The Ed Wood of Op-Eds

Mark Penn is a pollster with no concept on how to read a poll. Penn wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed on how blogging is a new job market. Speaking has someone who has been offered a blogging gig, I can say no it isn't. Penn writes 1.7 million bloggers profit from their work. Penn sites a web page for Blogworld Expo. The Blogworld Expo page say there are 12 million bloggers in America. There is no way to check the accuracy of this information.

The 12 million bloggers number conflicts with Penn's statement that there are 20 million bloggers in America. Penn cites Emarketer which says "there were some 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007." A few problems here. Penn is not citing scientific polling data. He is using numbers from marketing companies. Another problem is the numbers are old and can not be fact-checked. What was the methodology used to find out paid and recreational bloggers? What was the size of the sample surveyed? Penn's methodology was to pull pages from Google. Companies marketing aren't interested in providing scientific research. Emarketer is interested in selling their so-called research for $695.00.

There is trouble paragraph in Penn's article.

Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

I don't doubt that most bloggers are white males. The numbers come from Emarketer. There is no way to check the findings. I'm not sure what Penn means by "reports blogging." If Penn is implying 1 out of 3 young people blogs then he didn't read the Pewinternet study. Below is the numbers for teens, generation Y and X.

Create a blog

Online teens - 28 percent

Gen Y - 20 percent

Gen X - 10 percent

I know bloggers that get 100,000 hits a month and they work day jobs. The bloggers that get paid to blog (Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan) receive over a hundred thousand unique visitor a day.

There is no excuse for a polster to be this sloppy with data. The conflicting and questionable data proves Penn did not heavily research the subject. Penn phoned in an article and the Wall Street Journal didn't bother to fact-check. This id the Ed Wood of op-eds.