, publisher of the Weblog Rebecca's Pocket, cites an occasional dearth of interesting links as her only major problem. Blood, who's been publishing since 1999, says "that's just the consequence of doing a Weblog over a long period of time."
Con: Money
Web publishers looking to supplement their incomes, or replace them altogether, are in for a rough time. Most sites don't make any money at all, and the ones that do are lucky if they can cover the $300-$500 yearly server expenses.
Even popular sites don't rake it in. Josh Griffin, editor of the large "Star Wars" news site TheForce.net, is a volunteer at his own publication. He receives no pay check and says the revenue the site brings in goes toward monthly upkeep costs.
Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com, a site that gathers and publishes odd Web links submitted by readers, says that popularity doesn't breed profitability. "We get more hits than the Chicago Sun-Times and just a bit less than Salon.com, yet we struggle every month for revenue," Curtis says.
Con: Staff communication
Many sites are one-person operations, so responsibility for the site begins and ends in the same spot. Sites with multi-person staffs, however, delegate responsibility, and in doing so, bring a need for good communication into the picture.
Flak Magazine is run by a team of volunteer editors. James Norton, founder and editor-in-chief, says Flak's set-up allows for more content to be produced in a shorter timeframe, but problems arise when staff members in different locales need to collaborate.
"What might take two or three days to resolve via bouncing e-mails could generally be solved by having people sit down at a table for two minutes in real life," Norton says. "The fact that our people are in Chicago, Madison, San Francisco, New York, D.C., Boston and Prague really is tough because it cuts down the quality and amount of conversation. For serious discussion you need 30 or 40 long e-mails going back and forth. That's a drag."
