Across the pond

That New York Times article on the possibility of death by blogging also pointed out that the effects on your wealth can be just as bad as the effects on your health. They instanced cases of bloggers being paid as little as $10 a post and young people slaving away day and night for blogging companies and taking home $1,000 a month.

But Jeff Javis of City University (New York, no relation of City University, London) reckons his blog, Buzzmachine.com, is putting millions of dollars into his bank account.  The ad income from the blog, which he has been running since 2003, amounts to a total of $13,855, which his healthy profit considering the blog cost in hosting is only $327 a year. But hardly enough to live on. Nevertheless he decided to take the plunge and give up his well-paid day job as President of an online division of Conde Nast. And now he is back on a six figure income and and expects to have several million dollars in his bank account in five years time.

According to Jarvis the blog got him his job at the City University of New York and a contract to write a regular column for The Guardian, both of which pay real money, but not up to the level of a Conde Nast President. But it also led to companies paying him to come in and teach their executives how to blog. Then came a book contract which emerged from an idea that began in his blog which doubled his consulting income.

Jarvis wrote it should take only about two minutes to teach how to blog. That statement reminded me of Jeremy Paxman telling the City University, London that it only takes three weeks to learn the essentials of journalism. Both Jarvis and Paxman were speaking truth. But it does not follow that journalism students are wasting their time spending a year in a university or that that the executives Jarvis teaches are wasting the hours he spends with them.

Because in journalism, an understanding of the subjects you are mostly writing about and contacts with other people working in the subject area, can get you up the tree rapidly, even if your writing, spelling, etc is not that brilliant. And that line of thinking reminded me of John Gardiner, who was one of the best journalists on the Financial Times, and went on to become the chairman and chief executive of Tesco, until he retired two or three years ago. Probably even richer than Jarvis hopes to become.

I met Gardiner in the 1960s, by which time business journalism was becoming increasing dominated by the university educated and particularly the Oxbridge lot. I remember Gardiner because he had started as an accountant, during which period he had learned skills and acquired contacts which his colleagues fresh from the ivory towers did not have.

He was one half of the Lex column when I first met him. Thanks to his reputation at the Financial Times he was offered an executive job in the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, which was the Wilson government’s vehicle for restructuring ailing large companies in the British economy without full-scale-Attlee type nationalisation.

While doing that job Gardiner was offered the top job at one of the companies the IRC was trying to resurrect, the old Cammel Laird ship-building company. He took it, whereas most of the business school graduates would not have touched it with a barge pole, since they had learnt that Britain no longer any hope of ever becoming a great shipbuilder even again; the future had already been staked out by the Norwegians and the Japanese.

Nevertheless, he made a success of the job. Which led to him getting the top job at Tesco, a company which could not have more different.

All of this led me to start cogitating on what is learnt in the university of life, as contrasted with what is learnt in universities and the even more unanswerable question of why some people managed to learn in the university of life, while others get crushed.

But fear not I am not going to continue these ramblings. Because beneath Jarvis’s post was anther on how Web Two is changing journalism. That is a subject he really knows about and it has led him to draw maps to illustrate his arguments.

My next blog will be about that. Complete with my own map, maybe.