Lately I have been thinking about the death of - or deconstruction of, depending on your point of view - the news business, so-called. Journalism, in a word. What I was trained for in college. Gone the way of the buffalo in the form in which I learned it, from the people who taught and practiced it in that fashion. A gone dead train, that one. For the better? For the worse? All I know is, I’m pretty much out of work.
I mean paying, short-range work. If you like writing researched articles for three dollars per 600 word article, I can show you where to go on the web for that kind of thing. Otherwise, online publications tend to pay in a form of specie known as “link density.” They will trade you links, or more specifically, something on the order of link options — or perhaps the better term would be link propensities — in return for you writing articles for, basically, nothing.
Well. But you can’t just automatically get steamed about the people offering up this kind of work, since their ability to pay rests on the online advertising dollars they attract, which, in the splintered blogosphere, amounts to generally very few. So, unless you think the editors of blog magazines ought to pay you out of their own pockets, and with all due haste, the matter of no-to-low pay will not be solved anytime soon, and probably not in my lifetime, if my usual luck holds.
I imagine that scholars of the history of journalism can point to parallels from the world of print, such as the profusion of New York newspapers in the early years of the 20th century. Or something. These examples never seem all that reassuring. If the first rule of the New Thing That is Digital News is that digital news has almost nothing in common with the production and delivery of news in printed form — then we have to ask ourselves just exactly why there are supposed to be any valid historical comparisons in the first place. Now that the line between amateur and professional writer has been muddied beyond recognition, further subdivisions, or should we say subdomains, containing job descriptions such as “content provider,” not to mention “SEO optimizer,” which, if I understand rightly, would translate as “Search Engine Optimization Optimizer,” abound.
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Article comments
1 - Alessandro
I hear you. You, I hear.
2 - Kelly Jad'on
Mr. Hanson in Minnesota,
Great Piece! In a time when almost all other professions are becoming more specialized and usually licensed, online publishers do seem to be blurring the lines. However,"Content is King," still holds true. Readers know the difference between those who can and those who cannot.
3 - Alec
Great article, and I sincerely hope that you find a way to make money at what you do best. There are a lot of historical antecedents to the blogosphere, and you should also keep in mind that the "professional writer" was in some ways a relatively late arrival, with talented amateurs (often from the gentry or aristocracy) often more typically represented.
Not too long after the printing press became established in the West, you had not only newspapers, but pamphleteers -- the true analog to contemporary bloggers -- who widely varied in their levels of expertise, competence and stylishness.
One of the big challenges facing newspapers (and TV and radio stations as well) is that more people want free stuff and are willing to depend upon bloggers even though bloggers do very little original reporting. It's great when a blogger explores an area that was missed by a professional reporter, but if we all had to depend solely upon bloggers for basic reporting, we would soon be deluged with ignorant navel gazing, bombastic ideological cheer leading and outright misrepresentation of facts masquerading as punditry.
The additional problem is that even though online news is "free," in reality this means that people who get their news online are leeching off of those who buy physical newspapers and the advertising revenue that newspapers get from their physical and online editions.
Ultimately, newspapers will have to come up with a new economic model to remain viable (maybe some kind of shared royalties based on online hits).
Meanwhile, an even greater threat to knowledge in general are the increasing numbers of people who claim that they want accurate news, but really want the ultimately empty promise of news sites which confirm their ignorance and preferences instead of news sites which honestly attempt to tell them what they need to know.
4 - Dirk Hanson
Alec, I think you pretty succinctly nailed it down.
As you say, it's great when a blogger breaks some news that was missed or dismissed by print media. But in general, researching, interviewing, evaluating and maintaining sources, fact-checking, and rewriting--a.k.a. journalism--is a craft with its own learning curve, like any other trade or line of work.
The danger is that the terms "blogger" and "journalist" are sort of merging in the public mind.