How I Turned My Niche Fixation Into Paid, Full-Time Blogging
By: Steve Levine
Tags: Blogging, Creativity, Writing, Writing Tips, Blogging Tips

Writing

How I Turned My Niche Fixation Into Paid, Full-Time Blogging

When my print job vanished, I leaned on my expertise and paved my own way forward

Illustration: Lulu Jiang, originally published in Human Parts

In 2010, Bloomberg swallowed BusinessWeek, and I was among those who lost their job. The time of troubles for traditional journalism was already well along, and I buckled down for the search for something new. But the next morning, without any real forethought, I also immediately started writing. The subject was a niche obsession of mine — oil and geopolitics — about which I could and did geek out all day. And the vehicle? An all but moribund personal blog I had launched a couple of years before, and that I now resuscitated.

Three months later, the blog was absorbed by Foreign Policy magazine. Two years after that, I was the first editorial employee hired by Quartz, a serendipitous transition from the print to the digital world.

One of my editors has asked for any hard lessons from the experience. The story follows.

I had started the blog — The Oil and the Glory — a couple of years earlier. It was part of the promotion for a book I had written on the contest between the U.S. and Russia to control the oil underneath the Caspian Sea, where I had been previously based as a reporter. I hired someone to create the website (they used Blogger.com). And, since I didn’t know anything about blogging, I hired someone else to teach me. The lessons were basic: Start out by commenting underneath relevant posts by already-established writers. Rely on your expertise. Use your conversational voice. Get your signature around. Practice what he called “netiquette” — give credit where credit is due; don’t boast; keep your stuff succinct.

Then I just started writing.

The early version of the blog wasn’t very good: The design was cool, and all the components were there — blogroll, personal bio, clean font. But I was almost entirely reactive. I was posting links from the news and offering up a point of view, but adding only marginally to what was out there. Once the promotion was over, I gradually moved on.

A different mental dynamic clicked, however, the morning after the layoff. A ton simply seemed to be going on in my old haunt — Central Asia, Russia, and the Caucasus. And, without any plan, I started blogging again.

This time, I relied on reporting technique — I called my usual sources and read my usual material. I also knew a lot — I had lived and worked on the Caspian for 11 years, and had recently buttressed that with the book research. So the posts I now produced often broke news — either conceptually (how to think about a news development in Russia or wherever) or with the actual facts. And when that happened, I started to receive tips from diplomats, humanitarian workers, and business people based out there and in the U.S. Which produced more news.

I poured all of that into posts every weekday. Frequency and reliability were important — I learned that readers needed to know stuff would definitely arrive and more or less at the same time. I didn’t overthink the subject matter — I covered what was obsessing me at the moment, and with the detail and contemplation that I myself found appealing. I figured if I was fixated on something, that was a good proxy for others obsessed with the same themes. That turned out to be right. I was copy-pasting the resulting blog posts into emails to a small list of people I thought they would interest. It turned out they often did — intensely so. The list grew to include many more people in energy, diplomacy, humanitarian affairs, and academia.

For writing style and voice in The Oil and the Glory 2.0, I went back to traditional journalism, adding snark and, in the photos and headlines, aspirational humor — I wanted readers to see that following oil and former Soviet events was actually fun.

I searched for public photos on Flickr, and — observing netiquette — was careful to credit and link to the photographers.

What I did not do was bloviate — there was already plenty of hot air out there. Extreme opinionating also reeks of ignorance — if you don’t know something, mask over it with an accusation.

After three months, the editor of Foreign Policy asked me to lunch. I presumed she wanted some freelance ideas. Instead, she complimented the blog and proposed absorbing it onto her website. That was shocking enough, but there was more: a small salary and a title — contributing editor. I was to keep doing what I was doing — writing with authority about energy and geopolitics — but expand to the whole world. How cool was that?

The Foreign Policy imprint gave the blog a new and larger audience. I doubled down on traditional reporting techniques — calling and quoting authoritative sources, seeking to be fair but also not pulling punches. I expanded the energy beat to include a new obsession — the geopolitics of batteries, that is, how a possible shift to electric propulsion would affect who was powerful and who wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be coverage of this prospect. Now there was. That led to a new book contract and, in 2012, a new job when The Atlantic decided to launch Quartz as a business news publication.

I started out with the advantage of heavy print experience. But when it came to the arrival of the new technology — digitalization — I wasn’t flippant and made sure that I got professional training in this unfamiliar thing, even though my wife hated spending the money on it. Network effects are important — priming the pump with an initial audience — and I gave myself a lift by unilaterally adding friends, family, colleagues, and sources to my first mailing list. Some politely asked to be dropped, but most didn’t.

Finally, I stuck with the rules and ethics of the newspaper industry. All that, and a niche subject that I knew well, ended up setting me apart.