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Is the Internet Bad For Professional Writers
destinyland writes "The internet democratized writing — but has there been collateral damage? A former magazine editor asks 10 professional writers how the net has changed their profession, and even the act of writing itself. Has the net changed the demand for longer articles, or created more opportunities for more kinds of writing? It's a fascinating read that belongs in a time capsule for the variety of reactions captured — including the author who complains reading time was traded away for time to maintain our applications, and adding "Gates and Jobs...ought to be disemboweled — yes, on the internet.""
Most print publications would have known to end that title with a question mark.
it's always been tough to be a professional writer. i can't think of any given time in history where the number of people who could live solely off the income of writing hasn't been insignificant in comparison to the total population.
the internet is just new technology that will help in some ways and hurt in other ways. me, i'm not concerned about this dinky little group. my concern is - how has it impacted the reader. there have always been many more of us than the writers. have we been benefited by the internet? i think so.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This entire article is the equivalent of a bunch of whining, wanking carpenters complaining that people can resort to do-it-yourself for many home projects these days or that "regular people" have video cameras at home and not just big film directors.
Yes, the internet has made a lot of people much stupider (witness your average idiot's abbreviated text message session) but the probability of such people being consumers of quality magazine or book content is low to begin with, even if the internet doesn't exist.
The Internet is good for amateur writers with talent.
I'm guessing the article says it's bad for professional writers with limited talent. And everyone else is to blame for the professional writers' comeuppance.
I believe that the increasing popularity of television, with its immediacy of coverage, its focus on 30-second soundbytes, and its tendency towards sensationalist presentation, has had a much more profound impact on traditional printed media (newspapers and such) than the world wide web.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I don't think the Internet is necessarily bad for professional writers. There is a trend, certainly among technical folks, to rely on blogs and wikis and the like for information, but I think that will pass. Just as politicians can get away with sound-bites for a while, so the technical audience will tire of reading the same 200-word blog posts with a somewhat rehashed idea of someone else's 200-word blog post, which was just a combination of a couple of ideas mentioned on a wiki they linked to anyway. People don't just read technical writing for a quick idea. They read it for some depth of understanding, an insightful explanation, clear examples, and countless other goals that Joe Amateur just can't satisfy with his 200 words of quickly and casually constructed blog post.
However, the Internet is going to be bad news for people who can't write for an Internet audience. You need a different writing style on-line. Most people don't sit down and read many screens of essay-like text all at once, nor do most people print such articles to read off-line. We can still have depth and insight and all that good stuff, but it has to be written the right way. It needs to be easy to scan. It needs to be organised in relatively short sections, or with other natural reading breaks that suit the material. There needs to be some effort put into effective presentation — and I don't mean turning every essay into a 3Gazzilibyte 1hour video interview, just because you can!
The Internet is also going to be bad news for bad writers. There are plenty of decent writers on the web, and more than enough excellent ones in technical fields. No-one needs to read paid-by-the-hour, padded-out-forever-to-bump-the-word-count text-that-goes-on-forever-pointlessly. Writers who have specialised in producing such text to satisfy their contracts are going to be out of luck.
The Internet is also going to be bad news for professional writers who occasionally write something really good, but mostly write filler. It is easy to link to a single article or blog post directly, and good work will typically be recognised as such. But if you want your home page to be the thing people think of, or you want people to subscribe to your blog, you're going to have to produce consistency. Sure, some work will always stand out from the everyday writing, even for the best author in the world. But no-one's getting famous for writing one article and then having nothing.
So the bottom line is, if you're a professional writer who can consistently produce worthwhile content with occasional really good stuff, and you can adapt your presentation to the medium, then there's no reason you can't be successful. If you're not a good writer, even if you once write a brilliant piece five years ago, or if you can't adapt your writing to the target audience, well, you're going to find fewer opportunities than you used to. It's not like writing books is going to die out (though writing for magazines is fast going that way), but the Internet is the ultimate meritocracy when it comes to content, so if you're not up to standard with enough material a cut above to get you noticed, this isn't the career for you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's hard to plagi^h^h^h^h^h quote an article if it is too large. More than a paragraph or so and it won't fit into the summary at Digg.
It certainly seems that the net has created a cottage industry built on not citing the original article and driving technorati. One might say that one denies the other. The drive isn't news anymore, it's notoriety and advertising. Long articles and sources sour both of those. I don't think there's a shortage of people who want to read the long stuff, there's just so many that can't be bothered. Both groups pay the same per view, so who are you going to appeal to?
The internet may have changed some things, but it's AdSense that is murdering information on the web. Is it any wonder that the more successful google is, the less useful their index has become.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Has the Internet given mindless fact less fools equal footing as real journalists.
Considering that a major portion of the "real" journalism I see these days is notes from a press conference from , I don't think that equal footing is undeserved. Good investigative journalism is more and more rare, and weeks of coverage on some starlet's alcohol problem seems to be on the rise. There's some good journalism out there, still, but it's harder and harder to find.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Remember, censoring porn from kids is bad; censoring porn from hurting women's feelings is good.
Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up.
The real damage from the Internet is that pounding-the-pavement newspaper journalism is no longer cost effective. That's not because anyone can blog; it's because Internet advertising is killing local newspapers. Ads for jobs, apartments, garage sales - all have moved to the Internet. Classified ads were a major money stream for newspapers, and that stream has dried up. Most newspaper content today is driven by press releases and other publicity. "News is what someone doesn't want published - all else is publicity". Pick up your local paper and mark the stories that didn't start from a speech, press release, wire service, or police report. In many papers, there won't be any. That's the problem.
of people you've never heard of who claim to be Writers who write about writing. Like musicians who write songs about being on the road doing gigs or business people who spend all their time attending effectiveness training seminars, it demonstrates a certain loss of perspective in the craft. Isn't it interesting how most people who write these "how to publish a novel" books are either obscure or unpublished themselves? That snippy comment aside, I think the hubris-ridden article raises some good points. Writing well is a craft, but like any craft it takes place within constraints. Those constraints are dynamic and writers should be judged within their appropriate local conditions. However, if the constraints on your craft are rapidly expanding (e.g. in the case of writing and the internet) and you don't acknowledge the adjustment, your rigidity sounds about as silly as a Sumerian high priest bitching about how no one seems to do cuneiform right anymore.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
My significant other switched from being CEO of a small company being a writer back in 2002, when the economy was in the tank. Now she's building another company around small-volume custom publishing, taking advantage of the changing trends in print media. She had fun being a pure writer while it lasted, but where's the money? She pays $25 for an article from 2nd-tier local writers, and $125 from the top-tier. She has unpaid interns who just want the experience so that one day they can be paid writers. Even as CEO of a small publishing company, she's making far less than she did as a regular employee at her previous high-tech job.
I feel for writers, but their not the only ones feeling the squeeze. This morning I came up with a fairly depressing argument about where the new startups are in high-tech: practically nowhere. If you want to do a startup making chips, forget it. If you build digital, then FPGAs, microcontrollers, and DSPs have it covered on the low-end, and digital high-end ASICs are too damned expensive. Analog is just too hard, though there's some room there. If you want to do a startup in software, you've got Microsoft dominating the market, and tons of free open-source to compete with. What's that leave? The web. The big successes that quickly come to mind for new high-tech companies over the last 15 years are Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, and Google. Not software, not chips, but something else entirely. Since all those companies started back before the web bubble burst, what's left for us geeks now?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
It's not about content length or page count. I think most people here have read long articles or other works online before. The key is that they have to be *interesting*.
I don't know about that - I can personally attest that I've stopped reading things because of the moronic pagination on the web. I read fairly quickly, and there have been many times that I simply gave up because I was spending more time watching the page load than actually reading it.
You're right - articles on web or elsewhere have to be interesting. And a ton of page loads is one of the best ways to kill that, in my opinion. It's not web specific - what if newspapers split columns across 7 different pages and made you wait 20 seconds before you were allowed to turn the page? When I'm reading something, I don't like being interrupted, and I don't think I'm alone.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but I've actually seen articles split into up to 10 different pages with two short paragraphs per page. I can read a couple of short paragraphs in 5-10 seconds. I don't want to get the next page every 10 seconds. I won't read it.
"Since all those companies started back before the web bubble burst, what's left for us geeks now?"
Clearly you've been given the gift of 'imagination'. Please let us know when you intend to unwrap it and take it out of the box...
Yes but think about how hard it was to get your hands on information 30 years ago. If it wasn't in a book or magazine or trade journal you were SOL. So when you got that material you expected more bang for the buck, that's what the market brought. Fast-forward to today when it's information overload and you see the need for smaller articles, at least from a business standpoint. Then also factor in the stress that monitors put on ones eyes, with the page being lit. It's technically "harder" to read a monitor full of text than it is to read a piece of paper. So we see articles getting smaller.
But the idea that writing is now "shorter" is a bit skewed. There is a lot more information being conveyed these days.
The parent speaks truth. Romance may not really have "the lion's share" of all fiction publishing, but in 2004 romance novels really did account for about 55 percent of all paperback book sales, totaling some $1.2 billion.
Here's another factoid for you armchair publishing-industry pundits to ponder: That same year, the Christian book market was said to be worth about $1.3 billion in net sales. You may not realize it, but there's a whole parallel market for Christian romances, Christian mysteries, and even Christian sci-fi and fantasy. And in 2004, it apparently brought in more money than romance books -- or, the equivalent of more than 55 percent of mainstream paperback book sales.
Remember these points, the next time you want to start mouthing platitudes like "only bad writers need to worry" and "the quality will rise to the top." When it comes to the business of writing, those writers who are most capable at reaching the market -- the real market, not the one they assume exists -- will be the most successful.
Breakfast served all day!
Of course, it was never just a simple transaction of "money for writing." Nobody would write on spec otherwise. It was about getting published, in an expanding mass market, so there's always been a bit of business sense involved. This is simply a change in paradigm, not a disaster.
Writing is now much more like mass media. You (the writer) write something good, and then you get an audience, and you're going to have to take additional steps to make money from that. If you can't do that, then instead of going to a publisher, the writer will need to find some marketers to help with merchandising.
This new economy doesn't translate well for florid, Victorian era writing because you can't fit that crap on a coffee mug or a T-shirt. No one's being paid by the word any more. Many don't have the time to read all that verbiage.
But when something is available to everyone, as publication now is, it becomes essentially worthless. QED.
Publication, the ability to physically publish or produce media, is rapidly becoming worthless, because everyone can do it for negligible costs. I sense that the publication/distribution industry is running on inertia at this point, or, if you prefer, it's in free fall and has just about hit terminal velocity. Mind you, it doesn't necessarily have to hit the ground, but it's not going any faster.
The workers now own the means of production in this industry. Creative Commons is one seminal, if somewhat inchoate, way to "profit" from it. Money is not the only form of compensation. It's a tool amongst many, not an end. Some of the authors in this article lack the imagination to realize that.
They should take note of Bulwer-Lytton's old saw that "The pen is mightier than the sword." That would sell some serious T-shirts. The only writers who are worried about these developments are the ones who never figured out what "Step 3. Profit" actually means. You have to do something with all that money for it to be a meaningful profit.
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Toro
A friend of my studied history at university. You know what one of her lecturers told her after her first essay.
"No one gives a fuck what you think."
This is exactly how I feel about modern 'Journalism' and writers. I don't want some long flowery introduction which contains no new information, and is usually designed to cloud my opinion with the authors bias. Or worse 'teases' me with a hint of what might be the case later in the article. I want the facts. If I had by way news would be in bullet points. I don't care how good you can spell, how pretty your prose is or how how wonderful you write. I want facts. I don't read the news to be given opinions or bias, I don't read it to admire how well written it is.
I also don't care what the experts say unless they have some actual evidence to back it up. I don't want to hear 'Well if I was a betting man I'd guess that...', I want to hear 'In 1967 there was a similar incident with...'. I can make up my own mind. Write the news like the person reading it has more than 3 functional brain cells.
To anyone thinking of going into 'Journalism' who wants to appeal to me and others like me in my generation, cut the crap. We have no patience, and it is a good thing. When we want to be entertained, we read fiction. The other day I picked up a magazine and after 3 paragraphs I gave up. After three paragraphs there wasn't a single fact. I didn't know anything about the article except about where it was written.
I have no sympathy for 'Journalists'. If they spent half as much time actually doing real investigations, exposing all the crap that goes on in this world and less of it brown nosing themselves into cushy positions and working on their pretty prose, then they might actual out perform the bloggers.
Even the article itself is unbelievably indirect and full of opinions without facts. Three paragraphs in and I still don't know any new information, other than some artist thinks he has an unquantifiable talent. Big wow. All artists think they have an unquantifiable talent. Eventually I find out that we are talking mostly about people who write books. Writers. Great, so am I going to find out how writers have been affected? No I'm going to get a bunch of opinions from a sample of unknown quality. Great, so I might as well go ask my mate Dave what he thinks the internet has done to writers.
Of course this problem is indicative of a much wider one. Virtually no one who works in a field which is primarily artists know how to determine facts. And what information they do have, they have no idea how to present concisely. Half the books I read could be one third the length. You want an example of a well written factual book? I advise every Journalist to go and read 'General Relativity' by P. A. M. Dirac. It's only short, but contains a bucket of information. That is how a book should be.
It isn't just people who write books. Take the media, we have 24 hours of non-news. They speculate and get half baked experts on to double the speculation, and don't bother to go and get any new details themselves. Save for the odd human interest story that tells you absolutely nothing about the big picture.
Case in point, when is the White House press core going to grow a pair and ask some tough questions and demand real answers? When are we going to get reports with some real statistics in that talk about how Iraq is actually going? I shouldn't have to watch a report to congress by General Petraeus to see some actual charts and data on how things are going. Heck I know his report is going to be biased but when no one at CNN seems to know what a pie chart is and prefers to endlessly run off the same pictures of Baghdad while pointlessly speculating what am I going to do? I don't care about human interest stories. I don't care how patriotic you guys in the media think you are being. I want the facts.
The president compares Iraq to Vietnam, I have to go to bloody Wikipedia to bring up the differences in casualty rates so I can decide for myse