If the idea of sifting the news 20 hours a day for blog material gives you the willies, don’t panic: get a partner. One of the most popular blog formats (or rather, the format of many popular blogs) is the multi-contributor blog. I mentioned the Volokh Conspiracy earlier; it’s written by several legal experts who contribute in their areas of expertise to the blog’s main theme. National Review’s “Corner” follows a similar format: NR’s columnists answer reader mail and contribute quips and opinions, making the page a lively read. Creating a multi-contributor blog means that you’ll be sharing your Blog Empire with co-regents, and as history illustrates, this has challenges of its own. But if you share a love of your subject with other experts, you’ll be doing your readers a favor by sharing divergent opinions with them.
A second possibility is to join a site that has multiple blogs on it, drawing traffic that may come to read others and stay to read you. A number of newspapers like the Lawrence Journal World feature a stable of bloggers on their site and may even feature some of their bloggers in print or on their paper’s front page online. For the blogger who wants to build an audience quickly, this may be an option. Be aware, however, that writing 15
under someone else’s banner means you will be giving up significant creative control: it may be a good starting place for you to build a name, but you’ll soon want to strike out on your own.
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