The Trials And Tribulations Of Bloggers

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting look at one facet of blogging that causes a bit of a headache. What does a blogger do when he or she wants to go on vacation? Get guest posters? Go dark? Lose readers?

Yet for the sliver of people whose livelihood depends on the blog — whether they are conservative, liberal or don't care — stepping away from the keyboard can be difficult. Unlike other jobs, where co-workers can fill in for an absent employee, blogs are usually a one-person show. A blogger's personality carries the site. When the host isn't there, readers tend to stray. August is a slow time for all blogs, but having an absent host makes the problem worse. Lose enough readers, and advertisers are sure to join the exodus.

It's something that John Amato, host of the political blog Crooks and Liars, knows all too well. Mr. Amato rarely steps away from his site for any significant amount of time, although he finds updating the page multiple times a day exhausting.

"You become your blog," says Mr. Amato, whose site gets an average of 150,000 hits a day. "It's John Amato. They're used to John Amato."

Some bloggers thrive on the manic pace. Getaways for Jim Romenesko, host of the popular media blog bearing his name, consist of a Friday afternoon drive every month or so from his home in the Chicago suburbs to visit friends in Milwaukee. The 85-mile trip should last around 90 minutes. For Mr. Romenesko, it takes nearly four hours — because he stops at eight different Starbucks on the way to update his site.

The longest Mr. Romenesko has refrained from posting on his site, which gets about 70,000 hits a day, was for one week three years ago on the insistence of site owner, the Poynter Institute. He hasn't taken a vacation in seven years. "The column's called Romenesko," he says. "I just feel it should be Romenesko" who writes it.

While it may seem like a chore to outsiders, many bloggers enjoy the compulsion. Mark Lisanti, who runs the entertainment gossip blog Defamer, is much like Mr. Romenesko in his no-vacation tendencies. Although he gets three weeks off each year from Gawker Media, which owns the site, he rarely takes a day. Not because he can't, he just doesn't want to. "My plan is to die face down on the desk in the middle of a post," Mr. Lisanti jokes.

Jeff Jarvis, author of the political blog BuzzMachine, knows the feeling. He has always posted during his annual vacation to Skytop Lodge in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. When the resort had only an expensive Internet connection, he paid the hefty fee to keep his blog current. His son, Jake, now 14 years old, paid for half of the connection costs so he could keep up his technology blog, Wire Catcher.

I took a vacation very shortly after I started writing Blue Crab Boulevard. Even with the minuscule readership I had at that point, taking that time off hurt my daily hit count and took some time to recover from. So it really is a dilemma, especially if you are writing a one-person blog. Elizabeth Holmes of the WSJ does a nice job on this piece.