Should Kossacks form a union?

Came across this interesting piece at Columbia Journalism Review that says bloggers should form a union and that people who contribute to sites like this one should be paid.

He is basically saying that Markos is raking it in and not sharing it with us lowly farmhands.

(Profits add up quickly: A single, week-long, premium-slot ad run on Daily Kos, according to Blogads, sells for $9,000.) As top-tier blogs, in particular, become increasingly profitable, it will be fair to ask just how much of their proceeds are going to the writers who, ultimately, make it all possible.

At those rates, DKos will no doubt be passing ExxonMobil in quarterly profits.

Yep. It seems that Markos has us all under his thumb.

They’re not being hired, nor are they freelancing in the traditional sense. They’re political activists or college students or professors or celebrities, or simply opinionated and informed citizens. In many cases, they have day jobs (or are retired) and blog for “fun” or out of devotion to a cause. They don’t expect to be paid well, if at all—or they don’t know that they should expect it.

These types of bloggers comprise a significant part of the core content base of economically significant sites like Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and ScienceBlogs (where I maintain a regular blog). And current standards for their compensation are hardly uniform. The Huffington Post, for instance, recently came under fire when cofounder Ken Lerer told USA Today that the site’s “financial model” did not involve ever paying bloggers. There’s a similar lack of compensation for writing “diaries” at Daily Kos. ScienceBlogs, by contrast, pays bloggers invited to join the network based on their traffic.

If we are going to organize we will need some good slogans.

Kossacks of the world unite?

And we'll need a song.

And a pension fund too.

I joke, but the writer, Chris Mooney, is serious.

I imagine it something like this: the most successful writers take the initiative to organize, because they’re the ones who will actually be listened to by employers. Then, they’ll set up a structure that separates the workhorse bloggers (those who make large collective sites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post possible) from the pure “hobbyists.” Whatever these distinctions may be, they should have nothing to do with whether or not the blogger in question has another salary from another job. (Not all writers in the guild work full-time on TV and screen writing, but all are equally protected.)

Of course, if we try to organize, Markos might send some goons to break our kneecaps. Or he might move his servers to a right-to-work state (right-to-blog state?).

So I guess we're screwed. Oh well, back to the salt mine.