Joyce Cohen, the New York Times real-estate columnist behind The Hunt, blogs at HuntGrunt, one of my favorite blogs. I interviewed her about blogging.
SR: Do you like blogging?
JC: No.
SR: Why not?
JC: There’s easy blogging and hard blogging. Easy blogging is like a diary — you want to write about your bad dates or complain about your mother or your boss . . . the kind of thing that otherwise you would do in longhand. Hard blogging feels more obligatory. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive and the payoff isn’t clear. The technology is still not up to snuff. There are space issues: You can’t quite figure out the spacing to make the picture go in the right place. It’s easy to make a typo and not notice it until later. You can endlessly tinker to make it look good. Sometimes, updates are necessary. In some ways, it never ends.
SR: Why do you blog if you don’t like doing it?
JC: I don’t know. I started. It has a momentum of its own. The more gratifying stuff is the stuff that gets linked to by someone else and commented upon. If Curbed or Gothamist or Gawker links to the blog or one of my stories, that’s interesting. Especially because of the feedback. And occasionally there is something that I want to say.
SR: Many bloggers stop.
JC: I think a lot of people try it and find that there are many reasons not to continue. Maybe it’s not as great as they initially thought. Maybe they started it not really knowing. I’m not sure a lot of people start intending to stop.
SR: Yeah, that would be a small number of people.
JC: Unless you blog because of a particular project. Like if you’re blogging during your kitchen renovation or during your Shangri-La diet or for some very specific purpose like that. I don’t know that people start a blog and say, I’m doing this in order to stop doing it. I think people embark on it not knowing what it’s like.