Shorebird of the Week – May 23, 2013

It’s rare that a player spends a full year with Delmarva without being named a Shorebird of the Week, but back in 2010 Matt Hobgood managed that dubious distinction. Quite frankly, his numbers (3-7, 4.40 ERA in 94 innings covering 21 starts) were quite pedestrian and nothing you would expect from a guy picked 5th overall in the 2009 draft out of Norco High School in California. As we saw a couple years later with uber-prospect Dylan Bundy, we were expecting dominating performances and getting nothing of the sort.

The story got even worse in 2011 as Hobgood had some serious setbacks, including a nightmarish 8-game stint at Aberdeen where Matt went 0-6 with a ghastly 10.46 ERA and WHIP of 2.4. Something was definitely wrong, and Hobgood finally went under the knife in April of last year, missing the entire 2012 season due to rotator cuff surgery. In a March Baltimore Sun piece, Hobgood described himself as pitching pain-free for the first time in four years this spring. In essence, 2013 is the first season we’re seeing the “real” Matt Hobgood.

And what a year he’s having with Delmarva! On Tuesday Matt pitched a season-high five innings, shutting down Lakewood on just one hit, striking out seven and lowering his ERA to 1.17 in the process. Granted, Matt was soaking up innings in a one-sided blowout we lost 9-2, but by one report he was touching 98 on the stadium radar gun. In the outing where I took these photos last Thursday Matt blew away the last hitter of the night with 95-96 MPH heat. (That outing was actually one of his worse ones, where he allowed two runs in three innings.) Overall, Matt leads the team with four victories – all in relief – and has allowed just 17 hits and 12 walks in 30 2/3 innings, giving him a WHIP of 0.95 to go with 24 strikeouts.

Obviously the length of Hobgood’s outings is suggesting he may return to a starting role, but for now Matt is in the bullpen pitching long relief. If you consider that, had he gone to college, he would be at an appropriate level for a 22-year-old midlevel prospect (as opposed to a Kevin Gausman) it seems like the school of hard knocks has taught Matt about the lessons of pitching – and of life without baseball – as much as the grind of pitching for a Division I program would have.

Pledge drive

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several weeks, but kept putting off because it’s hard to put into words. But I decided I had better get it in while I still have a few readers left, as readership on a political site generally declines markedly over the summer and that begins with Memorial Day weekend. Pretty much every year I’ve had this site I’ve noticed that trend, although perhaps this summer of scandal may help reverse it a little bit.

Bloggers generally fall into two groups: those who have the wherewithal to make a full-time gig out of it because they can relate their other work to it and those who may not blog every day because they have other outside work which pays the bills. In my case, I straddle both worlds to some extent but economic conditions have forced me to do this with an outside job, so I’m slipping more and more towards the latter. For the most part, this economic reality is why I can only do a post or two a day – fortunately I’m very much a night owl, I can get by with maybe six hours of sleep a night, and many of my posts (including this one) are written well after 10:00 at night.

There are two or three general methods bloggers use to make ends meet, particularly the ones who are trying to make a full-time gig out of it. Most of the bloggers I link to sell advertising on their site, a number which includes me. (More on that in a little bit.)

Another favored method is the tip jar, which can be effective in its own way. Once in awhile I’m pleasantly surprised when mine is rattled and a little bonus shows up in my PayPal account.

The third and final method, but one you don’t often see on political sites, is a sponsored post or one with keywords. I have a couple non-political friends who use this tactic to some extent, but one has a “mommy blog” and the other has multiple websites.

If you look at my “ads” page, which I updated last night to reflect the contents of this post, you’ll notice I have three possible types of advertising. I’ve always been surprised no one has ever taken me up on the banner space I have on my header since it would be so prominent; however, John Robinson has been a steadfast supporter over the last few years with his sidebar ad and I have a couple text link ads as well. I used to have a couple others but their economic situation changed and they couldn’t sponsor me anymore.

Of course, I have the tip jar and, if you read the ads page, the opportunity to sponsor a series of posts such as my Shorebird of the Week post. So in that respect I cover all three bases, and I try to use some social media to build my audience. monoblogue has its own Facebook page I try to update at least once or twice a week. It’s been stuck on 94 followers for too long, though.

With respect to all that, I would say I have probably grown my audience so that, barring a major discovery by a much larger site that refers to my humble little space a lot – such as my Rushalanche 5 1/2 years ago – I am probably at a point where my audience isn’t going to get tremendously larger unless some changes are made in the posting tempo. In short, the direction is up to you, my loyal readers.

As I said up top, I work outside the home, and the reason I do so is that writing alone doesn’t pay the bills. While I have a current very loyal client for my writing and have done paying work for others in the past, I would love to secure a paying position writing political commentary. Unfortunately for me there are probably 200,000 other people who would say the same and maybe 1,000 such positions in the country. That’s not to say there’s no room for new talent, but the odds are against a blogger who has a thousand or so readers a week getting that break. If that blogger got to ten thousand or even fifty thousand readers a week, though, then there’s more of a chance.

Thanks to Jackie Wellfonder, at CPAC I met Pete Ingemi, who does a site called Da Tech Guy on Da Radio. I’ll call it DTG for short.

Now Pete is a very nice guy who would probably give you the shirt off his back. He’s also a struggling blogger, as evidenced by his pitch:

I was a Computer Tech who used to blog at the HiWired blog before we were all laid off and let go. I now support myself with a Radio show on WCRN 830 AM. I buy the time from the station, sell ads and live off the difference. That and DaTipJar is it.

I would be very interested in a position writing either a regular column or blog for your group or media organization.  I would be willing to provide a weekly column for $40 If you are interested in carrying Under the Fedora, let me know.

If you notice on DTG, Pete also has a little thermometer-style widget tracking his weekly progress in making his rent money, with the goal being $300 a week. Obviously he also does his radio show, which I haven’t yet heard but is probably worth a listen just for the thick Bahstan accent. That’s apparently how he makes his living, and it’s a wonder he’s made it to CPAC for so many years.

Just as a comparison, Pete’s site is ranked 176,143 on Alexa and I’m at 368,769. (I have been as low as in the 250,000 range, though.) I would presume his readership is probably about fivefold what mine is, though, since that top 200,000 echelon is hard to crack without probably 500 to 1,000 readers a day. I think in order to get to that level I would probably have to do 3 or 4 posts a day – maybe I could get away with two if they are really meaty. Obviously I would need to work on more of a social media presence as well.

But here’s the rub – if I’m lucky I can get two posts in a day, and generally they are on subjects I can write relatively quickly about. Obviously I write a lot about Maryland politics, which is good but somewhat limiting. I would love to write more in-depth on a number of issues but I simply don’t have the time to do so and function well at my paying job. One thing I pride myself on is having at least some content every day, unlike other sites which may post 5 times a week one week then go for a week without an update. If you thought building an audience with one post a day was tough, try doing it with one a week.

Pete tries for $300 a week from his tip jar, which works out to $15,600 a year. So I got to thinking, gee, if I had 150 readers pledge to donate $100 a year to my cause – that’s less than $2 a week; you’ll pay more than that in new taxes and fees annually if you live in Maryland – I could probably leave my part-time job and write full-time once I got the first 50 to 75 donors in. And if I could write full-time, I could build up my audience because I could develop other aspects and storylines I’ve been wanting to delve into but couldn’t because I’m so worn out from my outside job and its associated travel. Yes, I can live on six hours of sleep a night but that doesn’t mean I’m as focused after doing so for days on end.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be a donation – I also sell ad space and would be happy to work with you if you have a product to sell. Something I noticed last night on Google Analytics – for the first time, Salisbury is not the city with my highest number of visitors. Perhaps I should be scared by this fact, but that distinction now belongs to Washington, D.C. Over the years I have gone away from local news for the most part, which makes sense because there are others who already cover that ground. Obviously I keep my hand in this area for certain events and subjects, but that’s not my main focus anymore.

Quite honestly, there are but two likely outcomes. If nothing comes from this, well, I can muddle on for the time being but there may come a day when I have to make the choice of cutting back on this enterprise because it’s not paying the bills. If you think of the time I’ve spent here which could be doing other things, it’s quite an expensive hobby.

On the other hand, I could get enough people to take me up on my offer to pave the way for success: more readers and advertisers here, more writing and media opportunities elsewhere, a much broader success for my second book (and perhaps a renewed interest in the first.) I don’t mind sending out autographed copies for the right price.

Once I compared my site to another by saying mine was like National Review and his was like National Enquirer. The readership comparison at the time was similar, too. But I pressed on, confident that what I wrote enabled me to sleep at night because it was written with integrity and to high standards.

But one thing I have said over the years is that if an area doesn’t grow, it dies. The same is true with blogging – either I slowly fade into obscurity or I catch a second wind and thrive. It’s happened before with the Rushalance and perhaps it can happen again if 150 people (or more, they are always welcome) care enough to chip in.

So who wants to be first?