As a journalist and especially as a blogger, I sure picked a hell of a time to move to Los Angeles. No sooner did I settle here late last fall than my fellow writers in the film and television industries went on strike. I’ve never done their kind of writing in a professional capacity, but the more I’ve engaged with the issues at the center of the current dispute between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the more I’m convinced that bloggers could soon find themselves making similar complaints against their own employers.

Yes, dear reader: the Bloggers Guild of America may be on its way. The dispute between screen and television writers and media conglomerates has its roots, after all, in the Web. The sweeping changes it has impelled in the media over the past decade or so have made film and TV writers feel less in control of the products of their labor. The current strike is the culmination of that: the writers are fighting for additional compensation when a product they’ve created for film or TV is distributed in some form over the Internet. Their current compensation? Nothing.

Bloggers often earn that same salary. There are exceptions, of course, those fortunate few who have become quasi-celebrities in their own right and found themselves, and their sites, snatched up by major media companies (which in some cases are owned by the same large conglomerates that the Hollywood writers are, as of this writing, striking against). These big media outlets are making money from the Web traffic that bloggers bring, via the online advertisements that that traffic helps to sell.

And blog traffic is growing. According to Technorati, which compares blogs with mainstream media Web sites using “inbound blog sources” (e.g., measuring how much a site is being linked to by other sites), the biggest media sites—nytimes.com, cnn.com—still have more linkage cred than any blog. But the blogs are catching up: in the fourth quarter of 2006, Boing Boing, a collaborative blog, had about a fourth as many inbound blog sources as nytimes.com (19,438 to 83,740), and The Huffington Post and Daily Kos had over an eighth as many (12,703 and 11,093, respectively). Tellingly, both The Huffington Post and Daily Kos were slightly ahead of The Economist’s site—and considerably ahead of The New Yorker’s. Even more tellingly, on Technorati’s list of the hundred most-linked information sources, twenty-two were blogs.

But blogs aren’t just part of the proverbial marketplace of ideas; they’re also part of the plain old marketplace—and site viewership, of course, translates into ad sales. (Profits add up quickly: A single, week-long, premium-slot ad run on Daily Kos, according to Blogads, sells for $9,000.) As top-tier blogs, in particular, become increasingly profitable, it will be fair to ask just how much of their proceeds are going to the writers who, ultimately, make it all possible.

Which is not to say that the answers—or even the questions—will be easy. How, for example, do you define and otherwise distinguish “bloggers” themselves? Bloggers are an (in)famously diverse bunch: grouping them isn’t just grouping apples and oranges, but apples and oranges and bananas and the occasional kumquat. There are the Andrew Sullivans, for instance, whose blogs are acquired by major media outlets (in Sullivan’s case, first Time, then the Atlantic). They become, essentially, contract workers—sometimes even staff members. If and when they do, an at least somewhat recognizable form of journalistic (or freelance journalistic) economics kicks in. As a freelancer myself, for example—though not at Sullivan’s level—I’ve negotiated contracts with several blog sites to contribute regularly and be paid per contribution. The rates for such work can rival or even exceed online writing for, say, political magazines—and it tends to be far easier work, given the informality of blog-style writing, its generally minimal reporting requirements, and its lack of much editorial oversight (which is, after all, contrary to the spirit of blogging).

Chris Mooney writes The Intersection blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum and is the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.