6 Jan 2010

Wages of Ink

The background that you need to read this is the following sequence of Tweets:

By @stevesilberman: Indeed: Writing rapidly becoming unpaid labor. [LAT] http://bit.ly/8y0NlR || http://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/7449005692

By @theatavist: Thank god my bank accepts news ecosystem social capital checks RT @stevesilberman: Writing becoming unpaid labor. [LAT] http://bit.ly/8y0NlR || http://twitter.com/theatavist/status/7449246433

By me: @theatavist @stevesilberman Uh, guys? For most of us, writing was always unpaid labour. Only a select few of you got where the cheques were. || http://twitter.com/doingitwrong/status/7449466953

By @stevesilberman: @doingitwrong Well sure. But stop paying doctors and see what happens to medicine. Writing, at its best, is social medicine. || http://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/7449521737

By @theatavist: @doingitwrong Unsure your point. That we're lucky to make a living at it? Yes! That since few do, we should celebrate shrinking wages? Uh... || http://twitter.com/theatavist/status/7451309748

My point doesn't fit well into 140 characters, so I'm making it here.

For most people, writing was always unpaid labour. We wrote journals or letters to friends or short stories we never showed anyone or for the school newspaper or ideas that got rejected by publications. Then the Internet made publishing easy and all of us unpaid labourers got unleashed on a much wider public. The consequences to the people who'd been making a living at writing were as predictable as they are dire.

I'm fascinated by the new subgenre of columns that boil down to columnists worrying about the changes being wrought to their income by the Internet. The article that Steve linked to feels like one of the worst of the genre. It's a bizarre mixture of category errors, rose-tinted nostalgia, unjustified leaps, and amongst all of that, real problems.

Begin with the category errors. I agree with Steve that the best writing is social medicine. But that's not what's at stake in the column. Cast a critical eye on the Craigslist of horrors at the opening; can you honestly say that any of those are underfunded ground-breaking reporting projects? They aren't. They are the crappy pablum shovelware that keeps the content engines churning. They don't need good writing (and boy, do they not get it) they need keyword-rich writing. Reiterating stuff that's come 161 million times before works just fine for their purposes. If writers can't make a living wage repackaging dieting tips, this does not strike me as a tragedy.

Which brings me to the rose-tinted nostalgia.
The crumbling pay scales have not only hollowed out household budgets but accompanied a pervasive shift in journalism toward shorter stories, frothier subjects and an increasing emphasis on fast, rather than thorough

Excuse me? A shift? When exactly was this golden age when papers and magazines were not full of repackaged writing, distorted obsessions with the news of the moment, human interest sidebars, barely concealed press-releases published as articles, and the like? Was it before or after the OJ Simpson Trial? Was it around the time that papers added a weekend gardening supplement? We really don't need more of these article (but we're sure gonna get them).

Look, this stuff is verbal junk-food. It's as empty and nutrition-free as a Filet O' Fish. The chefs who make your burger and fries get paid minimum wage because they are disposable and interchangeable. Why would you think that equally bland interchangeable content would garner any more income?

Which brings us to the leap. The entirety of the column consists of a string of anecdotes around people being underpaid for fast-food writing (shovelware, humour and opinion pieces) and then the threat identified is to good journalism. I think that good journalism is in serious trouble too. I just don't think that any evidence of that shows up in this column. It isn't even an exemplar of good journalism. It's a column of lazy reporting that acts like the plural of anecdote is data. It's as if the author came up with an angle, sent an email to Help A Reporter Out and Zagatified the responses.

This is a very bad time to be a writer if your income model focused around having opinions and being easy to reach. You are now in an environment where everyone else has an opinion too and for one reason or another, a lot of them are willing to write it down for less than you.

I feel uneasy making these kinds of observations because a lot of people I know and even more that I admire make a living as a writer. I'd like many of them to continue to do so. At the same time, I'm part of the problem.

As a consumer, I've never subscribed to a newspaper. This is unlikely to change given my RSS reader and Twitter feeds, both of which are drowning in excellent writing, much of which was produced for no pay.

As a producer, it's even worse. Twice a week, I post articles for free online that are as thoughtful and well-written as I can make them. There is no income model whatsoever. Why do I do this? Because at this stage, attention is more valuable to me than money. There are a lot of people like me.

Does anything that I produce come close to the quality and scope of something like Evan's Vanish experiment? No. Not by a long shot. And Clay Shirky aside, I suspect that there will always be a market for writing of that caliber, and that people like Evan will continue to make a living wage at what they do. But I'll put my writing up against just about any opinion column in your local paper. I think that the stuff I produce is better than what's there and I'm giving it away.

This is the third time that I've been part of the problem of massively devaluing the labour around content.

The first time was when I was part of a team starting a new videogame company. After putting together two demo games, we were hired by Disney to make a mobile version of Pixar's Cars. Why did Disney entrust a sliver of one of their biggest new properties to a band of unproven developers in frigid Canadia? I'm sure the quality of the pitch and art were an important part, but I suspect that the aggressively low budget helped. We paid ourselves a pittance - as one does at a start-up - but we didn't care. Anything to get into games.

We weren't the only ones pitching, I'm sure. And I'm sure that the people at the other studios thought their game ideas were great and worked as hard as we did to put a package together. Hopefully they all found another project and got paid good wages and went home at a reasonable hour. I doubt they did. For every person currently in the industry, there are dozens of people like us who want to be in the industry. Every time a work-for-hire studio starts to get too pricy, the publisher can roll the dice on a new player. The new studio will thank them for it.

The second time I was part of the problem came through work on Project Wonderful, an online advertising service that grew out of webcomics. Check out this thread in 2008 featuring that other victims of the death of newspapers: syndicated cartoonists. Does it look achingly familiar to you? Do you feel like some judicious edits could turn this into an argument about paying freelance writers for their work? The print guys are furious with the webcomics people. Can't they see that they're ruining it for everyone?

I wrote about this in 2008. My friends (many of whom are webcomics creators to varying degrees of success) have little sympathy for the syndicated cartoonists. Because the environment where syndicated cartoonists make a living is the environment where my friends don't even get a shot.

I feel similarly about the collapse of freelance income. The writing environment being eulogized is one where I don't get a shot, and I want my shot. The difference is that I'm friends with some of the people whose lives are likely to be impacted. So there's more guilt.