Tuesday, February 17, 2009
News / News Bites Let's pretend
Posted by Michael Miner on 02.17.09 at 04:32 PM
I owe this one to my colleague Kate Schmidt. She was taking a look at my recent Hot Type on the Huffington Post and its reliance on people who contribute for nothing. Kate noticed this response posted online:
"...Ms. Huffington is merely cashing in on the fact that writers expect to be treated badly. Meanwhile, she has a bundle of money, thanks to marrying a rich husband. It's shameful, I think. The problem is that there are plenty of people who will writer for free to see their names in print."
No doubt she was looking at a typing mistake, but it was an evocative mistake. There are people who write, and there are people who writer. The writerers are a grown-up version of the kid who sits in a parent's lap and twists and turns the wheel of the family car parked in the driveway. Why would anyone expect to get paid for the thrill of writering? Just living the writery life is reward enough.
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Huffington has modeled her "give em a place to post and let em write for free" on websites that don't pay for the value added by their commenters. In both cases, the writers come into the deal with their eyes wide open. -- MrJM
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Sweet! A Reader editor blasting a business model that doesn't pay writers enough to live on! Can I assume that you'll be raising your rates for freelancers?! I don't know about 'writeryness' though. Seems a bit snotty. Do you really think the dividing line between writeryness and writing is the paid/unpaid line. I feel like I read a good dose of writeryness in the papers, and I also find better writing at some of the blogs than in many of the pieces in the Trib's Perspective or whatever they're calling it these days. HuffPost is an exercise in blustery starfuckery, so don't give it too much credence. Seriously, look at which pieces actually got comments tonight - Howard Dean got 301, Howard Schultz of Starbuck got 43, Arianna herself got 700. The next 13 pieces got an average of fewer than 10 comments. That's what you're worried about? Surely the Trib's old Voice of the People column was a bigger threat to paid journalism than Jim Arkedis on "the European masses" or Christina Page's "flog-blogging" (meaning writing for a blog to flog her latest book.) If no tree falls in the forest to provide the paper for your column, and no one's there to hear the tree or your column, then does it still make a cybersound? I say no. In terms of visits and visitors, HuffPost tracks very evenly with the Boston Globe site. Kind of puts things in perspective. And don't forget that someone DID get paid for at least two of those posts -- PR flacks almost certainly wrote for Schultz and Dean.
Someone might point Ms. Schmidt in the direction of 99% of the literary journals in North America, which pay nothing. Submittors, beyond being able to use such a publication on their CVs/submission cover letters/manuscript proposals, do so to see their name (and work) in print. I don't recall the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry publishing industries going out of business because of it.
I suppose I should clarify (still one coffee cup #1) above, not so much the "industry" (though unpaid writers in my example are the "citizen journalists" of creative writing, those same CJs allegedly contributing to the downfall of professional journalism). There's a parallel in there somewhere. Though I suppose, by the criteria thrown around in this ongoing debate, Van Gogh was a "citizen painter." I guess he should've left the painting to the real painters, who got paid.
To give some substantiation to my claim there's a lot of professional writeryness in the dailies, I submit Charles Madigan's Commentary piece today, on Burris, lying and the problems of Illinois politics: >When you get beyond simple statements, "I like cheese," for example, and into "sometimes, I like cheese in casseroles and on pizza but not necessarily by itself," (your lie) gets too complicated to remember. A cheesy embarrassment is likely to ensure (sic). Tell me that's writing and not writeryness. The bigger problem, of course, is not the cholesterol-laden writing. It's the flabby thinking. Charles M. wants a blue ribbon commission to save us from politics! He says this happened "in the old days". Yet he can't trouble himself to think of a blue ribbon commission that ever saved us from politics, nor to explain why, if it happened, the rescue was so short-lived. [And yeah, he really wrote "in the old days." I dunno, maybe he thought "once upon a time" made it too obvious that he really had no idea when or where this happened.] If Charles Madigan wants to reform politics, he could do worse than to walk over to his newsroom and tell them never to write another "so and so raised a lot of money in time for the filing period" article. With a tiny newshole for pre-election stories, they nonetheless write that article over and over again. I call it the "corruption primary." "Did you prostitute yourself sufficiently to raise enough money so the media will mention you in one of only three stories they'll write about your race?" If campaign finance is a topic of a story, it should always be a hard-headed story -- so and so got 30% of his contributions from industry X and here's what that might mean after the election. The Sun-Times ran a cute profile about how Sara Feigenholtz is the health care candidate because she'll always remember what a nice doctor her mother was. I think Sara probably knows an awful lot about health care, and her mother being a doctor is relevant. And I don't think the type of contributions she gets corrupt her. But if Sara is the health care candidate, an important way of explaining what that means is to let us know that she's receiving a lot of contributions from hospital administrators. And also from doctors. I'd guess that many people dislike hospital administrators. But they like doctors. I mention them both to make my point -- it's not about being "good" or being corrupted (though it can be.) But it's an objective measure of who a candidate is, who they're listening to and who they will listen to in office. If you give us "her mom was a doctor" and don't tell us about the contributions, you're being writery, not doing the obvious reporter's work that gives credibility to what you're saying. Professional writeryness helped give us Rod "he's a big fan of Elvis!" Blagojevich. The problems with Illinois politics are at least partly problems with Illinois journalism, problems that showed up long before Arianna had a blog (in fact, even before Arianna wrote for a Chicago newspaper).
Re: JoeBu I'm well aware of that, and wasn't even trying to make a point about HuffPo--I just thought the typo/inadvertent verb coinage was funny.
Apologies to Ms. Schmidt: seems, in my undercaffeinated state, I attributed to you a comment it seems you simply cited. Should've known such a simplistic attitude wasn't the product of the Reader's intrepid writers (as opposed to writer-ers). JoeBu regrets the error. ; )
