Steven D. Krause

This is pretty much a local (as in Michigan and in the Michigan blogosphere) story, but I thought it’d be worthwhile to post here, especially for anyone coming across the site from outside Michigan: “Senate Republicans block access to left-leaning web site.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

LANSING, Mich. — Lawmakers and staffers using the state Senate’s Internet server no longer can visit or post to a left-leaning political Web site, prompting backlash from bloggers and others who say it is blatant censorship and a violation of free speech rights.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop’s chief of staff, Matt Miner, late last week asked the secretary of the Senate to block access to http://www.bloggingformichigan.com.

Bishop spokesman Matt Marsden said Monday that the decision was made because using “state time and taxpayer money to surf sites not applicable to the jobs staff were hired to execute is not an acceptable use of state time or funds.”

Senate Republicans, however, did not block other political Web sites such as http://www.michiganliberal.com and a conservative-leaning blog, http://www.rightmichigan.com. The block came after Republicans apparently saw stories posted to the site they did not like. Marsden said Bishop’s office also is reviewing other sites that could be “overtly political in nature.”

The move and potential for blockage of other sites drew charges of censorship from Democrats, who said blogs are a legitimate method of communicating directly with the public.

“It’s a very arbitrary, unfortunate and rash decision made by the Senate Republican leader’s office,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Schauer, D-Battle Creek, who called for Bishop to change his mind.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of talk about all this at Blogging For Michigan.

Frankly, I don’t follow political blogs that closely, and I certainly don’t follow blogs about state of Michigan politics. So all I can guess is that this particular blog has had enough readers to significantly piss off Bishop’s staff manager. It does seems to me to be one more example as to the power of blogs, but I guess that’s something that is a lot more easily assumed nowadays than it was a couple years ago.

Via TechCrunch comes this discussion, which is itself discussing an Wall Street Journal piece, “Is Blogging Ready for a Unionized Workforce?” I think the short answer is “no.”

As someone who is in a profession that is mostly not under the umbrella but who is actually in a faculty union, I have profoundly mixed feelings about unions in general and mine in particular. I don’t want to rehash all of that now, but I guess I’ll say two things, both of which I think applies to the idea of unionized bloggers. First, while I think the union for the faculty has done a good job at doing things like providing guidelines on procedures (e.g., how tenure and promotion works, a mechanism to complain about things, etc.), it doesn’t exactly reward individual achievement. Want to see smoke come out of a hard-core union person’s head? Talk about merit pay. And ultimately, I think one of the main reasons to write in blogs is individual achievement.

Second, I don’t exactly feel like I’m in a field that needs the protection of a union to prevent exploitation. I suppose this is all relative since lots of very well-paid workers have unions: airline pilots, professional athletes, etc. But when I think of people who most need unions, I think of occupations like factory workers, coal miners, truck drivers, and other performers of unpleasant work. The same is true with bloggers.

On the TechCrunch site, there’s some interesting points and discussion here, but I think the last paragraph sums up my feelings on this when it comes to the exploitation of bloggers:

As long as the supply of labor that will accept low rates exists, no amount of organization will create a marketplace that provides pay rates that are equal to that of comparable fields such as journalism. Exploitation only exists where those being paid do so because they have no alternative; bloggers have many alternatives, although most do not involve blogging itself. A fair wage is a noble cause, but one that will always be undercut as long as there are more potential writers than positions available.

And again, it raises some questions about why people blog in the first place– at least in terms of my assumptions about why people blog. In BAWS, I intend to primarily examine blog writers who are not doing it for the money; on the other hand, I suppose if one actually makes something that resembles a living, I suppose that too is a factor in considering the reasons to write, the audience one writes to, when one writes, etc.