Blogging As A Job?
[Via Slashdot] The Wall Street Journal’s online edition is carrying a story about some companies hiring staff as full time bloggers.
..Last year, Christine Halvorson was hired as chief blogger at Stonyfield Farm Inc., a Londonderry, N.H., organic yogurt company owned by Groupe Danone. She applied for the job after responding to an ad posted at Monster.com. A former freelance writer and Web content editor, Ms. Halvorson now writes four blogs for Stonyfield, including a blog about the company, the Daily Scoop, and Creating Healthy Kids, about healthy foods in schools. Her job entails researching, linking to news and providing personal insight.
Now I’m thinking how does one,
[a] constantly remain creative to maintain not one, but four blogs, writing new content on an almost daily basis?
[b] make sure they aren’t revelaing too much about the inner working of the company they work for?
[c] make sure that how they express does not cost them their job? A quick search on Google revealed links to news stories about several incidents of companies having fired employees over what they wrote in their blogs. Some examples,
- Ellen Simonetti, former flight attendant for Delta Air Lines, fired for posing in her uniform in her blog
- Joyce Park, former web developer for Friendster, fired for making three posts about Friendster on her blog (that too based on publicly available information)
- Mark Jen, fired from Google for making comments on his blog about life on the job at Google, just 11 days after joining,
- Michael Hanscom, a former contractor for Microsoft, fired for taking some pictures of Apple G5 computers being unloaded onto the Microsoft’s Redmond campus and posting them in his blog.
Quoting another section of the same WSJ article,
..Blogging jobs pay anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 and frequently require writing copy for corporate Web sites and ability to promote on the Internet.
sounds like some decent amount of money for something that not quite my kind of thing. Am not sure if blogging on a regular basis is the thing for you. But there seem to be quite a few vacancies for bloggers, out there.
Anyways, moral of the story: Blog at your own risk
Sidenote: Oh and by the way, interested in blogging about how much you love popcorn? Then there’s a job waiting for you at Dale & Thomas Popcorn!