The Wall Street Journal wouldn’t lie, right? So when it announced that blogging is America’s newest profession, I polished my black shoes so I would look very professional when I went through my mail for the day, plucking out the fact juicy checks that a professional like me should be getting.  I am, if nothing else, a blogger.

The barriers to entry couldn’t be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.

Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.

As far as the $75,000, the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it’s not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money — but the point is, the huge potential is there.

Now I’m not saying that $75k is something to sneeze at, but that’s not enough to get me a Porsche so I can drive around like a middle-aged proctologist.  So if I want to be a player, it looks like I need to be in that one percent who snag the big bucks. 

They work long hours?  Again, I’m not quite impressed.  Working 50 to 60 hours might seem like a great burden to some, but most lawyers consider that half time.  We work as long as we need to work, and then we work a little more to make sure our work is done right. 

So what is it that distinguishes this mega-bloggers from the lesser bloggers?  Advertising, according to the Journal.  That’s where the big bucks are, getting enough desirable readers and then getting you readers to do something, like click on an ad, would turn me from one of the unwashed mass of bloggers into a font of vast blogging wealth. 

Yet even the biggest boys in the blawgosphere are less than sanguine at the prospect of raking in the dough.  Orin Kerr at Volokh says:

The Volokh Conspiracy is a pretty popular blog, but we tend to earn less than minimum wage for our time blogging here.

If VC can’t keep Eugene in champagne, then what chance do I have?  Plus, with almost half a million claiming to earn their full time income from blogging, it seems like the profession is getting pretty crowded already.  I guess I’ll stick to lawyering.  My kids still like to eat, and I never really wanted to look like a middle-aged proctologist anyway.