Frances Wilkinson asked this question at The Week last week, and it's hard to argue with him:
It's not obvious how young writers without accommodating, well-to-do parents or a trust from gramps make it these days. Surely they can't spend a year or two blogging without pay until an audience evolves to nurture them. They'll starve.
As someone who has created her own career as a writer online, I can assure you that even 11-plus years as a blogger -- since before the word blog was even conceived -- isn't enough to evolve a large enough audience alone to fend off starvation.
Meantime, freelance rates for non-fluff magazine writing have barely risen in the past 15 years. And the chances of getting a job at a quality newspaper or a serious magazine are fast approaching zero.
There are exceptions, I know. There always are. But on the whole, the writing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper middle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The offspring of the affluent, branded college degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But anyone hailing from more hardscrabble environs may find it too difficult to get traction before succumbing to the dismal economics of it all.
This is a real problem. When only the rich are able to put about their opinions in the public sphere, only the very narrow perspective of the rich will dominate the public sphere. It's already that way -- when the mainstream media can posit that a tax cut for everyone but the richest 2 percent of Americans is a tax hike, and a wildly unfair one, you know we're already there. Imagine it getting even worse...
As Wilkinson notes in the opening of his piece:
In 1896, Richard Harding Davis went to Cuba to report on what his publisher, William Randolph Hearst, fervently hoped would be a war. Hearst offered the 32-year-old writer $3,000 for a month of work; Davis expected to collect another $600 freelancing for Harper's Magazine. Davis was a well-known and popular writer. But even the most famous print journalists today would have a hard time duplicating his earnings, which would amount to six figures in today's money.
Three thousand dollars for a month of work as a writer? I'd love that.
on 
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Wow. I mean, I don't mean to diss those serving in the military, and I'm not, but... wow.
What if you don't qualify for military service? What if you have moral objections to military service? What if you don't want to write about stuff connected to military service?
Yea to soldiers as war correspondents. Yea to not being able to hide stuff. Yea to global travel and being exposed to other cultures. But are any of those military bloggers making a living from their blogs?
This may work for some who wish to be writers. But as general advice to *anyone* wishing to be a writer? It seems foolish. And it seem so limiting. We're in bad shape if this is good advice for aspiring writers.
There's nothing wrong with military service, in my mind. (I don't have the moral objections some have, though I respect them. I might have joined the Air Force with an aim of becoming a fighter pilot if they were letting women do that in the late 80s. It's probably a good thing they weren't, because I am SO not suited to the military life. But I didn't know that then.) But as a good way to become a writer? Hoo... I don't know.