Learning from the Big Dogs

In class we had an assignment to pick a blog and interview the creator, so being a photographer I picked the blog Fstoppers and got to do an interview over the phone with the cofounder Lee Morris. Below are my outline and a screenshot of what the blog looks like. Enjoy!

     Name and URL of blog: Fstoppers, https://fstoppers.com/

1)    History of the blog

a)    How long have they been blogging? 4 and a half years

b)    Who is the blogger? Co founder - Lee Morris (31 years old and is a professional photographer with his own business)

c)    Purpose of the blog: To create a community that photographers can learn from

d)    Geographic Location: Based out of South Carolina but the blog is published all around the world.

e)    Number of followers: 4 million page views per month

f)     Does it make money? Yes, the blog itself doesn’t make that much money, but the products they sell on the blog make the most money.

g)    Why do they blog? To help photographers around the world have access to a community to find help and answers to questions they have.

h)    Inspiration: http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/

2)    What makes this blog unique? It is a large business with many different parts to it. There are around 50 writers for this blog, so it is a very wide variety of writers and opinions.

3)    What are its strengths? It has a lot of incredible part time writers, who are also photographers, so that have a lot of talent working for them.

4)    What are its weaknesses? Personally Lee said he doesn’t know much on the computer and technical side of the whole blogging process and that’s something he could improve on.

5)    What is the advice of the blogger? It depends on what the goal is behind the blog. If you want it to be a business, you have to have the mentality that it is a job, and you need to put work into it everyday. If you want to make money from it, you need to post at least once a day for two years before you can really expect to have any successful profit from it.