Some UMass bloggers

An interesting -- maybe even inspiring? -- story about a very successful UMass blogger by another UMass blogger:
Student morphs blog into book deal
By S.P. Sullivan Bulletin Contributing Writer
Published on January 02, 2009

Zac Bissonnette in his dorm room at the University of Massachusetts. He is writing a book about how students pay for college.

Students graduating from the University of Massachusetts are entering a job market made unsteady by the national recession. UMass sophomore Zac Bissonnette, however, has a book deal to help him weather the storm.

Publishers Weekly has announced that Bissonnette, 20, an editor for AOL's financial site WalletPop.com and blogger for TheDailyBeast.com, is putting together a book for publishing company Portfolio, an imprint with Penguin Group (USA), that challenges the way parents and their children are paying for college.

The book is slated for publication in 2010. Bissonnette, who currently lives in the John Quincy Adams dormitory on campus, will be a senior by then.

Bissonnette said he started his first personal blog from a library computer at his high school in Hyannis, when he was 16, and has been doing it ever since.

He said financial blogging is something more of "personal interest" than anything else.

"I started blogging when I was in high school," he said.

"Eventually, someone from AOL saw my blog and offered me a freelance thing, which is better than doing it for free."

The UMass student said he hasn't taken any finance courses at the school, and that his major is in legal studies, not finance.

"I had to major in something, so why not that?" he said.

Bissonnette, who is paying his own way through college and has recently delved into real estate with capital earned doing freelance blogging, was invited on CNN's "American Morning" in November after writing an editorial for The Daily Beast about Barack Obama's economic policy and its effects on student loans.

Bissonnette said he got a book deal the way a lot of people do: through his agent.

"I came up with this idea, got an agent, and he put this together," he said.

Publishers Weekly reported that Adrian Zackheim and Adrienne Schultz at Portfolio outbid several other agencies for the book, which will take a critical look at the consequences of falling too deeply into debt because of student loans and weigh the value of an education from a public institution against less-affordable private ones.