No wonder mass media is of such poor quality if original, reported articles consumed by up to 13M readers pays $100. Guess that's supply and demand (?)
Exactly. Ad revenue of newspapers slipped over 50% during that time. The whole market got eaten up and destroyed, worse than the music industry could've ever dreamed.
There is still a great bunch of journalism out there, like Vice (who actually did the original reporting) and then there are folks like this guy who wishes for days of yore. The Atlantic puts out plenty of great content from great writers who get little cash for their efforts.
The market changed drastically on this guy and he hopes he can get more PR from this free blog post than a free byline on theatlantic.com
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.
> There is nothing evil happening on either end of this.
I am speaking in pure material terms. I am not injecting morality.
This is a despicable trend because we are seeing emergent, widespread immiseration in advanced, developed countries.
The quality of our journalism is suffering, and journalism is a bulwark against corruption in a democracy. Corruption is bad not because it is immoral but because it leads to waste, which reduces our material well being. David Simon, the creator of The Wire has spoken about how important local papers were in catching corruption at the city and state level of government.
I said that this is worse than sweatshops because at least in a sweatshop the workers earn subsistence wages.
> 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.
The product and skills are valuable. There is a demand for them. What we are witnessing is deflation. The demand is strong, the ability for the creators to be credited is what has broken down.
I will not just be a passive observer in all of this. The end game to this scenario is obvious. We are looking down the barrel of a new feudalism, and I do not want a period of reduced living standards and stagnation.
An entire generation has had it's prospects diminished, and the trend is only accelerating.
Perhaps all that is needed here for the market to correct this is for consumers to be educated. This is a new trend, and I would like to draw people's attention to it.
Do you still feel warm, fuzzy and excited when you buy a ticket to SXSW? When you know the festival organizers, bars, restaurants and hotels are all making money, the only people not making money are the performers and the volunteers that draw the crowds and make everything run?
In the absence of knowledge about how SXSW works the organizers are able to exploit the performers. I am not going to keep their secret for them.
I'm boycotting SXSW until their labor practices change. Who's with me?
I think you are trolling but I gave it a hard look anyway. My cable subscription helps fund several TV news operations and I buy the paper edition of the NY Times frequently.
That is not enough, and point taken. If you have any recommendations for a high quality subscription only journalism operation please tell me.
Where I have changed considerably though is with video entertainment.
In my younger days I used to use bittorrent, and megavideo et al... and rarely pay for movies/tv shows.
Jaron Lanier changed my mind about all of this. I now pay for a lot of movies/tv with my Netflix/Amazon Prime subscription and by renting/buying on iTunes and Amazon.
I even went so far as to create an app to facilitate this. My problem with not pirating movies is that the catalog of these online services are incomplete. You have to search a few, and sometimes a particular title is not available at all.
I built http://streamjoy.tv as an abstraction layer above Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. Search in one place, compare availability and price.
That is how I am putting my coding skills behind my economic philosophy.
When the machines do most of our jobs, my hope is we can still find meaningful, gainful employment in creative projects. In the current economic context the creators need a mechanism to be compensated.
Good on you, that is a good looking site and it fills a niche for people like you and I who pay for content. I really hope there can be a tip system (bitcoin, ripple, paypal, dwolla) that can be a click at the end of a good article. I could imagine dropping $0.25 on 4 good articles a day.
Like TV, video, music, books, if you give the people an extremely convenient way to pay for your content, a good number of them will.
Little known fact, my gf is a journalist, an editor, at a certain publication named after a body of water, who may or may not be in her second week on the job and already embroiled in a bit of controversy. :-o
I really hope that everything works out well for your gf, and the Atlantic. I called trading exposure for work a despicable trend because it's happening in so many fields. Its unfair to place all the blame on the Atlantic.
People should go easy on The Atlantic. This new phenomenon needs more society-wide awareness and technologies for micro-payments.
My understanding is that regulations have stymied micro-payments. If that is the case legislation should be adopted to correct this.
Journalism is extremely tough, and has much more of my sympathy. I have total disdain for operations like SXSW that are very profitable and still stiff their talent.
EDIT:
After posting this I thought about how your gf may or may not be embroiled in this controversy. I think the issue of free work/immiseration of the creative class would make a good piece. The Atlantic could acknowledge that it has succumbed to economic (and perhaps social) pressure, do some human interest pieces on people that have been effected, people that have found ways to be viable despite the economic changes, and maybe regulatory reforms that might make micro-payments feasible.
I could see a continuing series on this topic being well received. This issue made it to the top of HN today, I think that validates the market.
I told her she should write about it (I just created this account, she doesn't know I'm commenting on it here) ...
If she had asked him for an interview on the topic (for free obviously) this would've been a non-issue. But she thought she would give him a byline, not knowing of his fame.
He became famous for interviewing pol pot when she was about a year old, and although he is well known in south east asia circles, he's not exactly a household name. The article is freely available now (if you care to read about basketball in NK), she just wanted to offer a wider audience with near zero extra work on his part. With the offer of $100 for a future online effort.
So she asked and got put on blast.
It's interesting how that works. It was a weird way to wake up this morning though.
TO YOUR POINT ON MICROPAYMENTS:
Yes, I think there is a per transaction fee for credit cards. Bitcoin couldn't work flat out because it only supports 350,000 total transactions a day and piddly little tips would eventually crush the blockchain. I think paypal could do it if you just tipped out of your paypal balance. Dwolla.com does do it... but no one has an account.
I have to say I agree with the people who argue people should be doing a lot of this for the love, but love doesn't pay the bills. I really like Stewart Lee's take on it here:
Long listen, but he advocates for a lot of government funding for the arts. Likewise a lot of in the trenches journalism is sponsored by small orgs (pro publica, xyz foundations, etc) The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, etc just chip in a bit extra to publish some of that work.
This specific case was about already written, already available content.
If this was huffpo they would've just thrown quotes around it and put it up with a little link.
Running a hotel is not fun; playing in a rock band is fun. This is why you have to pay people to run a hotel and people will desperately make and spam you with demo tapes for a chance at consideration for a spot to play for free. This isn't exploitation, this is the fact that the world does not owe you remuneration for doing something you love.
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.
You should also read up on the disputes they have had with Reddit about how they promoted their content; earned them an official site-wide ban, if I recall correctly..
That's not shocking. Most people who head up these corporations made it up the corporate ladder because of, not in spite of, an incredible lack of tact.
The Atlantic is owned by David Bradley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_G._Bradley), and it isn't a particularly large corporation. It can't have that many employees, given that only 400,000 people subscribe to the magazine.
You're right, hackers don't produce intellectual property, and they never have issues with people not valuing it. If you think being able to sling code or design a webpage makes you immune from this trend, then maybe you don't have enough imagination to get the most out of this site.
If an article is considered uninteresting by the community quickly falls out from the front page.
The fact that this one is on top and has received a huge amount of comments already, makes me think that a good part of the people frequenting this site found it interesting and relevant.
Please have another look at the various guidelines for HN.
This post invites discussion on a number of fronts.
i) It demonstrates one person's work and information flow through a day. Good hackers will spot opportunities to make that a bit easier.
ii) We can discuss the problems of finding good longform journalism. Good hackers will spot opportunities around collation of great articles, or filtering news for people.
iii) There are problems around paying people to create decent journalism. There are opportunities around this. The current ad-driven model sucks, with it's reliance on pageviews and linkbait and controversialist nonsense.
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
A) it is futile: people upvote what they upvote. No amount of whining will affect that.
B) If something gets upvotes and comments, then obviously it's of interest to enough people.
If you have genuine confusion as to why people upvoted, perhaps a question asked in good faith along those lines would be the proper way to find out.
I think the power of your comment will be lost in this noisy thread. What all of this hemming and hawing comes down to is that people are showing that they're willing to give up their creations for absolutely nothing, just to gain some sense of notariety.
We have a celebrity-obsessed culture in the US in particular, and it's becoming clear that too many people would sell their soul just to be noticed. That's the overabundant supply side. I think, at the end of the day. That's the real problem.
If you already have something to promote, like a self-published ebook on North Korea, and they let you put a few lines and an Amazon link at the end, then it might be worth it.
I'm not sure what kind of traffic most Atlantic articles get. I used Gawker as a reference for guesstimating pageviews. A lot of their self-reported pageviews in the sidebar are around 30k or under.
You're right, 2-5% is high. But I do think an article that leads into a pitch for a topical e-book would convert well with Atlantic traffic.
In this case, you might as well not have used any numbers of all. It gives an impression of concreteness in your example of numbers that are very unrealistic in my experience.
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.
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.
That's actually a really tough question. I think that there aren't any sources that I consider totally good. I generally read quite a few, and find one or two that cover each issue well. For example, I usually quite like the BBCs international reporting, but have felt a bit let down by their tech coverage recently. The Guardian (UK) can be good, but it can stray too far (for me) to left wing tub-thumbing at times. Places like The Atlantic and HuffPost have the occasional decent article, but I don't usually bother with them unless I know I can trust the author. I used to read the FT's (UK) general news and found it good, but it's been a while since I picked it up.
Yes. It is time to chase names rather than institutions.
We already do it most other professions. (Entrepreneurs, artists, Doctors, Lawyers etc)
One's personal brand can have credibility added to it by association with a large publication, but that association does not outweigh the value the individual brings. Especially if the costs associated with that publication no longer make sense.
As newspapers and online publishers continue to degrade their reputation through sponsored content (both off and online) and silly page view chasing slide shows and posts, the value they bring to the reader is also decreasing.
These institutions are failing. The individual or collaborative group of individuals is what will rise from the ashes.
Yes. It is time to chase names rather than institutions.
We already do it most other professions. (Entrepreneurs, artists, Doctors, Lawyers etc)
One's personal brand can have credibility added to it by association with a large publication, but that association does not outweigh the value the individual brings. Especially if the costs associated with that publication no longer make sense.
As newspapers and online publishers continue to degrade their reputation through sponsored content (both off and online) and silly page view chasing slide shows and posts, the value they bring to the reader is also decreasing.
These institutions are failing. The individual or collaborative group of individuals is what will rise from the ashes.
My startup Scoopinion does try to find the high quality journalism, this is how we do it:
Take a set of sites that
1) Have an editor and or are established blogs.
2) Publish content that you can show to your mother
3)
Then we have a community of readers with "Scrobbling" browser add-on that measures reading speed and read through percentage. Whenever they read, they implicitly rate the article with their behavior. Later the articles are recommended to people who read same sources, topics and journalists.
This has worked pretty well, at least what we hear from our users. If someone has better definitions of quality journalism, would love to hear those.
I really like it! Definitely works out well although it seems British- and maybe Australian-centric. Is that just based on who is using the Scoopinion now?
I'm not sure you actually disagreed with the parent.
The parent said something like "there's not enough demand, and too much supply". You said something like "it's very expensive to produce good journalism". The two statements are not contradictory.
I do agree with you that there is a definite problem with the current situation, by the way.
I think our attention disorder deficit world (1) and the lack of transparency (2) lead to just that: Lack of demand for high quality journalism.
(1) Quality journalism usually demands time and attention from the reader since it presents itself in multi-page articles that try to distill down to the important facts. Oftentimes reality is so complex, that even this distilled view is difficult to read and takes some time to understand. People who just want to read some news between checking facebook or tweeting are not interested in these long and elaborate articles.
(2) Even for short articles, it is difficult to assess the quality of it since there's no way (or only a difficult way) of figuring out whether an article is high quality or low quality. In order to find out, you'd need to be an expert in the specific domain or re-do the work of the journalist (fact checking, etc). Since most readers neither can do the one or the other, for a normal reader this lack of transparency (or information asymmetry, as the economists say) means that he doesn't see the difference between high and low quality. So there's little demand, too.
I do think that there'll be a future where high quality journalism is flourishing, but not with the current business models, and not with the current way of news publishing. My hope is that at some point a startup will figure out the correct ingredients (and I doubt social news, or anything in that domain is the answer)
There's very little demand for high quality journalism.
A high quality article might cost 100 times as much to create as a low-quality one, but the returns from it (ads, subscriptions, whatever) aren't anywhere near 100x as much. At this point, all magazines, newspapers and similar outlets have figured this out.
There may be some sort of niche possible in ebooks aimed at relatively narrow niches - niches that aren't served by general interest publications. But for regular old publishing/"journamalism"/opinion pieces.... the outlook for making a living at those is not good.
There is still plenty of demand for high-quality journalism. If a reader is willing to pay for it, he may find himself better informed than his average peer, giving him a competitive advantage. If the journalist doesn't find himself in such an authoritative spot, perhaps he's not good enough. If I'm a trader, why should I buy a product that doesn't give me sufficient profit? If it's societal value we're talking about, then you're arguing that the entire profession should benefit from government subsidies, in which case I'd much rather see my money go towards education (see http://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_schleicher_use_data_to_buil...)
Additionally, the best writers don't have to rely on publishers anymore, they can monetise their skills themselves.
As a journalist, I am biased, and I agree with the parent comment.
But the more significant problem is the demise of journalistically savvy publishers. Content is not a priority, period. Unless, of course, you're talking about 'content marketing,' which is essentially advertising in disguise.
Journos will have to ignore the traditional glass wall between editorial/advertising to make a living. And there's always been some push from the top in terms of promoting favored advertisers or even squelching a negative story. But of the last three publishing groups I've worked for, two were run by glorified ad execs who considered editorial staff as a cost drain, and who were constantly trying to find ways for the department to 'earn its keep.'
The best was a newspaper group still managed by the founders, admittedly a labor of love but profitable, until health issues prompted the sale. Now the product is hardly recognizable. Remote bureaus were quickly closed, and the chain of "hometown" papers no longer have offices in the communities whose names are on the banners.
Hyperlocal websites are trying to fill the void, and doing a reasonable job with no resources in many places. But it just ain't the same as developing local knowledge and journalistic skills over a career with the same publication.
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.
I have just one thing echoing about in my head: "We get what we deserve"
One of the reasons that "high-quality journalism" is in trouble is that it's no longer high-quality compared to the competing offerings now available to readers. In the past, readers had to rely upon journalists "doing research, finding new angles, interviewing people" to get expert knowledge. Now the experts are online and talking to readers directly, cutting out the middlemen.
Take the recent US election, for example. Why would a reader expect to be better informed by reading traditional journalists, even those doing high-quality work, than by reading Nate Silver or Andrew Gelman?
"High-quality journalism," to be blunt, is in trouble because it's not really that good. It's just that nobody had a better alternative until the Internet gave them one.
Ya, the middle man is getting cut out, but when a site like the Atlantic can publish your content, give you a byline, and a wider audience, you can do a lot with that exposure.
Or you can write a bitchy blog post and keep writing for nknews.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Does it matter? A good chunk of the blog posts that make it to Hacker News involve extensive research, interviews or data processing. Of course, when you're not being paid, you have less of an incentive to dig deep so I get your point, but there's people who do it, and you only need a small amount of people to satisfy the demand for high-quality journalism. There's only so much you can read in a day: 3-10 stories for most people.
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 trick...
You make some interesting points, but I feel you misunderstand the OP's remark that 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.
They said nothing about computers doing all the writing. It's about technological conditions (printing being really expensive and thus information hard to share) that lead to economic conditions (newspapers as semi-monopolies both for publishing and for advertising, limited inventory because paper isn't free). It turns out that people have always wanted to write and didn't mind not getting paid for it, but they couldn't get anything published without passing by a gatekeeper so it didn't matter.
Now that everybody can be a publisher online and supply nearly endless, it's perfectly possible that writing might primarily become a leisure activity or something experts (e.g. lawyers, academics, coders) do as part of their main job. "Leisure" in this context doesn't mean that the writing itself has no goal other than to entertain the author, it just means writing because you want to, whether you get paid or not.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Toy example. If there's a demand for 10 great pieces of journalism every day, 10,000 pieces a day get published and great journalism is so hard to produce that your yield is only about 1 percent or one great piece for every 100 that are written. Well, do the math and it'll be clear that you are still overshooting demand by a factor of 10.
Even among professional media, there's a move towards seeing the journalism as a loss leader for more profitable things like events, speaking gigs, books etc.
(And you truly have to be kidding with those remarks about photography.)
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You're right, I didn't know how to interpret the technological and economic conditions statement.
However, it is still unclear to me. jdietrich and yourself suggest, then, that profiting from writing and publishing was due to only a handful of organisations holding a monopoly on the the 'writing market'. If we had X number of writers applying to fill writing positions at these few organisations, before these writers were profiting from it because fewer organisations meant bigger profits for themselves (they didn't have to share the 'wealth' with as many competitors) and their 'employees'. I hope I'm getting it right so far. Fast forward to the present, and now they are not. You are saying this is because writers can basically post their texts to be read for free on the Web and competition in the publishing world has increased. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything.
What I say to this is, if I have interpreted what you're saying correctly, how do you get that these same people wanted to write for free? I get that when you do something you love, it doesn't feel like work, but everyone wants to get paid for their services rendered. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. People need to pay bills and feed families. This is how our society is set up. I offer a service, you pay me for it. Similar to bartering practised in the past. Why is writing the exception? This I do not understand and I will not even start to guess, though I do have some ideas (information should be free, knowledge has no sole owner, etc.).
Writing as a leisure activity, as you have defined it, has existed ever since the Greeks. There is no "might primarily become a leisure activity"; it already has. Euripedes wrote about things that went in direct contrast to what most, if not all, Greek playwrights were writing and were supposed to write about. The equivalent of "being published" back then was winning literary contests to gain recognition. Euripedes (~400 BC) only won a few times while many out-won him by a lot (Sophocles by five times, winning 20 times or so, I believe). This isn't some new phenomenon. Writers's desire to write without getting paid or publishing has had very little to do with only oligopolies or semi-monopolies being in existence at a certain point in time. Another example: Don Quixote (1605 AD) by Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges (early 20th century) spoke at length about his embarrassment for wanting to publish, because his father never wanted to be published and they speak of a long history of writers who publish as losing a sense of integrity.
And yes, all this meant, little to no pay.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Actually, I wasn't referring to only bad online writing. In fact, bad writing in print is more dangerous and can cause more harm, because the average person still puts more weight and confidence on the printed word, because people think it is harder to publish a book.
Just to be clear, I never said that there is no or little or lower quality writing than before, be it on or offline.
With regard to photography, I think there is a creative side to photography that is hard to measure. But I'm not referring to that. At my workplace, we have an in-house photographer. We don't use artistic photographers. There is very little creativity involved (my photographer colleague tells me this himself). I don't know much about photography, but he tells me they should know about lighting, shutt...
Why do you insist on picking the most unlikely interpretations of whatever someone is saying? :-) What I meant was that people will still write even if not getting paid, not that they actively prefer not getting paid for their writing and putting it on the web for free. And when there's tons of supply (as there will be if people write regardless of demand), prices go down, meaning that very few people actually will get paid.
This is off-topic, but it always interests me how someone trained in the arts approaches argument and discussion compared to someone trained in the sciences. Sometimes I feel like you do; people seem to interpret what I say very differently, emphasising different parts of my argument.
I had a feeling we were still not understanding each other, but we'll leave it at that.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
- Samuel L. Johnson
"I have had it with these motherfking snakes who try to get motherfking content for free."
- Samuel L. Jackson
As a pretty successful freelance writer for 15+ years I would respectfully ask the original poster to please kiss my ass. If writing well were easy, everyone could do it. But it isn't, and they can't. Some people will still pay for quality, even if the Internet doesn't always reward it.
(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.
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 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
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 sense that, for a long time, the world of journalism has told itself that it is a fundamental pillar of democratic society. While true, the implication is that society owes it something. You might even extrapolate that a journalist doing an investigation that did not result in a published story, has still added value because they have kept the authorities in check.
However, the funding for this type of work only really existed as a quirk of the technology that newspapers used and now that the public has the opportunity to only pay for the stories they're interested in; I think society will need more constitutional rights regarding access to government data and a crowd-sourced monitoring effort to prevent corruption.
I, like you, don't feel a moral imperative to pay someone for putting in a days work regardless of what they produce at the end of it. I would donate to political campaigns regarding constitutional rights to open data though.
I went to J-school. I have the benefit of holding a degree from one of the most prestigious schools in the world.
I've been out of school for six years and have yet to find a single job, in spite of the half-dozen successful internships with various mega-media corporations.
Surely! InsertQuarterly.com, we believe gamers are growing up and gaming 'content' in general is feeling a little outdated. We're going to publish original, fresh content from writers in the industry who are passionate about what they do. We're just trying to focus on content (the stuff that matters). Experience doesn't really matter to us, all we care about is if you have something awesome, amazing, insightful, or fresh to share :)
good luck, i think there is enough room for a decent gaming site (RPS is living proof). Just don't get sucked into "we need to give xx percent", that normally ruins the site.
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.
A good friend of mine was earning a decent salary as a tech blogger for CNET. In 2009, they let him go, and now he is barely making ends meet with some sort of deal with another site where he earns commission based on page views. I think it's a general trend.
At least one major conference organizer / publisher is really skinny on speaker expenses to the extent it costs speakers money to go talk at their conferences.
Maybe journalists need to be rebranded into "intelligence gatherers." Not many people will pay for stories. They will pay for useful intel that isn't shared with a wide audience. "They" being governments, corporations, investors.
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.
I liked this one commentor as well, "she did NOT have the budget 4 Dat, and did I know anyone who would do it for FREE?"
I get this a lot from technical recruiters. "Your hourly rate is too high, but do you know anyone else?" Dude, my friends are all pros and we all come at a high price. And I'm certainly not going to do your job for you tracking them down. GTFO.
Or when people in malls try to hand me flyers, "I'm not throwing your garbage away for you."
142 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThere is still a great bunch of journalism out there, like Vice (who actually did the original reporting) and then there are folks like this guy who wishes for days of yore. The Atlantic puts out plenty of great content from great writers who get little cash for their efforts.
The market changed drastically on this guy and he hopes he can get more PR from this free blog post than a free byline on theatlantic.com
Good luck to him.
That's the reblog rate.
A confusing sentence if ever I've seen one, but are they saying they're offering $100 for reblog or for something else?
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.
> 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.
I am speaking in pure material terms. I am not injecting morality.
This is a despicable trend because we are seeing emergent, widespread immiseration in advanced, developed countries.
The quality of our journalism is suffering, and journalism is a bulwark against corruption in a democracy. Corruption is bad not because it is immoral but because it leads to waste, which reduces our material well being. David Simon, the creator of The Wire has spoken about how important local papers were in catching corruption at the city and state level of government.
I said that this is worse than sweatshops because at least in a sweatshop the workers earn subsistence wages.
> 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.
The product and skills are valuable. There is a demand for them. What we are witnessing is deflation. The demand is strong, the ability for the creators to be credited is what has broken down.
I will not just be a passive observer in all of this. The end game to this scenario is obvious. We are looking down the barrel of a new feudalism, and I do not want a period of reduced living standards and stagnation.
An entire generation has had it's prospects diminished, and the trend is only accelerating.
Perhaps all that is needed here for the market to correct this is for consumers to be educated. This is a new trend, and I would like to draw people's attention to it.
Do you still feel warm, fuzzy and excited when you buy a ticket to SXSW? When you know the festival organizers, bars, restaurants and hotels are all making money, the only people not making money are the performers and the volunteers that draw the crowds and make everything run?
In the absence of knowledge about how SXSW works the organizers are able to exploit the performers. I am not going to keep their secret for them.
I'm boycotting SXSW until their labor practices change. Who's with me?
What journalism outlets do you pay money to subscribe to?
That is not enough, and point taken. If you have any recommendations for a high quality subscription only journalism operation please tell me.
Where I have changed considerably though is with video entertainment.
In my younger days I used to use bittorrent, and megavideo et al... and rarely pay for movies/tv shows.
Jaron Lanier changed my mind about all of this. I now pay for a lot of movies/tv with my Netflix/Amazon Prime subscription and by renting/buying on iTunes and Amazon.
I even went so far as to create an app to facilitate this. My problem with not pirating movies is that the catalog of these online services are incomplete. You have to search a few, and sometimes a particular title is not available at all.
I built http://streamjoy.tv as an abstraction layer above Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. Search in one place, compare availability and price.
That is how I am putting my coding skills behind my economic philosophy.
When the machines do most of our jobs, my hope is we can still find meaningful, gainful employment in creative projects. In the current economic context the creators need a mechanism to be compensated.
Like TV, video, music, books, if you give the people an extremely convenient way to pay for your content, a good number of them will.
Little known fact, my gf is a journalist, an editor, at a certain publication named after a body of water, who may or may not be in her second week on the job and already embroiled in a bit of controversy. :-o
I really hope that everything works out well for your gf, and the Atlantic. I called trading exposure for work a despicable trend because it's happening in so many fields. Its unfair to place all the blame on the Atlantic.
People should go easy on The Atlantic. This new phenomenon needs more society-wide awareness and technologies for micro-payments.
My understanding is that regulations have stymied micro-payments. If that is the case legislation should be adopted to correct this.
Journalism is extremely tough, and has much more of my sympathy. I have total disdain for operations like SXSW that are very profitable and still stiff their talent.
EDIT:
After posting this I thought about how your gf may or may not be embroiled in this controversy. I think the issue of free work/immiseration of the creative class would make a good piece. The Atlantic could acknowledge that it has succumbed to economic (and perhaps social) pressure, do some human interest pieces on people that have been effected, people that have found ways to be viable despite the economic changes, and maybe regulatory reforms that might make micro-payments feasible.
I could see a continuing series on this topic being well received. This issue made it to the top of HN today, I think that validates the market.
If she had asked him for an interview on the topic (for free obviously) this would've been a non-issue. But she thought she would give him a byline, not knowing of his fame.
He became famous for interviewing pol pot when she was about a year old, and although he is well known in south east asia circles, he's not exactly a household name. The article is freely available now (if you care to read about basketball in NK), she just wanted to offer a wider audience with near zero extra work on his part. With the offer of $100 for a future online effort.
So she asked and got put on blast.
It's interesting how that works. It was a weird way to wake up this morning though.
TO YOUR POINT ON MICROPAYMENTS:
Yes, I think there is a per transaction fee for credit cards. Bitcoin couldn't work flat out because it only supports 350,000 total transactions a day and piddly little tips would eventually crush the blockchain. I think paypal could do it if you just tipped out of your paypal balance. Dwolla.com does do it... but no one has an account.
I have to say I agree with the people who argue people should be doing a lot of this for the love, but love doesn't pay the bills. I really like Stewart Lee's take on it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udqMA4YRQCk
Long listen, but he advocates for a lot of government funding for the arts. Likewise a lot of in the trenches journalism is sponsored by small orgs (pro publica, xyz foundations, etc) The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, etc just chip in a bit extra to publish some of that work.
This specific case was about already written, already available content.
If this was huffpo they would've just thrown quotes around it and put it up with a little link.
/rant
A good hacker should have a good grasp of how the world works, and how it changes over time.
Might as well just rename the site to Random News and post stuff from every field there is.
The fact that this one is on top and has received a huge amount of comments already, makes me think that a good part of the people frequenting this site found it interesting and relevant.
This post invites discussion on a number of fronts.
i) It demonstrates one person's work and information flow through a day. Good hackers will spot opportunities to make that a bit easier.
ii) We can discuss the problems of finding good longform journalism. Good hackers will spot opportunities around collation of great articles, or filtering news for people.
iii) There are problems around paying people to create decent journalism. There are opportunities around this. The current ad-driven model sucks, with it's reliance on pageviews and linkbait and controversialist nonsense.
Hacker News seems appropriate :)
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
[1] - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A) it is futile: people upvote what they upvote. No amount of whining will affect that. B) If something gets upvotes and comments, then obviously it's of interest to enough people.
If you have genuine confusion as to why people upvoted, perhaps a question asked in good faith along those lines would be the proper way to find out.
We have a celebrity-obsessed culture in the US in particular, and it's becoming clear that too many people would sell their soul just to be noticed. That's the overabundant supply side. I think, at the end of the day. That's the real problem.
Assuming: 30,000 page views, 2-5% conversion rate, $4.99 price (Amazon takes 30%, so $3.49 profit)
You could make $2095 - $5239.
You're right, 2-5% is high. But I do think an article that leads into a pitch for a topical e-book would convert well with Atlantic traffic.
You could just not renew your subscription I suppose.
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.
We already do it most other professions. (Entrepreneurs, artists, Doctors, Lawyers etc)
One's personal brand can have credibility added to it by association with a large publication, but that association does not outweigh the value the individual brings. Especially if the costs associated with that publication no longer make sense.
As newspapers and online publishers continue to degrade their reputation through sponsored content (both off and online) and silly page view chasing slide shows and posts, the value they bring to the reader is also decreasing.
These institutions are failing. The individual or collaborative group of individuals is what will rise from the ashes.
We already do it most other professions. (Entrepreneurs, artists, Doctors, Lawyers etc)
One's personal brand can have credibility added to it by association with a large publication, but that association does not outweigh the value the individual brings. Especially if the costs associated with that publication no longer make sense.
As newspapers and online publishers continue to degrade their reputation through sponsored content (both off and online) and silly page view chasing slide shows and posts, the value they bring to the reader is also decreasing.
These institutions are failing. The individual or collaborative group of individuals is what will rise from the ashes.
Then we have a community of readers with "Scrobbling" browser add-on that measures reading speed and read through percentage. Whenever they read, they implicitly rate the article with their behavior. Later the articles are recommended to people who read same sources, topics and journalists. This has worked pretty well, at least what we hear from our users. If someone has better definitions of quality journalism, would love to hear those.
The parent said something like "there's not enough demand, and too much supply". You said something like "it's very expensive to produce good journalism". The two statements are not contradictory.
I do agree with you that there is a definite problem with the current situation, by the way.
Perhaps there's very little demand for high quality journalism and I'm just being naive, but I hope not.
I do think that there'll be a future where high quality journalism is flourishing, but not with the current business models, and not with the current way of news publishing. My hope is that at some point a startup will figure out the correct ingredients (and I doubt social news, or anything in that domain is the answer)
A high quality article might cost 100 times as much to create as a low-quality one, but the returns from it (ads, subscriptions, whatever) aren't anywhere near 100x as much. At this point, all magazines, newspapers and similar outlets have figured this out.
There may be some sort of niche possible in ebooks aimed at relatively narrow niches - niches that aren't served by general interest publications. But for regular old publishing/"journamalism"/opinion pieces.... the outlook for making a living at those is not good.
Additionally, the best writers don't have to rely on publishers anymore, they can monetise their skills themselves.
But the more significant problem is the demise of journalistically savvy publishers. Content is not a priority, period. Unless, of course, you're talking about 'content marketing,' which is essentially advertising in disguise.
Journos will have to ignore the traditional glass wall between editorial/advertising to make a living. And there's always been some push from the top in terms of promoting favored advertisers or even squelching a negative story. But of the last three publishing groups I've worked for, two were run by glorified ad execs who considered editorial staff as a cost drain, and who were constantly trying to find ways for the department to 'earn its keep.'
The best was a newspaper group still managed by the founders, admittedly a labor of love but profitable, until health issues prompted the sale. Now the product is hardly recognizable. Remote bureaus were quickly closed, and the chain of "hometown" papers no longer have offices in the communities whose names are on the banners.
Hyperlocal websites are trying to fill the void, and doing a reasonable job with no resources in many places. But it just ain't the same as developing local knowledge and journalistic skills over a career with the same publication.
I have just one thing echoing about in my head: "We get what we deserve"
Take the recent US election, for example. Why would a reader expect to be better informed by reading traditional journalists, even those doing high-quality work, than by reading Nate Silver or Andrew Gelman?
"High-quality journalism," to be blunt, is in trouble because it's not really that good. It's just that nobody had a better alternative until the Internet gave them one.
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.]
Or you can write a bitchy blog post and keep writing for nknews.com
Best "Yeah, sure" email I've ever sent :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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 trick...
They said nothing about computers doing all the writing. It's about technological conditions (printing being really expensive and thus information hard to share) that lead to economic conditions (newspapers as semi-monopolies both for publishing and for advertising, limited inventory because paper isn't free). It turns out that people have always wanted to write and didn't mind not getting paid for it, but they couldn't get anything published without passing by a gatekeeper so it didn't matter.
Now that everybody can be a publisher online and supply nearly endless, it's perfectly possible that writing might primarily become a leisure activity or something experts (e.g. lawyers, academics, coders) do as part of their main job. "Leisure" in this context doesn't mean that the writing itself has no goal other than to entertain the author, it just means writing because you want to, whether you get paid or not.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Toy example. If there's a demand for 10 great pieces of journalism every day, 10,000 pieces a day get published and great journalism is so hard to produce that your yield is only about 1 percent or one great piece for every 100 that are written. Well, do the math and it'll be clear that you are still overshooting demand by a factor of 10.
Even among professional media, there's a move towards seeing the journalism as a loss leader for more profitable things like events, speaking gigs, books etc.
(And you truly have to be kidding with those remarks about photography.)
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
However, it is still unclear to me. jdietrich and yourself suggest, then, that profiting from writing and publishing was due to only a handful of organisations holding a monopoly on the the 'writing market'. If we had X number of writers applying to fill writing positions at these few organisations, before these writers were profiting from it because fewer organisations meant bigger profits for themselves (they didn't have to share the 'wealth' with as many competitors) and their 'employees'. I hope I'm getting it right so far. Fast forward to the present, and now they are not. You are saying this is because writers can basically post their texts to be read for free on the Web and competition in the publishing world has increased. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything.
What I say to this is, if I have interpreted what you're saying correctly, how do you get that these same people wanted to write for free? I get that when you do something you love, it doesn't feel like work, but everyone wants to get paid for their services rendered. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. People need to pay bills and feed families. This is how our society is set up. I offer a service, you pay me for it. Similar to bartering practised in the past. Why is writing the exception? This I do not understand and I will not even start to guess, though I do have some ideas (information should be free, knowledge has no sole owner, etc.).
Writing as a leisure activity, as you have defined it, has existed ever since the Greeks. There is no "might primarily become a leisure activity"; it already has. Euripedes wrote about things that went in direct contrast to what most, if not all, Greek playwrights were writing and were supposed to write about. The equivalent of "being published" back then was winning literary contests to gain recognition. Euripedes (~400 BC) only won a few times while many out-won him by a lot (Sophocles by five times, winning 20 times or so, I believe). This isn't some new phenomenon. Writers's desire to write without getting paid or publishing has had very little to do with only oligopolies or semi-monopolies being in existence at a certain point in time. Another example: Don Quixote (1605 AD) by Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges (early 20th century) spoke at length about his embarrassment for wanting to publish, because his father never wanted to be published and they speak of a long history of writers who publish as losing a sense of integrity.
And yes, all this meant, little to no pay.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back: > Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Actually, I wasn't referring to only bad online writing. In fact, bad writing in print is more dangerous and can cause more harm, because the average person still puts more weight and confidence on the printed word, because people think it is harder to publish a book.
Just to be clear, I never said that there is no or little or lower quality writing than before, be it on or offline.
With regard to photography, I think there is a creative side to photography that is hard to measure. But I'm not referring to that. At my workplace, we have an in-house photographer. We don't use artistic photographers. There is very little creativity involved (my photographer colleague tells me this himself). I don't know much about photography, but he tells me they should know about lighting, shutt...
Here's another way to look at it, if you're still not following: http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1220
This is off-topic, but it always interests me how someone trained in the arts approaches argument and discussion compared to someone trained in the sciences. Sometimes I feel like you do; people seem to interpret what I say very differently, emphasising different parts of my argument.
I had a feeling we were still not understanding each other, but we'll leave it at that.
- Samuel L. Johnson
"I have had it with these motherfking snakes who try to get motherfking content for free."
- Samuel L. Jackson
As a pretty successful freelance writer for 15+ years I would respectfully ask the original poster to please kiss my ass. If writing well were easy, everyone could do it. But it isn't, and they can't. Some people will still pay for quality, even if the Internet doesn't always reward it.
dt
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.
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.
However, the funding for this type of work only really existed as a quirk of the technology that newspapers used and now that the public has the opportunity to only pay for the stories they're interested in; I think society will need more constitutional rights regarding access to government data and a crowd-sourced monitoring effort to prevent corruption.
I, like you, don't feel a moral imperative to pay someone for putting in a days work regardless of what they produce at the end of it. I would donate to political campaigns regarding constitutional rights to open data though.
I've been out of school for six years and have yet to find a single job, in spite of the half-dozen successful internships with various mega-media corporations.
*A single media job.
I'm starting my own online publication, and even though we're pre-revenue I'm STILL paying our writers.
Why? Because I truly believe in craft and content. Good, fresh, original content should definitely be compensated for.
I'll keep an eye on you guys, good luck.
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.
At least one major conference organizer / publisher is really skinny on speaker expenses to the extent it costs speakers money to go talk at their conferences.
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...
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.
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.
I get this a lot from technical recruiters. "Your hourly rate is too high, but do you know anyone else?" Dude, my friends are all pros and we all come at a high price. And I'm certainly not going to do your job for you tracking them down. GTFO.
Or when people in malls try to hand me flyers, "I'm not throwing your garbage away for you."