Today is a great time to be a writer. There are virtually no middlemen between you putting together a sentence and millions being able to read it. There are countless communities where you can find people to give you good feedback to hone your craft.
Unfortunately, that also means it's a really terrible time to be a writer for a living. Like every job that is (a) creative and (b) can be distributed digitally, almost all of the money is falling out of it.
Well no money because nobody's paying for it,and since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.
Free information is great,but let's face it,quality news cost money and time. What have we today?in the tech world? content farms (readwrite,thenextweb,techcrunch,mashable...) where writers often know nothing about the subject,or are using social justice warfare to manifacture outrage in order to generate impressions( http://readwrite.com/2014/09/09/apple-no-women-on-stage-dive... ). How can that kind of news scale? readers are not idiots. But most readers ,at the same time,refuse to pay for anything,so the money has to come from somewhere,so we get sponsorised news too...
Real journalists or writers have skills,what's missing is a plateform where pro journalists could monetize their skills to corporations directly,to write serious reports on a specific subject for instance,intelligence,sourcing,or just writing for the web(for commercial purposes,i.e. writing for content for a corporate website).
The current quality and quantity of information previously classified as "news" is far beyond what has ever existed previously. Look at any news event and compare the information that's immediately available now compared to similar news events 20 or 30 years ago. People on the ground publish pictures, videos, and reports as the events are happening, and we can read reports from any source in the world translated instantaneously into our native languages. And we have access to all of this using a tiny computer that fits in a pocket.
The idea that quality has decreased is simply an absurd and obvious myth perpetuated by editors and professional writers who are unhappy that their control over the journalism and publishing industries is evaporating. Furthermore, the market has never really paid for journalism, which was always subsidized by ads of questionable efficacy and ownership by wealthy individuals.
Finally, the big secret is the a massive amount of non-fiction by professional writers is embellished, plagiarized, or outright fabricated, and there is almost no real fact-checking in the industry. The regular scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.
Journalism and non-fiction writing as they exist now are in need of a major overhaul. Thankfully, technology is creating a situation where the world is naturally moving forward.
Well, there are still a couple of good ones. The Economist is exceptional, but it's there. Foreign Policy is also pretty good, though it the opinions are less polished - it seems written by people who haven't had to defend their article in front of colleagues before publishing. Anyway, it's good. On the tech front there's Anandtech and partly Ars Technica. I doubt the world has seen much better journalism than those four.
Immediacy and media quantity have shot up, like you say. It's one of the most amazing things about living in the world today.
Depth and investigation has suffered, and I think accuracy and objectivity have too. Not every story can be revealed with cell cameras in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you have to dig and dig hard.
I rolled my eyes every time someone linked to the “publications” you’ve mentioned: readwrite, thenextweb, techcrunch, mashable… add venturebeat, buzzfeed, cnet, business insider, the street, and many more……
It is all in the name of page hit, no longer about useful information.
The pageview journalism model is fascinating. Initially you just had to produce cheap content in volume. Now you actually have to build the incentive structure so that most of your content is free. The payouts to writers become somewhat of a skill based lottery.
Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.
Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.
One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.
The wild success of such social justice warfare proves that you are incorrect. Most people are too stupid to read, comprehend and / or care about legitimate news, and so the industry adapted in order to increase revenue. This adaptation started over 100 years ago, and now the transformation is almost complete.
There are still some excellent journalists out there, but they are outnumbered.
I don't think there is really no one paying for it. At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations for example. I doubt the magazines will generate large profits, but seem to be self sustaining and at least some of them have content you would not easily find on the web. Even with tablets, it is more pleasant to leaf through a 10 Dollar magazine about design, than the equivalent app. High quality magazines should still have some advantages over online advertising for some brands and they select specific audiences probably as efficient as elaborate online analytics. If you bought a magazine about miniature railroads or gardening, noone needs to store your purchase history to infer what products you might want to buy.
> At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations
That's because magazine publishers are responding to widespread decline in sales with more and more titles, trying to capture every possible niche under the sun.
> seem to be self sustaining
That's less and less true every year.
Try googling "Linux Voice"; read up on their background, what they are doing and why. You'll see how things are really going. The "magazine" format is dying a slow death, in the same way generalist TV is; their death will be slower than the one of newspapers, but it's written in stone in the same way.
> since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.
I think that's an oversimplification.
I believe the lack of publishing gatekeepers means the bottom end of the bell curve isn't being truncated. The variation in quality has certainly gone up, but I'm not sure if the mean or median have really moved.
Sure, there's a lot of crap to wade through, but there are also a lot of talented people who wouldn't have been able to find an audience going through old publishing systems.
If you're trying this seriously, consider Patreon. I support some obscure stuff, and that obscure stuff is currently trending between "lucrative hobby" to "middle-class job pay".
You still have to put in the work in the first place, of course, but I think the situation is slowly swinging around to being able to make a living at it again. But... not everybody is going to be able to make a living at it, and that's just not going to change, ever.
Patreon is a very interesting development, but I think it's crucial to be a personality and not just someone producing good work. People like supporting...well, people.
But it's exciting to see a writer like Cara Ellison get enough money to live and work on, or a group like RedLetterMedia get an extra $100k/year to make more and better stuff. People had been talking about direct audience support for years, and Patreon has proven that it can work.
Patreon is on my radar. I'm really excited about the idea of micropatronage, or just patronage in general. I think it's a workable idea but it needs a certain amount of critical mass before it can swing culture enough to be self-sustaining.
This is not really true. If your job prior to the internet was to earn six figures from covering celebrities then yes, your suffering. However, if your job as a writer was to use proper grammar and write logical correct and intelligent works, you can still find a lot of work paid very well. I'm consistently surprised how high writers are compensated in urban centers (although a lot seem to work remotely as well).
>Today is a great time to be a writer. There are virtually no middlemen between you putting together a sentence and millions being able to read it.
I'm wondering if any journalist has thought about the idea of a subscription model. For example, charging something like $5 a month to read all articles on their site or releasing long-form articles that cost $1 each.
This always struck me as odd. Writers are clearly aware making money in their industry now is an uphill battle, yet in music (which has the very same environment), people seem to think the industry is thriving.
I think what you see is that more and more musicians do it for mainly non-financial incentives. That's been true for most musicians since time immemorial, but it's even more true today.
It turns out you don't really need to pay people much to get them to make and play music. They just need some gear and enough free time to do it.
Depends on your motivations and what you want to get out of it.
For example, for me, it's a great time to be a writer. I wrote a book that I'm self-publishing. If I couldn't do that, I would have had to compromise it in ways I don't really like in order to please a publisher.
I probably won't be making as much money (not that I would make much with a traditional publisher), but that's OK. I'm lucky enough to have a decent-paying day job.
The way writing works today is perfectly attuned to what I want to get out of it.
I don't see anything unclassy about laying off workers after a big event. I'm assuming there's a decline of work after a big event, so if they're financially hurting a decline would be the correct time to have layoffs.
Surely that's better than laying them off the day before the event?
Attending events like the one yesterday has to be one of the best perks of the job, and if any of the employees had wind of what was coming, it would have been a great place to network for their next opportunity.
I was at the original iPhone launch for CNET, and there was a lot of stress, as you say. But watching Steve Jobs unveil it was a magical experience, and it also was very much a perk of the job.
So what? There are plenty of things that are really great to do once for fun, but still devolve to a grind when you do it all the time for work.
I'd drive a tractor trailer or a tank for free, or work on a 787 assembly line. But that doesn't mean the people who do it every day for a living consider it a perk to do their jobs.
Additionally, the people who cheerfully do this stuff for free are often the people you don't want doing it for you for real.
Are you seriously suggesting that we need more than, say, one person per language to type the things Tim Cook says into twitter? I think you're overstating the journalistic impact of MacWorld.
I cannot possibly be overstating the journalistic impact of MacWorld because I'm not stating it in the first place. I was only talking about how a job that seems glamorous and exciting from the outside can become boring and routine when you do it all the time.
How about being totally open about the state of the company, so people have advanced notice and the opportunity to prepare?
Surprise layoffs essentially reduce a significant inconvenience for the employer at the cost of a massive, stressful life changing event for the employees. It's always an asshole move.
Perhaps they think that there is a money tree that you just shake to pay employee salaries.
I think a comment like the parent (or perhaps that attitude) comes from a failure to realize that in the traditional business world business needs to operate at a profit. There is no runway like the startup runway.
Business and life isn't fair and it's not about hurt feelings. And you can't let personal emotions and feelings get in the way of sound business decisions. (This comes from someone who has and has seen what happens as a result...)
It's entirely possible that the laid off employees were fully aware of the pending demise and failed to take their own action first to their benefit (which for sure they would have done with "2 weeks notice" if they could).
While I see your point, I cannot agree with you. Business is not separated from the people that form it. Yes, good businesses are profitable. Yes, if it weren't for the profits, there should be no businesses.
But from my point of view, when you hire someone to work for you, you have some moral (if not legal) obligations with that person. You could say that laying them off was "good, financially". Maybe it was even the only thing to do. As I don't know the specifics, I don't blame Macworld for that.
Although, it is part of your businesses COSTS dealing correctly with your employees. Making theses costs disappear is not "maximizing profit". That is turning your head on a cost you have to pay in order for your business to work.
If you do not do that, you will pay the consequences. Dealing incorrectly with people will hurt you not in a way you can represent in your books, but will definitely hurt you.
Good businessmen are wise if they treat their employees well. It need not be for a higher sense of morality (although it should be), as there are at least a couple of good self-interested reasons to do so.
So you think that the company should sacrifice in a way that hurts them but doesn't benefit their employees. Sounds like a highly rational thing to do.
If they can't afford to keep their employees the thing for them to do would have been to lay them off between events, which would have meant before this last event. Not a few weeks after this event. If they could have afforded to lay them off a few weeks after this event it would have perhaps been better for both parties for them to wait until the next big event and then lay them off, which would have looked exactly the same as this.
Consider that the past few weeks may have been the extra time MacWorld was gracious enough to give them, while at the same time helping themselves so that they may be doing well enough to provide some of their former employees with freelance work.
What moral obligation do you feel was neglected here? Surely hiring someone doesn't create a moral obligation to never lay them off if you can't afford to pay them anymore.
As I said, I don't have the specifics so I can't judge the Macworld case.
Assuming it was an unexpected layoff right after a very demanding day of work, I can see some wrong things there.
First, you should inform people as soon as you made up your mind that you were going to fire them. Letting them work (a lot) and just after that letting them go is wrong. Is using them. Explaining the reasons for the layoff is the moral thing to do. Hiding it with an obvious intention of exploiting people's work without hindering their motivation is wrong (for me, but moral is usually a pretty subjective field).
A simple way to assess that you're up to no good is to see how the employees treat and refer to you after you let them go. And in this case, the twitter action does not feel very amicable to me.
Again, I don't know what really happened there at Macworld. But if someone is laid off and ends up feeling mistreated, maybe, just maybe, we should give him some credit and not directly assume that the business is right and they are just chronic complainers.
> First, you should inform people as soon as you made up your mind that you were going to fire them. Letting them work (a lot) and just after that letting them go is wrong. Is using them.
You're on very shaky moral ground, and I don't find it persuasive. I don't understand the moral obligation to inform as soon as the decision is made. Employment is a 2 way street. By this logic, employees are "using" their employers if they continue working while hunting for a new job. I don't buy that moral logic.
Moreover, morale is important for both employer and employee. You don't want to keep a disgruntled employee around to sap morale. A significant blow to morale can sink the entire enterprise, multiplying the number of layoffs.
> A simple way to assess that you're up to no good is to see how the employees treat and refer to you after you let them go.
Entirely too simple. An entirely legitimate difference of opinion can result in a disgruntled employee. Employees can have wildly inaccurate estimates of their own value and productivity. Losing your job almost always feels unfair. Even the most amicable of splits can still result in latent bitterness.
So if a former employee does go on a rampage, it's unreasonable to conclude that his employer was "up to no good".
People talk of "runway" in the context of a startup exactly because startups are usually at most a year away from running out and making significant capital investments while having no income at all.
I mean, I thought this is clear if you remember that the runway is what airplanes launch from.
We don't mention runway with developed businesses because they are run at timescales of multiple years. If you have to close your business and lay of all people tomorrow but knew nothing about the situation today, we rightly call those running such a business incompetent, and frankly unfit to be in charge of one. We can't tell people to not burn bridges and then excuse employers of the societal and moral obligations they enter into with hiring people.
We're at the turning point where great journalists are getting pushed out of their careers because jobs are vanishing under their feet. The content model has completely changed, some argue for the better. In the long term I fear the quality of content written will suffer, article accuracy will be reduced and we'll all be reading each others blogs about medicine [insert other topics here] (without ever having studied it or any previous knowledge on the subject). The Internet of "everyone's an expert" overnight is not something I'm looking forward to. Just look at all the overnight social media professionals. Many of these people don't have an understanding of how the Internet (or email) even works but they'll throw down the hot keywords to make themselves sound important; KPI's, User experience, etc etc.
I still feel there's huge opportunity in the learning space for online education. If I was a journalist or writer with specialized knowledge in a certain field, I'd focus my attention to that and bring my friends.
Journalists job is not to know about the thing they are covering; usually they have only slightly more knowledge than the layman; their job is to have relationships with people who can give them information the public doesn't easily have.
These relationships that lead to information becoming available won't and isn't going away, the people doing the reporting (now called bloggers) just aren't getting paid (much) for it. It's now a hobby. And that's ok.
As far as writings from experts; science journals still exist and AFAIK are not hurting or are in danger of being scaled back. Maybe someone with more knowledge can speak on the state of academic journals.
This might be a good case study for dying traditional form of online media. Credit goes to random dance of Google SERP. As per Alexa, search traffic (for macworld.com) is gone down from 50% to 30% of total traffic, in three months. Google decided to do a (un)fair distribution of traffic.
Niche content companies should remain lean to survive.
What is the catalyts for this? Apple's market share is similar to what is was a few years ago. Is there a decline in ad revenues? What is the reason for this.
My guess (as someone who worked for a decade+ as a journalist before leaving to create http://recent.io/) is increased competition for readers and advertising dollars. What <guywithabike> said is correct, especially the decline of print. Who wants to wait a month or two to find out more about yesterday's watch announcement? How many HN readers are actually paying for a print subscription to MacWorld?
Also, even if MacWorld moved entirely online, it's not like its web site is one of the only places to find this info, as the print magazine was in the 1980s. A lot of news organizations that are fierce competitors now simply didn't exist a decade or two ago. Hence today's major layoffs as opposed to reassigning the existing staff to the web. (When I look at the Recent.io knowledge graph, the top of the list of news organizations that cover Apple includes: Fool.com, Cult of Mac, Silicon Alley Insider, BGR, and TUAW.)
I wouldn't be surprised to see MacWorld with legacy costs and pay structures that make it less competitive against these upstarts.
My only print subscription is Bloomberg Businessweek. Seeing the week's cover in my mailbox is a highlight of my Saturday. But I got three years for $20.
The growth of tech websites has made print-based magazines extremely difficult to operate at profit.
While there are far more people using Apple devices, there are also much larger support communities for them as well, so a printed magazine is largely redundant.
Declining print subscriptions, most likely, and pressures to increase profit margins. They're ceasing print publication, but continuing to operate the website.
This is unfortunate, but that's the nature of publishing in this newfangled media landscape. (As they say.)
It seems like there's a lot of competition for "apple rumors" in general but I think the worst damage comes from within - the entire tech reporting industry just plagiarizes and cannibalizes other people's work, it doesn't require as much talent or manpower to reword articles.
The magazine market seems to be the worst possible use case for print, especially in the tech sector. With newspapers, at least you are only ever 1 day or maybe 1 week (sunday edition) behind the news, and its all general interest so there's probably something your reader hasn't read about in there.
On the contrary, look at the core demographic of a tech magazine to begin with: people obsessed enough to buy an entire magazine about one company's products. Add to that that that company's devotees are tech savvy and want the information yesterday, and you have a recipe for disaster for a magazine that comes out a month later with info.
Maybe a solution would be to focus on more in-depth style articles that cover exclusive information. I'm not sure that there's enough creativity around today for a publisher to be comfortable doing it but that'd be a way to produce non-daily content, if that makes sense.
The magazine market is running on fumes. Most of the print media companies haven't been able to replace the kind of revenue they used to see from subscriptions and in-print magazine advertisements in the on-line world.
Online advertising revenues per reader are through the floor compared to magazines, and everyone's going online now. You can sell a page in a magazine going out to 20-30,000 people for $5,000 or more. Getting $100+ CPM on a Web page doesn't happen.
The transition to mixed print/digital or all digital. Not handled well by magazine people. Some are making the transition (The Economist, Popular Mechanics) some are not (MacWorld and pretty much every other IDG title).
The only time I've ever bought a copy was when I was flying and needed something to read while taking off and landing, and even those days are gone now. Pretty sure I read maybe one page.
They could have shuttered the print magazine and kept the staff on to write for the website. Like all the other tech websites out there. Wonder why they didn't do that.
"On July 10, 2013 owner IDG announced that the magazine would cease its 30-year print run. The August 2013 issue was the last printed of PC World magazine, future issues will be digital-only."
(Once) famous earlier examples:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Dobbs: "In January 2009 Jonathan Erickson, the editor-in-chief, announced the magazine would become a section of InformationWeek called Dr Dobb's Report. and a Web site."
Yes, their/tech magazines' print business. A lot of print publications are doing well and even growing, but print is now basically a luxury world where the best 10% are thriving and the worst 90% are dying.. whereas it used to be more balanced.
Unfortunately, that also means it's a really terrible time to be a writer for a living. Like every job that is (a) creative and (b) can be distributed digitally, almost all of the money is falling out of it.