It's basic supply and demand. There's a glut of skilled writers willing to work for free and a dearth of people willing to pay for journalism, either through subscriptions or advertising. There's an idea that this is the cynical exploitation of journalists by publishers, but that simply wouldn't be possible if demand for writing outstripped supply.
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
Photography is the clear forerunner. Many newspapers have trained their journalists in photography and have them double up; Others are doing most of their photography through interns or very poorly-paid student freelancers. The microstock phenomenon has collapsed the value of stock images, to the point that only a small number of highly efficient studios are making good money from stock. There are just too many amateurs happy to shoot for free or for just their expenses, and they're producing images of perfectly satisfactory quality.
The real villains are educational institutions, who wilfully deceive students as to the job prospects for creative careers. There are essentially no jobs whatsoever in the studio recording industry, but many thousands of graduates with degrees in related subjects. There's an implicit deceit on the part of educators, who simply "neglect" to mention that they're training students for jobs that haven't existed for twenty years. The demand for creative workers is static or in decline, while enrolment rates for related courses continues to increase steeply.
There is a glut of low quality journalism, but high quality journalism is still expensive and time consuming to produce. Doing research, finding new angles, interviewing people -- these are what take time, not simply putting words on paper (though doing that well still takes time and more expertise than most people realize).
This trend towards free journalism is driving down standards to the point where 'journalism' is often now just re-hashing work with little fact checking. This could lead to real problems as it's been the journalism industry that traditionally has been the watchdog for the people. They've investigated and exposed nefarious activity in just about every sphere.
More and more, I see skilled journalists leaving the profession to work in PR. The people who were checking up on businesses and politicians are now being paid by them to stop new amateur journalists finding out what's going on.
writing is a leisure activity and not a profession
I'm not so convinced this applies to journalism, because I don't consider journalism (actual, real journalism) to be 'writing' in the sense you're discussing it. It involves extensive research, interviews, data processing (more so these days)... it isn't just sitting down and writing an article. That is often the smallest part of a journalistic project.
> writing is a leisure activity and not a profession
I think writing as a profession was a market anomaly created by the concentrated means of publishing. 30 years ago no private person could dream of publishing their writings as they had simply no access to print presses, etc.
But now everyone can put their writings for $free on the internet. And because there's no pressure to generate profit from their content people tend to write about things they are passionate about which results in higher quality articles than those that can be profitably produced for $100 by a 'professional' writer.
Now there's still a market for special expert services like effective copywriting - but that market is small and not every writer can (or wants to) fit in such a niche.
There's definitely some truth to your supply and demand argument. IMHO there is a major issue with working out a platform for payment. My Grandpa read the New York Times all the way through every day – having a single subscription worked. I skip around to at 20+ news sites and blogs on a weekly basis. There's no way that I would pay a typical newspaper subscription rate to each of them.
I don't think there's an easy solution. A pay-per-click system probably would just invite sensationalism. Personally, I think that the solution is partly to innovate up. Provide interactive content and go beyond and electronic copy of what could have been printed on paper.
Sometimes I think the only growth industry and reliable money for some types of creative work is teaching, for example journalism school.
Another example, a friend of a friend worked for a couple of years as a cameraman for a Canadian sports network then got laid off. He spent some time trying to get another job in the industry, failed and then ended up at a teaching job teaching the same thing to high school students.
I work as a copywriter and content writer, and I disagree with you.
Firstly, you're putting a lot of different types of writers in the same bag, which complicates matters.
It's basic supply and demand. There's a glut of skilled writers willing to work for free and a dearth of people willing to pay for journalism, either through subscriptions or advertising. There's an idea that this is the cynical exploitation of journalists by publishers, but that simply wouldn't be possible if demand for writing outstripped supply.
You are mixing things up. There is a glut of bad writers. There are very few skilled writers. I say this from a writer's perspective.
From a business person's perspective, many companies have lowered their expectations with regard to a writer's ability. Why in the world would they do this? This is actually pretty easy. They think they know how "artists" and "writers" work; they believe they are too slow and worry over superfluous details.
Let me first say the problem is less people are spending less money on the arts than, say, 40 years ago. Companies focus on their bottom line, of course. They ask of writers for specific things that will either protect their bottom line or help their visibility (mostly online now).
Nate Thayer said it: "I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired". I highly respect Nate Thayer. His display of professionalism and humility is admirable.
The company I work for makes me rewrite stories. This is why we do it: SEO keywords increase visibility by adding new/unique content to our site that really didn't originate or isn't unique to the company I work for. It is an easier way to add diverse content and then add the keywords we focus on, apart from the whole Google campaign stuff. We operate thusly because, since I am a writer and hardly anyone thinks we're worth anything, I have many, many, many other tasks that I must do throughout the day unrelated to the act of compelling writing. So I have very little research time and time to let what I write sink in. Therefore, I cannot get to it later after a week with fresh eyes. I am also the only editor and proofreader. This is wrong. I am meticulous. But I work at an actual factory (technically a "warehouse") in an industrial city where most companies are wholesalers. This city smells of rotting pig carcass. (Literally, though, which is rather funny-interesting and ironic. And I hesitate to say this, because you will probably now know where I am located.)
What has happened is companies, rightly so, get to why they really need the writer for in order to gain visibility and be searchable online. I'm of the opinion that many online places like Huffington Post don't care for what they are actually reporting on. I used to follow them on Twitter and they constantly A/B test articles with different headlines, switching the titles depending on hot or trending keywords. They will write headlines or articles based on trending keywords that will get them the most clicks, not because it provides compelling writing that is needed for us to improve as a society. But now I am imposing my own aesthetic and worldview on what writing should be.
I can't say The Atlantic does this, but I look at their headlines carefully and sometimes question their intentions. It's a little harder for me to discern The Atlantic's agenda, though. But the writing industry has made me jaded and sceptical of most online magazines.
A good friend studied journalism (I didn't) and they teach him that magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the NY Times and others no longer provide any real value to the art of journalism. Now it's mostly bloggers (working for free, for the most part) who have more valuable things to say. However, you will always find a couple of writers within large organisations who still offer compelling journalism. This is what makes things a little tricky. We usually follow these few on Twitter instead of visiting the front page of the companies they work for. By doing this, we don't need to rummage through all the trash.
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
This doesn't even make sense to me. What are you trying to say? All of writing can be written automatically by drones? Huh? Writing is not all scientistic. It's not all about numbers and data. In some theoretical world, computers may write all types of texts (novels, stories, journalism, etc.) so well we may not distinguish them from human-generated texts, but I am not here to hypothesise.
With regard to writing being a leisure activity, the arts have switched back and forth from being entertainment to didactic. The period in history which preceded the Enlightenment period is an example of this. Before the Age of Reason, the arts were seen as entertaining. If you view the arts as historico-cultural movements, you would understand the pendulum has swung back and forth. And my own bias is to think that it will continue being so. In the mid-20th century, I believe both existed almost harmoniusly, but with the creation of the World Wide Web, we seem to be confused as to what is entertaining and what is didactic and their respective values as a society. The whole culture of irony does not help matters either.
I don't really understand the whole "temporary blip" thing. Care to elaborate? Obviously writing is not just a leisure activity, so you have me ultimately confused. I do believe that the very nature of writing is suberversiveness or experimentation. I find it difficult to fathom that a computer can write something like In Search of Lost Time, and more importantly, I don't know why anyone would prefer to read something similar written by something without a heart.
Photography is the clear forerunner.
Photography is palpable. Language deals with meaning, connotations, subtexts, etc., which are all intangible. It is clear when we see a bad photo meant for, say, a travel magazine. It is difficult to find an equivalent in writing.
The real villains are educational institutions
I partially agree with this. I think there are good and bad professors in the arts (which I know is not saying much, if anything at all). The bad ones are looking out for themselves, either by just focusing on trying to get published or recruiting easily manipulated or "lost" arts students into their master/doctorate degree programme. There are a few who are more idealistic and want to help someone who they think has the potential to have an impact on society by transforming a small part of literature and how writing is perceived. They know the odds are against them and most likely it will never happen, but this is the romanticisation ofacademia and old educational institutions. Incidentally, I've found most of these types of profs teach literature & politics/poli sci, so they emphasise political writing.
Specialist journalism is doing fine, most industry specific news journals are comfortably profitable (companies are willing to pay subs as they have decent ROI in terms of staff education and bizdev), as are high-end news magazines like the Economist.
Another supply and demand aspect of the problem is the glut of interesting reading on the Internet, coupled with the lack of any clear way for a large general interest publication to be profitable online.
This is a despicable trend. This devaluing of labor is happening in many fields. The offer is always the same: exposure, it's good for your career.
The Huffington Post was built on this business model. Most of the writers weren't paid at all but of course Arianna cashed in to the tune of $315 million.
The comedian and podcaster Duncan Trussell was invited to do a set at SXSW, for free and without even airfare being provided. Their only offer was to let him sleep on a volunteer's couch.
And also and importantly SXSW enjoys a large, free labor force in the form of volunteers.
Millenials really have gotten a raw deal. Many can't afford rent or savings, they are rarely offered cash as compensation for jobs their parents were happily paid for.
These practices are worse than those of textile sweatshops.
> These practices are worse than those of textile sweatshops.
I think this is a pretty harmful way of portraying the issue. Don't use up all your shocking words on something like this. Sweatshop practices and child labor are truly despicable and deserve more attention. People being less willing to pay a premium for a certain product or skill in a free market? Not so much. If it is actually a product or skill that merits the money in a changing market, and if the specific one being offered is of good quality, in the long run it will harm the one unwilling to pay. If it is not, it will harm the one offering the product or skill. There is nothing evil happening on either end of this.
Thanks to the Internet, there is a huge glut of awful, cliched writing that leaves you no smarter than you were before you started reading. Journalism school calls this "pumping out copy", and it's something you used to be able to build a career on.
There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews.
People talk about this all the time — the first question people ask me when I tell them I have a journalism degree is "what news sources do you recommend?", because the vast majority of what's out there and popular is complete garbage, and everyone knows it, and there still, in 2013, isn't a good way to verify sources or tell good journalism from propaganda.
I believe people will pay for compelling content that leaves them better-informed, that they have a good reason to trust, and I believe we can use technology to go far beyond what's been possible up to this point with static, narrative storytelling. We're still terrible at providing context, perspective, and verifiability, all things the Internet has made possible, but nobody has done well yet.
Nobody should pay for what, for instance, the Associated Press produces. Robots will replace them one day and that day can't come soon enough. There is very little value in what they do.
But there is value in content that leaves you smarter than when you started. The methods of producing it haven't caught up with the baseline of knowledge the Internet makes possible for everyone, or the stunningly beautiful display of information that's possible on the modern Web.
It hurts to see the skills gap up close - journalists in the grad program at Stanford are still totally defeated by data mining, web design (a skill they all know well for print), data visualization, non-linear storytelling, multimedia production, and the kinds of things I believe will elevate journalism in the 21st century, and nobody's paying well enough to poach the people who do have those skills.
>There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews.
I've left comments like this before, but I'll reiterate: go subscribe to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs. There are others in this general vein, too, but that I don't care for as much: Mother Jones, n+1, etc.
Sites like "The Feature" and "Longform.org" also help.
I think you should read more pre-Internet journalism. You'd be shocked (SHOCKED) at what a NYT really looked like from 1970, let alone the zillions of regional papers, weeklies, newsletters, etc.
> journalists in the grad program at Stanford are still totally defeated by data mining, web design (a skill they all know well for print), data visualization, non-linear storytelling, multimedia production,
> So what do we do?
You get journalists together with other people to do the other stuff.
Journalists shouldn't be noodling around choosing fonts and colors or drawing charts - they should be gathering information and talking to people and writing best quality articles.
I've been thinking about the supply-demand problem lately as it applies to
journalism. How is it different than other industries with willing pools of
suppliers, but people are still paid well?
There are many willing, raw-talented writers out there, and I also know that
high quality journalism requires a lot of work and dedication, so the number of
truly excellent writers is small. Likewise, there are many willing professional
basketball players, and only a very select few make it. But when they do, they
are extremely well compensated, despite a large pool of willing players. What's
the difference between basketball and journalism?
There is still a very strong demand for high quality basketball among the
public. Additionally, in this case, higher quality is relatively easy for
anyone to judge: you have better teams if they win more than other teams. In a
supply/demand context, many will play, but very few can do it well enough to
beat other professional teams so the real supply is actually small, so the
players' price is actually very high.
Comparing this with journalism, I wonder if there has been a decline in a)
demand for or b) ability to appreciate high quality journalism or essayism.
The demand for journalism is probably still reasonably high, but the public may
be indiscriminate. This expands the real supply for writing from those few
truly-excellent ones to a larger pool of mediocre writers.
So if we lament the decay of journalism, we might wonder why we're not really
demanding it.
----
I anticipate comments suggesting I am out of touch with the coming journalistic
transformation. I read and enjoy many blogs, even those put out by magazines
like the Economist, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. But I recently began
reading the print versions of these magazines again and I was astounded at what I had
been missing: articles where I couldn't predict the next paragraphs based on
the headlines; articles that answered my objections in the next paragraph;
articles which clearly had taken a month to write. I know there's nothing about
print vis-a-vis html, but when you've worked for a month on an essay instead of
10 hours on a blog post, it shows.
I also anticipate comments suggesting I am an elitist. In this sense, I am:
taste exists. I won't claim that only the truly-excellent should write. But I
think they should be appreciated, and more importantly, aspired to. I worry
that talented-but-not-yet-truly-excellent writers will think: I can work for
years to become truly good at something no one will appreciate or I can just
blog my heart out at crappy journalism and make a living now.
I think there's probably more of a demand for high-quality journalism now than there's ever been, but I definitely think people's ability to appreciate it isn't there. Plenty of people would like to be able to read a 5,000 word essay, but simply can't.
And that's why I think focusing on the written word itself as the vehicle for high-quality journalism is a mistake. I don't think that's the only way to do it.
In sports, there's an advantage to being just that little bit better than everyone else: it's the difference between winning or losing.
For musicians, because the fixed costs of recording an album or planning a concert are so high, paying a little bit more for e.g. a pianist that's a tiny bit better is not a big deal.
For quality journalism, absolute performance matters less than performing above a (very high) treshold. It's not like you can distinguish "superb" from "peerless" journalism anyway.
Likewise, once you switch to digital, fixed costs melt away and so writing fees and salaries become a more salient expense.
One way in which journalism is like music and sports is that stardom matters. You'll still find writers and columnists that earn obscene amounts of money for a single piece of content, because who they are matters as much as what they write. I doubt Roger Ebert has been much affected by the media industry's downturn.
Both my sister and her husband are professional journalists at one of Britain's broadsheets and they have a very tough job of it. My sister was a freelance journalist for a couple of years looking for piece after piece before finally getting a job.
We have a lot of discussions about payment for content and how journalists should be compensated for their work and why they deserve to be compensated well.
A professional journalist works very hard indeed, they have to produce content on demand very quickly and to put aside their pride when sub-editors mash and reshape it to what (they believe) the editor asked for. Journalists have to create pieces out of events which are of little or no real interest and to do so without flinching. It's a hard job.
The job of a freelance journalist is just as tough and in some ways even tougher as the majority of it is selling and pitching. I was astonished when my sister told me how often she was sending out pitch ideas to editors and how she would engage multiple editors daily and of course be rejected by most of them. Professional journalists whether freelance or retained earn their keep and the majority of them (certainly the ones who haven't reached the confines of seniority) work extremely hard.
However in all of this there is something that my sister and I disagree on. In fact we've decided not to speak about it much because it's an understandably emotional subject for her and one that I feel very strongly about. And that is the topic of whether someone has a given right to receive compensation for their work.
I find it very difficult to empathise with the sentiment that anyone's work has a god-given value. Software is sometimes valuable in isolation as code, on a disk but most often it's not. Years ago you could produce software and sell it on cassettes, now many of our most successful companies are ones which provide a more scalable, hosted five-nines uptime service for free than many ever even charged for.
It frustrates me that writers should sit down and complain that nobody is prepared to pay them for their work. Many other industrial workers and even knowledge workers have found their skills devalued by the passage of time and have had to deal with it.
Unlike all those other industries which got crushed under the wheels of time though we still fundamentally need writers. We want good writers, we need informed writers and good writing is still not in unlimited supply. The survival skill writers need is not penmanship it's entrepreneurship. This may be unpalatable but it's also unavoidable.
I've noticed an apparent decline in the quality of Atlantic recently. Maybe this has something to do with it. When you go from putting high-quality writers on retainer for $125,000 a year to trying to get them to work for free, naturally quality suffers.
I really wish the comments hear were a little more thought out. There's an emotional reaction lashing out at The Bastards who stole the cheese. The reality is that there isn't a villain. There are some fundamental changes in the industry that have affected the amount of money and its flow. It's not malicious. It's incidental.
The move online broke newspapers' business models, especially the dominant 'journalism as a delivery mechanism for ads' model. Turns out it was fragile.
It also may have changed consumer demand, I think. ADD online readers can be attracted just as easily with reprinted headlines & fluff and their pageviews are worth just as little.
The internet also changed supply. A lot of content is being produced for free. They are doing it for fun, they are doing it for "exposure."
I have nothing against journalists. I respect the profession. I think it's important. All this adds up to a worse deal for them then before. There is no anti-journalist conspiracy now any more than there was a pro journalist conspiracy before.
It baffles me how journalism hopes to survive the disruption that the Internet brings with stunts like this, and the odd pay wall.
I'm doing a bit of work with journalists at the moment, and while I think many of the individuals would like to innovate, many of the structures and institutions that exist do not seem willing, they insist in framing the issue as "how can we get someone else to pay for us to keep operating as we are now".
I long to see journalism freed from the constraints that a daily print run onto dead tree once imposed on it, and re-imagined in an always evolving, interactive and yes, paid for, model. Just don't make me buy a load of content I'm not interested in, and don't try and charge me for a floor full of people who're re-hashing syndicated stories or writing fluff pieces.
How is this different than, say, music? There are incredibly gifted composers and musicians in the world today, but the general public seldom hears their work. They are either independently wealthy, or more likely work at a cafe or, if they are truly lucky, have some sort of low-level academic gig.
The general population has terrible taste in music, so talent is no longer appreciated. Why should journalism be any different?
I don't see it as simply an issue of supply and demand. It also has to do with the ethics of publishers who stretch fair use to its boundaries and beyond.
The money quote for me in the article is:
I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired.
That seems to be what most of journalism is about these days. You have sites like a Business Insider whose forte is bright and colorful presentation of work copied from other sites.
I got a similar offer from "hackin9".
One small difference: the contact already had the article that i should have written planned for the next issue even before she answered my e-mail in which i explained that my landlord sadly doesn't want to be paid in "exposure". Contact ended abruptly
This will influence how I will view future articles from The Atlantic. I liked a number of them, but this is likely not an isolated incident, and from now on I will always wonder how the article was produced.
The only reason that people are willing to do it for free is because they believe the "exposure" myth and think that it will lead to paid work.
What they don't realize is that in aggregate, their willingness to do it for free jeopardizes their ability to do it for money in the future. It's a nice little game theory problem. A single defector from the "only work for money" strategy probably benefits; the rookie journalist gets his foot in the door, gets the "exposure" and the industry connections, and so yields an advantage over his peers.
But once all his peers defect from the paid strategy, the whole thing comes crashing down. None of them achieve any advantage over any other. They just drive the median compensation down towards zero.
The claim that there's an abundance of high quality journalism is hogwash. There isn't. There's a glut of no-talent regurgitators. Most of them have poor knowledge of the subject matter, don't bother checking facts, don't do any original research, and generally offer little of value.
For those who practice SEO, there is a bit of irony here.
I suspect a couple of do-follow links from The Atlantic placed within the text of the article would be relatively valuable from an SEO perspective...
The market value of "acquiring" those links from a highly reputable site is likely far in excess of $100 / article; SEO considerations have disrupted value creation in the lower end of the content market. An article is often worth more for its links than readership / advertising. This was something that popped out of a study I did a while back:
I used to write for a tiny outfit that scraped together a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and paid me ~$50 for 1000 word articles.
They were approached almost daily being offered low $xxx figures to publish articles with backlinks for SEO purposes (which they refused). And this was a site with a few hundred pages of content and less than 100k uniques a month.
On that kind of scale, a backlink from the Atlantic would presumably be worth thousands of dollars.
Most of my entire professional career has been in traditional journalism. However, I'm new/young enough that I've almost taken it for granted that money-for-services is ancillary to exposure. Recently, a large media company asked if they could use one of my photos for a commercial campaign...and I almost said, "Sure, just take it" because it was a photo I've listed as Creative Commons. But then I thought, well, they're big media and asked to see their rate sheet...I about jumped when I saw they'd offer $1,000 for just a year's usage...for a photo that I took years ago and that I've been sharing online for free
I've been looking for someone to write interesting, in-depth articles on local business. For money. I've yet to find anyone who a) wants to do it, and b) can do it.
I've tried a few things - even contacting people who I know are doing unpaid 'internships' writing crappy press-release pieces. Very few even responded, and of those that did, even fewer had any grasp of investigating something.
I gave up looking, and just do the writing myself - even though the opportunity cost is massive.
(tried to post this on his site, but it is awaiting moderation)
I guess it always hurts to find out the going rate for your writing is $0. How much did the venerable NK News pay him I wonder.
A 6 figure offer a few years ago? Sadly 2003 (when that Atlantic editor died) is not a few years back, it’s a decade ago. Journalism has changed and the freely accessible article on NK News would’ve gained slightly more traction on the Atlantic with less typing than he spent on this blog post.
[+] [-] jdietrich|13 years ago|reply
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
Photography is the clear forerunner. Many newspapers have trained their journalists in photography and have them double up; Others are doing most of their photography through interns or very poorly-paid student freelancers. The microstock phenomenon has collapsed the value of stock images, to the point that only a small number of highly efficient studios are making good money from stock. There are just too many amateurs happy to shoot for free or for just their expenses, and they're producing images of perfectly satisfactory quality.
The real villains are educational institutions, who wilfully deceive students as to the job prospects for creative careers. There are essentially no jobs whatsoever in the studio recording industry, but many thousands of graduates with degrees in related subjects. There's an implicit deceit on the part of educators, who simply "neglect" to mention that they're training students for jobs that haven't existed for twenty years. The demand for creative workers is static or in decline, while enrolment rates for related courses continues to increase steeply.
[+] [-] benev|13 years ago|reply
There is a glut of low quality journalism, but high quality journalism is still expensive and time consuming to produce. Doing research, finding new angles, interviewing people -- these are what take time, not simply putting words on paper (though doing that well still takes time and more expertise than most people realize).
This trend towards free journalism is driving down standards to the point where 'journalism' is often now just re-hashing work with little fact checking. This could lead to real problems as it's been the journalism industry that traditionally has been the watchdog for the people. They've investigated and exposed nefarious activity in just about every sphere.
More and more, I see skilled journalists leaving the profession to work in PR. The people who were checking up on businesses and politicians are now being paid by them to stop new amateur journalists finding out what's going on.
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
I'm not so convinced this applies to journalism, because I don't consider journalism (actual, real journalism) to be 'writing' in the sense you're discussing it. It involves extensive research, interviews, data processing (more so these days)... it isn't just sitting down and writing an article. That is often the smallest part of a journalistic project.
[+] [-] kybernetyk|13 years ago|reply
I think writing as a profession was a market anomaly created by the concentrated means of publishing. 30 years ago no private person could dream of publishing their writings as they had simply no access to print presses, etc.
But now everyone can put their writings for $free on the internet. And because there's no pressure to generate profit from their content people tend to write about things they are passionate about which results in higher quality articles than those that can be profitably produced for $100 by a 'professional' writer.
Now there's still a market for special expert services like effective copywriting - but that market is small and not every writer can (or wants to) fit in such a niche.
[+] [-] csharpminor|13 years ago|reply
I don't think there's an easy solution. A pay-per-click system probably would just invite sensationalism. Personally, I think that the solution is partly to innovate up. Provide interactive content and go beyond and electronic copy of what could have been printed on paper.
[+] [-] drpgq|13 years ago|reply
Another example, a friend of a friend worked for a couple of years as a cameraman for a Canadian sports network then got laid off. He spent some time trying to get another job in the industry, failed and then ended up at a teaching job teaching the same thing to high school students.
[+] [-] kafkaesque|13 years ago|reply
Firstly, you're putting a lot of different types of writers in the same bag, which complicates matters.
It's basic supply and demand. There's a glut of skilled writers willing to work for free and a dearth of people willing to pay for journalism, either through subscriptions or advertising. There's an idea that this is the cynical exploitation of journalists by publishers, but that simply wouldn't be possible if demand for writing outstripped supply.
You are mixing things up. There is a glut of bad writers. There are very few skilled writers. I say this from a writer's perspective.
From a business person's perspective, many companies have lowered their expectations with regard to a writer's ability. Why in the world would they do this? This is actually pretty easy. They think they know how "artists" and "writers" work; they believe they are too slow and worry over superfluous details.
Let me first say the problem is less people are spending less money on the arts than, say, 40 years ago. Companies focus on their bottom line, of course. They ask of writers for specific things that will either protect their bottom line or help their visibility (mostly online now).
Nate Thayer said it: "I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired". I highly respect Nate Thayer. His display of professionalism and humility is admirable.
The company I work for makes me rewrite stories. This is why we do it: SEO keywords increase visibility by adding new/unique content to our site that really didn't originate or isn't unique to the company I work for. It is an easier way to add diverse content and then add the keywords we focus on, apart from the whole Google campaign stuff. We operate thusly because, since I am a writer and hardly anyone thinks we're worth anything, I have many, many, many other tasks that I must do throughout the day unrelated to the act of compelling writing. So I have very little research time and time to let what I write sink in. Therefore, I cannot get to it later after a week with fresh eyes. I am also the only editor and proofreader. This is wrong. I am meticulous. But I work at an actual factory (technically a "warehouse") in an industrial city where most companies are wholesalers. This city smells of rotting pig carcass. (Literally, though, which is rather funny-interesting and ironic. And I hesitate to say this, because you will probably now know where I am located.)
What has happened is companies, rightly so, get to why they really need the writer for in order to gain visibility and be searchable online. I'm of the opinion that many online places like Huffington Post don't care for what they are actually reporting on. I used to follow them on Twitter and they constantly A/B test articles with different headlines, switching the titles depending on hot or trending keywords. They will write headlines or articles based on trending keywords that will get them the most clicks, not because it provides compelling writing that is needed for us to improve as a society. But now I am imposing my own aesthetic and worldview on what writing should be.
I can't say The Atlantic does this, but I look at their headlines carefully and sometimes question their intentions. It's a little harder for me to discern The Atlantic's agenda, though. But the writing industry has made me jaded and sceptical of most online magazines.
A good friend studied journalism (I didn't) and they teach him that magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the NY Times and others no longer provide any real value to the art of journalism. Now it's mostly bloggers (working for free, for the most part) who have more valuable things to say. However, you will always find a couple of writers within large organisations who still offer compelling journalism. This is what makes things a little tricky. We usually follow these few on Twitter instead of visiting the front page of the companies they work for. By doing this, we don't need to rummage through all the trash.
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
This doesn't even make sense to me. What are you trying to say? All of writing can be written automatically by drones? Huh? Writing is not all scientistic. It's not all about numbers and data. In some theoretical world, computers may write all types of texts (novels, stories, journalism, etc.) so well we may not distinguish them from human-generated texts, but I am not here to hypothesise.
With regard to writing being a leisure activity, the arts have switched back and forth from being entertainment to didactic. The period in history which preceded the Enlightenment period is an example of this. Before the Age of Reason, the arts were seen as entertaining. If you view the arts as historico-cultural movements, you would understand the pendulum has swung back and forth. And my own bias is to think that it will continue being so. In the mid-20th century, I believe both existed almost harmoniusly, but with the creation of the World Wide Web, we seem to be confused as to what is entertaining and what is didactic and their respective values as a society. The whole culture of irony does not help matters either.
I don't really understand the whole "temporary blip" thing. Care to elaborate? Obviously writing is not just a leisure activity, so you have me ultimately confused. I do believe that the very nature of writing is suberversiveness or experimentation. I find it difficult to fathom that a computer can write something like In Search of Lost Time, and more importantly, I don't know why anyone would prefer to read something similar written by something without a heart.
Photography is the clear forerunner.
Photography is palpable. Language deals with meaning, connotations, subtexts, etc., which are all intangible. It is clear when we see a bad photo meant for, say, a travel magazine. It is difficult to find an equivalent in writing.
The real villains are educational institutions
I partially agree with this. I think there are good and bad professors in the arts (which I know is not saying much, if anything at all). The bad ones are looking out for themselves, either by just focusing on trying to get published or recruiting easily manipulated or "lost" arts students into their master/doctorate degree programme. There are a few who are more idealistic and want to help someone who they think has the potential to have an impact on society by transforming a small part of literature and how writing is perceived. They know the odds are against them and most likely it will never happen, but this is the romanticisation ofacademia and old educational institutions. Incidentally, I've found most of these types of profs teach literature & politics/poli sci, so they emphasise political writing.
Just the $0.02 of a rambling writer.
[+] [-] Swizec|13 years ago|reply
As a member of the growing self ebook publishing industry I have to disagree. Now is the best time to write something of value. Anything really.
People are out there and they want to buy your content [if it is of good quality, interesting etc. etc.]
[+] [-] ig1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantynan707|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] willholloway|13 years ago|reply
The Huffington Post was built on this business model. Most of the writers weren't paid at all but of course Arianna cashed in to the tune of $315 million.
The comedian and podcaster Duncan Trussell was invited to do a set at SXSW, for free and without even airfare being provided. Their only offer was to let him sleep on a volunteer's couch.
His response was hilarious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ6eMG-dfas
And also and importantly SXSW enjoys a large, free labor force in the form of volunteers.
Millenials really have gotten a raw deal. Many can't afford rent or savings, they are rarely offered cash as compensation for jobs their parents were happily paid for.
These practices are worse than those of textile sweatshops.
[+] [-] jrajav|13 years ago|reply
> These practices are worse than those of textile sweatshops.
I think this is a pretty harmful way of portraying the issue. Don't use up all your shocking words on something like this. Sweatshop practices and child labor are truly despicable and deserve more attention. People being less willing to pay a premium for a certain product or skill in a free market? Not so much. If it is actually a product or skill that merits the money in a changing market, and if the specific one being offered is of good quality, in the long run it will harm the one unwilling to pay. If it is not, it will harm the one offering the product or skill. There is nothing evil happening on either end of this.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
There is a frightening dearth of well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding as opposed to hit a word limit and generate pageviews.
People talk about this all the time — the first question people ask me when I tell them I have a journalism degree is "what news sources do you recommend?", because the vast majority of what's out there and popular is complete garbage, and everyone knows it, and there still, in 2013, isn't a good way to verify sources or tell good journalism from propaganda.
I believe people will pay for compelling content that leaves them better-informed, that they have a good reason to trust, and I believe we can use technology to go far beyond what's been possible up to this point with static, narrative storytelling. We're still terrible at providing context, perspective, and verifiability, all things the Internet has made possible, but nobody has done well yet.
Nobody should pay for what, for instance, the Associated Press produces. Robots will replace them one day and that day can't come soon enough. There is very little value in what they do.
But there is value in content that leaves you smarter than when you started. The methods of producing it haven't caught up with the baseline of knowledge the Internet makes possible for everyone, or the stunningly beautiful display of information that's possible on the modern Web.
It hurts to see the skills gap up close - journalists in the grad program at Stanford are still totally defeated by data mining, web design (a skill they all know well for print), data visualization, non-linear storytelling, multimedia production, and the kinds of things I believe will elevate journalism in the 21st century, and nobody's paying well enough to poach the people who do have those skills.
So what do we do?
[+] [-] jseliger|13 years ago|reply
I've left comments like this before, but I'll reiterate: go subscribe to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs. There are others in this general vein, too, but that I don't care for as much: Mother Jones, n+1, etc.
Sites like "The Feature" and "Longform.org" also help.
[+] [-] alexismadrigal|13 years ago|reply
We remember the good stuff.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
> So what do we do?
You get journalists together with other people to do the other stuff.
Journalists shouldn't be noodling around choosing fonts and colors or drawing charts - they should be gathering information and talking to people and writing best quality articles.
[+] [-] kevinalexbrown|13 years ago|reply
There are many willing, raw-talented writers out there, and I also know that high quality journalism requires a lot of work and dedication, so the number of truly excellent writers is small. Likewise, there are many willing professional basketball players, and only a very select few make it. But when they do, they are extremely well compensated, despite a large pool of willing players. What's the difference between basketball and journalism?
There is still a very strong demand for high quality basketball among the public. Additionally, in this case, higher quality is relatively easy for anyone to judge: you have better teams if they win more than other teams. In a supply/demand context, many will play, but very few can do it well enough to beat other professional teams so the real supply is actually small, so the players' price is actually very high.
Comparing this with journalism, I wonder if there has been a decline in a) demand for or b) ability to appreciate high quality journalism or essayism. The demand for journalism is probably still reasonably high, but the public may be indiscriminate. This expands the real supply for writing from those few truly-excellent ones to a larger pool of mediocre writers.
So if we lament the decay of journalism, we might wonder why we're not really demanding it.
----
I anticipate comments suggesting I am out of touch with the coming journalistic transformation. I read and enjoy many blogs, even those put out by magazines like the Economist, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. But I recently began reading the print versions of these magazines again and I was astounded at what I had been missing: articles where I couldn't predict the next paragraphs based on the headlines; articles that answered my objections in the next paragraph; articles which clearly had taken a month to write. I know there's nothing about print vis-a-vis html, but when you've worked for a month on an essay instead of 10 hours on a blog post, it shows.
I also anticipate comments suggesting I am an elitist. In this sense, I am: taste exists. I won't claim that only the truly-excellent should write. But I think they should be appreciated, and more importantly, aspired to. I worry that talented-but-not-yet-truly-excellent writers will think: I can work for years to become truly good at something no one will appreciate or I can just blog my heart out at crappy journalism and make a living now.
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
And that's why I think focusing on the written word itself as the vehicle for high-quality journalism is a mistake. I don't think that's the only way to do it.
[+] [-] stdbrouw|13 years ago|reply
For musicians, because the fixed costs of recording an album or planning a concert are so high, paying a little bit more for e.g. a pianist that's a tiny bit better is not a big deal.
For quality journalism, absolute performance matters less than performing above a (very high) treshold. It's not like you can distinguish "superb" from "peerless" journalism anyway.
Likewise, once you switch to digital, fixed costs melt away and so writing fees and salaries become a more salient expense.
One way in which journalism is like music and sports is that stardom matters. You'll still find writers and columnists that earn obscene amounts of money for a single piece of content, because who they are matters as much as what they write. I doubt Roger Ebert has been much affected by the media industry's downturn.
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[+] [-] petenixey|13 years ago|reply
We have a lot of discussions about payment for content and how journalists should be compensated for their work and why they deserve to be compensated well.
A professional journalist works very hard indeed, they have to produce content on demand very quickly and to put aside their pride when sub-editors mash and reshape it to what (they believe) the editor asked for. Journalists have to create pieces out of events which are of little or no real interest and to do so without flinching. It's a hard job.
The job of a freelance journalist is just as tough and in some ways even tougher as the majority of it is selling and pitching. I was astonished when my sister told me how often she was sending out pitch ideas to editors and how she would engage multiple editors daily and of course be rejected by most of them. Professional journalists whether freelance or retained earn their keep and the majority of them (certainly the ones who haven't reached the confines of seniority) work extremely hard.
However in all of this there is something that my sister and I disagree on. In fact we've decided not to speak about it much because it's an understandably emotional subject for her and one that I feel very strongly about. And that is the topic of whether someone has a given right to receive compensation for their work.
I find it very difficult to empathise with the sentiment that anyone's work has a god-given value. Software is sometimes valuable in isolation as code, on a disk but most often it's not. Years ago you could produce software and sell it on cassettes, now many of our most successful companies are ones which provide a more scalable, hosted five-nines uptime service for free than many ever even charged for.
It frustrates me that writers should sit down and complain that nobody is prepared to pay them for their work. Many other industrial workers and even knowledge workers have found their skills devalued by the passage of time and have had to deal with it.
Unlike all those other industries which got crushed under the wheels of time though we still fundamentally need writers. We want good writers, we need informed writers and good writing is still not in unlimited supply. The survival skill writers need is not penmanship it's entrepreneurship. This may be unpalatable but it's also unavoidable.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nutate|13 years ago|reply
You could just not renew your subscription I suppose.
[+] [-] netcan|13 years ago|reply
The move online broke newspapers' business models, especially the dominant 'journalism as a delivery mechanism for ads' model. Turns out it was fragile.
It also may have changed consumer demand, I think. ADD online readers can be attracted just as easily with reprinted headlines & fluff and their pageviews are worth just as little.
The internet also changed supply. A lot of content is being produced for free. They are doing it for fun, they are doing it for "exposure."
I have nothing against journalists. I respect the profession. I think it's important. All this adds up to a worse deal for them then before. There is no anti-journalist conspiracy now any more than there was a pro journalist conspiracy before.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d4nt|13 years ago|reply
I'm doing a bit of work with journalists at the moment, and while I think many of the individuals would like to innovate, many of the structures and institutions that exist do not seem willing, they insist in framing the issue as "how can we get someone else to pay for us to keep operating as we are now".
I long to see journalism freed from the constraints that a daily print run onto dead tree once imposed on it, and re-imagined in an always evolving, interactive and yes, paid for, model. Just don't make me buy a load of content I'm not interested in, and don't try and charge me for a floor full of people who're re-hashing syndicated stories or writing fluff pieces.
[+] [-] danbmil99|13 years ago|reply
The general population has terrible taste in music, so talent is no longer appreciated. Why should journalism be any different?
[+] [-] forgotAgain|13 years ago|reply
The money quote for me in the article is: I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired.
That seems to be what most of journalism is about these days. You have sites like a Business Insider whose forte is bright and colorful presentation of work copied from other sites.
[+] [-] jagermo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrPizza|13 years ago|reply
What they don't realize is that in aggregate, their willingness to do it for free jeopardizes their ability to do it for money in the future. It's a nice little game theory problem. A single defector from the "only work for money" strategy probably benefits; the rookie journalist gets his foot in the door, gets the "exposure" and the industry connections, and so yields an advantage over his peers.
But once all his peers defect from the paid strategy, the whole thing comes crashing down. None of them achieve any advantage over any other. They just drive the median compensation down towards zero.
The claim that there's an abundance of high quality journalism is hogwash. There isn't. There's a glut of no-talent regurgitators. Most of them have poor knowledge of the subject matter, don't bother checking facts, don't do any original research, and generally offer little of value.
[+] [-] sixtypoundhound|13 years ago|reply
I suspect a couple of do-follow links from The Atlantic placed within the text of the article would be relatively valuable from an SEO perspective...
The market value of "acquiring" those links from a highly reputable site is likely far in excess of $100 / article; SEO considerations have disrupted value creation in the lower end of the content market. An article is often worth more for its links than readership / advertising. This was something that popped out of a study I did a while back:
http://www.marginhound.com/revenue-model-study-for-small-web...
[+] [-] lenazegher|13 years ago|reply
They were approached almost daily being offered low $xxx figures to publish articles with backlinks for SEO purposes (which they refused). And this was a site with a few hundred pages of content and less than 100k uniques a month.
On that kind of scale, a backlink from the Atlantic would presumably be worth thousands of dollars.
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nutate|13 years ago|reply
This story: 2K tweets 3K facebook likes.
Seems like people are about 1000 times more interested in behind the scenes of freelancing than his research into NK basketball.
[+] [-] AlexMuir|13 years ago|reply
I've tried a few things - even contacting people who I know are doing unpaid 'internships' writing crappy press-release pieces. Very few even responded, and of those that did, even fewer had any grasp of investigating something.
I gave up looking, and just do the writing myself - even though the opportunity cost is massive.
[+] [-] nutate|13 years ago|reply
I guess it always hurts to find out the going rate for your writing is $0. How much did the venerable NK News pay him I wonder.
A 6 figure offer a few years ago? Sadly 2003 (when that Atlantic editor died) is not a few years back, it’s a decade ago. Journalism has changed and the freely accessible article on NK News would’ve gained slightly more traction on the Atlantic with less typing than he spent on this blog post.