In response to a question after my Saturday afternoon presentation at Podcamp Hawaii, I admitted that I don’t make any money off this site. Well, enough to pay for the few dollars a month I pay to a hosting service, but no “real” money. Someone followed up by asking whether I would like to be paid for blogging.

What a question! Of course I would like to get paid for blogging, but…nothing is that simple. Making money hasn’t been the goal of my life, although as I get older there’s a twinge of worry that perhaps I should have paid more attention to it. Money isn’t my motive for blogging, and that’s lucky because I obviously haven’t figured out how to appropriately combine the complex personal and political reasons for blogging with the need to generate some income.

I can, in part, blame the ethos of the 1960s, this feeling that focusing on income is sullying, or at least suspect. Those times had their own theme. Do what you love, contribute to the greater good, and let the money take care of itself. Don’t sell out, and don’t buy in. It’s an approach to the world that worked for much of my life, most spent in the nonprofit or public sectors, but has broken down in recent years.

It’s likely that my father’s attitudes also rubbed off on my as well. As soon as he arrived in Hawaii in 1939, he devoted lots of his time and energy to surfing. He is credited with creating the Waikiki Surf Club, which democratized the sport of surfing by providing a people’s alternative to the Outrigger Canoe Club. He and other Waikiki Surf Club leaders saw the opportunity, and organized and sponsored the Makaha Surfing Championships, the first major international surfing competition.

All this effort was aimed a amateur surfing, done for the love of the sport and not for money. The dynamics of the sport changed with the arrival of television contracts and the money (and resulting conflicts) they brought, and organized surfing transitioned from an amateur to largely a professional sport, from personal to corporate. Once that transition was in full swing, I think he had trouble fitting in and dropped back from the front lines of the new world of sport, and I can certainly understand the way he felt about that change.

When I was working in the nonprofit world, fundraising was for the cause, for the organization, and not for myself. Later, at the Star-Bulletin, that wall between editorial and business functions of the newspaper still buffered me from the nitty gritty of turning journalism into sales.

So: “Would you like to get paid for blogging?”

Simple answer, probably. All offers will be gratefully considered, although I doubt that I should hold me breath. And if there’s an interesting job out there for someone who isn’t worried first and foremost about how much it pays, don’t hesitate to let me know.