A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist
natethayer.wordpress.com
natethayer.wordpress.com
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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, shutter speed, aperture, and take the photo so they can easily edit the white space out of the photo to be published online. They take product photos. If a product looks dark or distorted, we re-shoot it. Colour-matching only barely matters. Unless it is totally off, we don't re-shoot because the colours are slightly off.
In writing, even scientific and technical writing can be good or bad, depending on who reads it. What's interesting is that a lot of technical writing is not written for technical people or those well-versed on the topic at hand, so these people make the worst critics of it. It is harder to get someone not well-versed in it, who actually is your audience, to get to tell you what needs to be improved or what they don't understand about the technical writing, because they don't understand what they don't understand to begin with.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
Yeah, 'noodling around', like this guy: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html
Design done well increases understanding. Data visualization done well increases understanding. They are integral to high-quality journalism, not a decoration to place around it.
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.
Meanwhile, Americans are terrifyingly ignorant of basic facts about the world around them and their own lives.
"Well, the elite media exists, and people with college-level reading skills know what's up, so I guess we don't have to do anything" isn't a real answer.
That's a demand problem, not a supply problem; in the GP you wrote: "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." But there isn't "a frightening dearth of well-produced content." You can argue that too few people want to read it, but you can't legitimately argue that it doesn't exist.
I can! I said:
>well-produced content from a variety of perspectives that seeks to measurably increase understanding
I would argue that lots of the quality stuff out there is designed for consumption by an audience that's already really smart and well-informed, and doesn't increase what we can call "net understanding" by the whole of society.
What about targeting people who aren't already well informed? Fox News is great at this, only their goal is to help the Republican Party. What if someone did the same thing with the goal of making people smarter?
I know this isn't a new idea and sounds incredibly naive. I don't care. There's a need for this whether the demand is there or not.
We remember the good stuff.
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.
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.
How expensive can it be if you guys are getting content for free in exchange for "exposure" ;)
I'm also not talking about video. I'm talking about interactive storytelling that combines interactive elements with strong narrative elements that gives people the ability to explore, and that can grow over time.
It might cost more to produce, but it also isn't a one-shot thing. If you were to take what the Atlantic did on gun violence and you had built something a little more substantial around it, something that broke outside of the web template, and committed to adding to it over time, you could continue extracting value out of it for a long time.
When things like "explainers" are produced, they usually sort of fade away after a while because they're released in the same episodic format most journalism is, even though they don't really work the same way.
For instance, This American Life's "Giant Pool of Money" is as relevant now as it was when it was produced, but to find it you have to look in a date-based archive. That doesn't make any sense.
It's easier than ever to graze on low quality, tabloid journalism -- "linkbait," if you will. Sensational headlines and puff pieces have always existed, and has always helped sell both tabloids and even more respected publications. But the web and social media make it easier to indulge in this sort of thing, and once you've clicked on one bit of linkbait -- or even a serious news story -- you're presented with a list of additional linkbaity stories.
Given the high demand, and low cost to produce, it's little wonder we see more and more churnalism and linkbait.
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.
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.
You could just not renew your subscription I suppose.
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.
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.
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.
The general population has terrible taste in music, so talent is no longer appreciated. Why should journalism be any different?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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."
The problem with commodity news is not one of quality but of quantity. Much like any other commodity product, news is driven by volume. Unfortunately, demand has far outstripped the supply. In the absence of clear differentiators, organizations rely on SEO tactics, content marketing and social media tools as new distribution channels for news.
Most technology-oriented solutions, however, put a different tack to the problem. They approach it from the efficiency perspective. Acquiring news (or, reporting and writing news) is an expensive activity. In fact, were it not for journalists’ famously low salaries, the returns on investment for news acquisition would be unsustainable.
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.
Boycotting The Atlantic is easy (and free). Paying journalists for quality content isn't.
That's how most journalism works and has worked. The content is free to consume, assuming you'll accept the advertising. Journalism/writing was always the carrot, but the ads the stick.
So what's changed. Two things:
1. There's so much more writing/journalism/creative arts in general being produced that the valuation of these entities has declined
(coupled with)
2. The Internet producing a culture that's less obsessed with quality, correctness and robustness.
Which has led to new consumption patterns: we want a lot more in smaller chunks and it's worth less to us (in aggregate).
So, in other words you don't want to pay for it. You want someone else to pay for it.
It doesn't help that supply has far exceeded demand, but there is still a convertible value to content.
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.
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
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?
1) Bloganda (internet) has beaten the publishing houses for promulgating corporate (group) memes.
2) Specialized internet platforms (ebay, CL, cars.com, autotrader.com, MLS listings) match buyers and sellers more efficiently than print publications, so that's where the money flows to now. As a consequence, prev(f)ailing publishing houses can't afford to pay above market-value money for low/no-demand content. Articles are the product of the writer and the information content is what people value. A good name (brand) is a derivative (effect) of regularly supplying the information desires of a non-trivial quantity of information consumers (subscribers/readers).
3) The editorial structure of the prev(f)ailing publishing industry doesn't scale outside of local/regional markets. The internet is global, right?
I've written an article about the economics of the prev(f)ailing publishing industry, why it is a hopeless structure and where I believe the ball is moving. HN hell-banned the site in week one post-beta launch, so I can't post the url here. If you're interested you can search for:
"will people pay for news"
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."
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.