Last question today and then I’ll have to wrap up this Q&A series, folks. Thank you all for sending your questions in, and feel free to continue sending more to askmridu@gmail.com. Once they’ve piled up, I’ll do another week or two of Q&A, but it’s time now to return to regularly scheduled programming.

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Congrats on your new blog! If you don’t mind, I’d love to know why you decided to go with True/Slant rather than start your own since you seem to have a large following. Is it a paying gig?

Great questions, and nope, I don’t mind answering. Yes, it’s a paying gig, but I’ve been offered blogging jobs (some higher paying) before this that I didn’t take up. What interested me about True/Slant were a few things:

1. The quality of the contributors. I checked out several people who’re involved with this project (and actually follow the work of a couple) and was convinced that this isn’t one of those websites that hires just about anyone who wants to write for them. They’ve carefully handpicked their contributors and have a limit on the number of people they take in. Most of them are nationally and internationally published journalists with decades of professional experience.

2. This is a professional venture with a business plan, management, editors and people who want to discuss regularly what your blog will be about and how to make it better. That alone gives me confidence in them.

3. They’re offering support for marketing, which means I don’t have to go around begging people to please click on my website (though if you do, I won’t mind!). Given that they’re serious about promotion, that makes content my primary job, not marketing (though I’m just wired to do it anyway).

Yes, I could have started my own blog, but you know, I already have a blog and I don’t really need another one. I don’t think I would ever have become a blogger if this one hadn’t just started out by accident, and why it’s popular, I will never know. I do know, however, that I didn’t want to invest all my time marketing, when I could be writing instead.

The only reason for a second blog could be to (a) add to my income and (b) add to my career goals, both of which Panties and Principles does. Also, the selling point for me was definitely that there’s a team at True/Slant behind me working with me on helping this thing succeed and they have a built-in audience for the kind of issues I’m interested in discussing.

There were other factors, of course, that I can’t get into here, but I will say that I had a long chat with one of the editors and what they are trying to do long-term matches with what I’m trying to do long-term.

That could change, of course. They might not like what I do; I might have a change of opinion along the way. But those were my reasons primarily for not starting a blog on my own and choosing True/Slant instead.