Living a Double Life

Me surfing for News/Courtesy: my mac

So, I guess you can say that I really have two jobs. The moderate paying one and the low paying one. By day I work in TV. I'm the Weekend Assignment Editor and planner and Weekday Associate producer at a Cincinnati TV station.. I've worked in TV, at 6 different stations in different cities, for what's been my entire professional life.

But, in my free time, most of you probably already know this, I'm a Sports Blogger. Not just me, but some of my friends too. Those who follow us are probably familiar with our blog. OnlineSportsGuys.com. If you aren't you should check us out.

Working full-time is great. It's what most professionals aspire to do. Work for a big company, do your job, don't make any waves and get a paycheck. It's the American Dream...right?

Sure, I know plenty of people who are full-time freelancers and can control their hours and work for themselves, but it's a tough life. You have to make yourself available most of the time and if you say no to a client, that client may never come back to you.

Me, I was always scared of that life. I'm not a sales person and don't feel like I'm very good at selling myself to others...you know, cold calling for clients. But the thought of not being tied to an office and working for someone else also had its appeal.

What I am...or at least I consider myself...is a creative type. I like to tell stories. Granted, I prefer to write them or tell them with visuals, but when push comes to shove, I'm a storyteller.

The blog and production company

What I really would "Like" to do, is what my second job is. The Sports blog.

We've been doing the blog for a couple of years now. We've actually had some success. 200,000-plus unique visitors in 2009 and we are trending about 25% higher than that this year. But we don't make much money from it. Yeah, it pays for itself. And we are making a little bit off of it this year. But not much, probably around $350 for the year total.

I wish we could make more. I really enjoy it. It's fun trying to find stories and beat the big boys. I did that today. Thanks to one of my Facebook friends, I posted a story on a Florida receiver getting arrested. I had it 90 minutes ahead of ESPN.

But, alas. It isn't a precise science. We don't have the resources to staff events. We can't really go cover a beat. Really, all we do is find stories, link to them and discuss them. That's all we can do. We all have real jobs. That's all we have time to do.

The fun, is we don't have to be like traditional media. I can offer my thoughts or opinion on a story and its okay. I can use my insight and 22 years in TV news and sports to give perspective. It's ok to do that.

We have big aspirations. My friends and I have a production company. Not only do we have the blog, we authored a book. Not everyone can say that. We are trying to get production work and have a lot of ideas on how to do it.

But in the meantime, I spend my 40+ hours every week working. I can't really post from there which is tough. I usually take the morning duty. On my off days, my free time is spent looking at websites and papers from all over trying to find something.  On work days, it's usually an hour or so, just trying to throw something up there and hope people find us.

I guess maybe it's a dream. Or maybe it's a goal. But to me, it would be pure fun to be a full-time writer, writing about something you enjoy finding stories and talking about them. No, it's not the traditional find a story, get it confirmed and report it facts only thing that the traditional media do. But that is okay. We are reporting about what they are doing. We are offering the insight, thought and opinion they aren't able to.

Either way, it's fun. I wish I had more time to do it like some of the big-time blogs. Heck, one of them, the Big Lead was just sold recently for $7 million. You know, if something like that would ever come up, I think we'd be ok with that.

Enjoy this song, I thought it somewhat fitting...Thanks YouTube: