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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.""
I think the opinion of "bad versus good" falls nearly directly in how in-bed the writer was with the old media. For most old media writers, their
"bosses" had massive control over the distribution of their form of media, be in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and journals. This was a "good thing" because the pseudo-monopoly gave them more income. It was bad for advertisers because they never knew how many impressions their ads received, who received them, and what their return was.
I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers. I've been a writer myself since the age of 13, and a newsletter editor since I was 18. The Internet has blown open the market for myself, and the writers I've hired to "pen" articles. We now know who reads our creations, how often they return, what they think of the articles, and even who they forwarded the articles to. Our advertisers know immediately what they're getting out of us, and they also have the ability to be selective over where they advertise and what form of advertising.
The other plus is that we can focus on shorter articles with links to articles providing more material within our own site. I know a site has gained power with our audience when the monthly stats pop up showing the average visitor has gone 4-6 pages deep and stayed over 10 minutes on the site. That's a VERY successful site, and makes excellent income for us via advertisements from direct sponsors who also know they're getting a return.
For many, the downside is competition, but to me this is the best thing possible. The more people that are writing about your topic, the bigger your audience grows. If you're a "top tier" writer in a given niche, your market is growing because of your competition, and they'll eventually find you. Another downside for old media authors is the lack of editors within the new media, because the financial overhead from the previous pseudo-monopoly is lost. I think there's a HUGE market for independent editors (I actually earn some money monthly editing other people's writings), but most old media editors don't like the idea of selling themselves to a large market and seem to prefer focusing on a few writers. The potential for being an editor is so large right now that I am turning away more work than I can manage (it was never meant to be an income source, but instead a form of education for me). The massive amount of corporate blogs, e-newsletters and e-journals is astonishing, and they all need outside consultants to help formulate the clearest writing and a decent SEO.
As to supporting the application, that's bunk. I spend about 10 minutes a week TOTAL on back-end support, and I use a "do it yourself" ISP to host my sites.
I'll write until the day I die, but most of my e-writings will continue for years after. For me, that's the ultimate profit: leaving a legacy of my opinions, teachings and ideas tomorrow and for the future.
Has the Internet given mindless fact less fools equal footing as real journalists.
Just look at rob Enderle, Paul Thurrott, or most computer writers who will say just about anything for a buck. They won't check facts, they refuse to show how they come to conclusions when they actually do research, and the research itself is so one sided it's just plain sickening.
One Lady asked a group of dedicated windows admins if they were considering a switch to Linux. They are Windows admins not Linux admins.
this isn't a flame war, but it's like asking a group of Mac Admins when they are switching to windows. you are going to get skewed results.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
No, I think he meant "Increased the probability that an article will unnecessarily be split across several pages" :-P
Seriously though, if the complaint is about blogs, try looking at the mainstream media. A lot of the their stuff makes me feel stupider for having read it. Recently an msnbc, or Time article, I forget, referred to the 1997 Kasparov defeat as being a case where a computer "whupped" a human.
"Whupped"????
If I had tried that in 6th grade English, I would have been sent to a torture chamber. (figuratively, of course, although by this point it's "correct" to say "literally")
Also, they have annoying habits of using longer slang expressions where shorter, simpler ones will do: "divvy up" instead of "divide" and "cents on the dollar" instead of "percent", or even better, "%".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I think the same types of people who wanted longer articles 20 years ago, want them today. However, since the web is currently forcing a lot of short-article people to read, I think it simply seems like the demand is higher for shorter articles.
With the advent of talking heads to read the short articles to them, they'll wander off to listen instead of read, and the average article length will increase again.
On a less sardonic note; many newspapers and magazines--the people who actually produce the longer articles--still only put cropped versions online, in an attempt to lure you into buying their paper product, so the bigger articles don't always make it online.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I keep hearing about these things but so far I have yet to spot them. I wonder what they are like...
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Gee, might that have something to do with the article? Not just people like me blocking ads (privoxy and squid) but including people like you with their notsafeforwork attitude.
IF you write an article in playboy (yes they do have them) then you can include ads to pay for that that are slightly more risky. IF you write a very similar piece but publish it on the net, well then it better be safe for work and kids and right wingers.
This all ads up to less revenue to pay the writers.
So less money, means less writing obviously, so shorter articles, less time to attract eyeballs, less time to get them watch ads, fewer ads, less money. Voila downwards spiral of doom leading to articles with no contents spanning 20 pages to which somekind slashdotter posts the print link meaning that NOT just do they not get ads views from me, but not even any pageviews.
I could almost feel sorry for them... Well not really.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"The Internet is good for amateur writers with talent."
Because on the internet (as well as real life), talent is recognized and floats to the top for everyone to see and admire.
Oh, wait, sorry - it's "scum" that floats to the top. My bad.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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*.
;)
While it most certainly has its faults, the most important purpose of the publishing industry today is that it acts like a filter. There are a hundred times more people who want to be published than actually will be, and this is a sad reality of the industry and anyone who wants to write. On the other hand, it's also a benefit; publishers filter out stuff that, for the most part, simply isn't that good -- derivative, written with third-grade grammar, tedious, unrealistic, unimaginative, etc. Even the "filters" sometimes need filters; that's what agents are for. While a given publisher may accept a small fraction of one percent of what is submitted to them, your average agent may end up selling perhaps half of what they acquire. This works because it's now the agent who accepts a fraction of one percent of what they get. Many big publishers don't take unagented submissions; they use agents as a "filter" to reduce the drivel that they have to sift through to find what's good out there. Often, even the agents will use their own "filters" -- say, grad students, paid slave wages to read the incoming queries . Like this person, for example.
That said, the internet does have some developing "filtering" mechanisms -- even if nothing more than an email from a friend saying, "Hey, I read this and it was great! You have to read it!" What the internet doesn't have, currently, is a particularly effective profit mechanism for writers, even those who do have some level of popular success. And translating online success to print success is not as easy as it may at first appear. If you have a relevant website that gets tens of thousands of unique hits per day, you might be able to get a little further by citing it as "platform" (esp. important in nonfiction) in your query, but beyond that, what agents and publishers want to see is some direct "filtering" mechanism on your work -- have you won presigious contests with thousands of entrants and recognized judges, have you been published in magazines or major newspapers, have you had a book published before (and how did it sell?), and so on. They want hard evidence that someone besides your friends and family thinks that you're good. Of course, even if you don't have any worthwhile credits, you can still be published based on the merits of your writing at hand.
At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
My biggest gripe with the publishing industry is the "inventing" of best-sellers. At regular intervals, they'll buy what they (a relatively small number of people) consider the best sales potential work out on the market by a new author in their particular field for a huge advance (6-7 figures, compared to the usual 4-5). This starts the ball rolling; the very fact that they paid a huge advance gets the critics buzzing about the work before they even know anything about it. When it comes out, they review the heck out of it. Good or bad reviews, it gets a ton of publicity. Meanwhile, the publisher plugs the heck out of it, everywhere they can. Altogether, they create enough buzz about the work that anyone who reads books in the field feels they have to read it, if only just to know what other people are talking about. The work may, in fact, be pretty lousy, but that's not the important aspect. They could sell almost anything in this manner. The same thing applies to authors who, by virtue of their name, will get published no matter what. Someone like Tom Clancy could practically write a proposal for a diatribe against tube socks on a coffee napkin and get a deal out of it before he pens a word. Simply having the author's name on the side will ensure enough sales to be worth it.
That said, there are inherent benefits to new authors in the industry. Let's say you land a deal with
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
On the other hand, free software, or open source software don't have anything to do with money. Most of the money associated with software can still be had with those.
Licenses are not everything. The catch is that in order to make money from free software, you have to actually provide a service. Implantations and consulting on other peoples software is a solid service to sell, and mostly welcome by most players. Custom developments, first level support, reselling second level support. It doesn't make you rich quick, but there's a lot of bussiness to be made. I am planning on starting a company of that sort next year in my country. I will let you know how it goes, if you want.
Western Civilization is a spectrum, and even though I'm a conservative, I'd rather thought that we ought to have a place of value for our crazy liberal friends, because, at the end of the day, they do amazing work.
We have before us, a class of people whose livelihood depends on control over the mechanical means of producing a copy of a work, and that means is stripped away from them. So, yeah, the internet screws writers, along with phographers, artists, musicians, and anyone else who used to make a living selling copies of their work.
Who are these people getting screwed?
They are really, liberals. And, as a right winger, I have to admit, I find this funny and sad at the same time. It's funny, because all of the people really leading the charge to get rid of copyrights and the writing class, are those who tend to have a leftist bent themselves. It's sad though, because by the same token, those people do make good work. I may not like all of Bob Dylan's politics, or Vonneguts tirades against Reagan, but, I love Highway 61 and Slaughterhouse 5.
Today's liberals owe their political lives and the way they think to a literary tradition and they are destroying for reasons that are positively vain. "Free beer" for Steinbeck? Dickens? Vonnegut? Without the likes of a number of great liberal writers, there could be no liberalism, and honestly, there could be no western culture. Conservatism can't exist by itself, any more than liberalism can.
Liberalism, in its truest (that is, pan political party sense), is based on ideas that are deeply contemplative, and, you can't stuff that into an angry blog post. It's about images and ideas and emotions, and, really, the arts is what drives it. Daily Kos and liberal blogs cannot hold a candle to the likes of Steinbeck or a Dickens, to just name two great progressive (gasp liberal) writers, and it is reckless and irresponsible to pretend they can. This culture that the internet is trashing is -important-, and it is a downright disgrace that liberals own leaders of today are doing the trashing of their own roots, and, viewed broadly enough, are undermining the very basis for western culture.
We are what we Art. Is art really so expensive that it must be free? Are songs really that mundane that you need to have thousands of them? Are images so cheap? Must they be?
I counsel my liberal patriots to think carefully before you act, and I don't think that you are.
This is my sig.
Well, with so many venues where your can write, for each you have to decide what level of quality you're going to shoot for beyond merely communicating. Slashdot postings for the most part don't demand high polish.
Regardless, these many venues certainly encourage you to write, and that's by far the most important thing for everyone concerned. Think about it, in a period in which there were fears that the written word would die (TV and all that), instead we've got more people writing than I'm sure in any period of history.
His point about independent editors is well taken. One of the things I've done for a decade to improve my language skills is free editing (fiction and technical non-fiction) for people or efforts on the net who can't afford to pay money. In addition to the practice/experience, it pays off handsomely pure enjoyment, and I have absolutely no trouble spending all the time I want doing it.
I don't do that much of it, but "an army of Davids" doing this sort of thing in such a low friction system can make a big difference.
In June, I attended Book Expo America in New York. This is billed as the largest book-publishing event in the U.S., with many other countries sending representatives as well. Besides the thousands of booths, there are a number of seminars and talks about various things dealing with the industry. It seemed to me that one out of every four mini-conferences dealt with whether or not book publishing would be hurt by the Internet. I agree with many of the posters here that say good writers won't be hurt, but bad writers will be. I admit that I don't know a ton about the book publishing industry, but seeing how it works (I published a book two years ago, and I'm working on my second one now), it's pretty ridiculous how some things get mass-produced, while others aren't considered at all. From what I gather, most old-school publishing people are scared by the Internet. Many new authors are not, however, which leads me to believe that eventually, like most industries, a new way will replace the old. It's amazing to me how few authors have any web presence whatsoever. Explaining reciprocal links to some authors is painful. To me, it's not just a matter of being a good or bad writer. It's also about having the drive to market yourself in the proper way and get your name out. You can dispute whether or not John Grisham is a good author. But the man reportedly sold books from his car trunk to find an audience. That's separate from writing.
Your discussion remind me of this excellent essay by Robert J. Samuelson entitled The Sad Fate of the Comma.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I think most people understand that almost nobody has ever really made big money writing--and of those who do, even fewer make it for very long. I've done much better than a lot of writers, but except for a few years in the late 1990s, I could not have considered my writing income a "living." (Fortunately, I had a good day job and didn't have to.) What I find fascinating is that I am now making about as much money writing as I did back in the late 1970s and all through the late 1980s (until my books became popular) but the shape of the money has changed. I have a blog, and I've posted numerous articles in various hobby areas (mostly retro electronics) all with AdSense ads. I used to get money from publishers in lumps. Now I get it in dribbles, but from Web ads. And over time (and by time I mean eighteen months to two years) I get about as much money from the ads in accumulated dribbles for a given article as I used to get all in one lump for the same kind and size of article. The bad news is that it is not and has never been a lot of money. The good news is that the money keeps coming. If people keep looking for radio circuits to lash up on boards, well, the dribbles will continue, and after five years or so, I expect that the articles will have paid considerably more than I could ever have gotten from the niche magazines, back when there were niche magazines. An article in a print magazine is seen for a few weeks and then vanishes from sight. Web articles are always there, and anyone who really wants to find them can.
Add to that the fact that research is now hugely easier than it used to be, well, the Internet is a big win for writers who keep up with the online culture and do it as it needs to be done. Ironically, the key is patience. Write stuff that some small audience wants, and it will slowly generate money for years, with no additional work. I'm good with that.
Chips are old , software is old .And even internet giants of today are a decade old . If you want a brilliant start up you have to start with tomorrow idea, not rehashing old ideas. Methinks AI and biotech will explode in next 10 years and the Googles of tomorrow are made today out of new ideas built on existing technology, competing with Intel, Microsoft or Google today is pointless.
:) )
Of course ideas are dime a dozen, implementation matters. Have a brilliant idea and bring it first to the market? -then you might have next google (or facebook at worst case
Is the world that much a better place with career writers, musicians, and politicians? I'm a believer that all of these tasks are done better when they aren't the primary source of income for the person. Notice how at least one of these writers doesn't even make it one sentence into his response before promoting his book? Get out there and get your hands dirty. If you are truly passionate about it you'll still manage to do it.
#10: This one. It really doesn't contain any useful content. Trust me, I know it, because I wrote it. Well, actually, I'm currently in the process of writing it, but when you read it, it will be finished. You are not interested in that sort of nitpicking? Well, I told you this comment isn't interesting.
#9: You are still reading? That proves you are not taking my advice anyway, because otherwise you'd have stopped reading this comment after I told you that it's not worth reading. So why should I waste my time giving more advice about comments to avoid reading, if you don't follow my advise anyway? And of course if you follow my advise, you'll not reading this, nor anything that follows, so writing more advise for those following it would be waste of time as well, since they'd not read it. Not that I had planned to research other comments for this list anyway.
#8: You are disappointed about this? Well, I already told you that it's not worth reading this comment, so if you are still reading it, it's your fault alone. Don't say you haven't been warned.
#7: You are still reading? I assure you, it's not getting more interesting. So you really can stop here.
#6: I see, you won't stop reading until I tell you another comment to avoid. OK, then, I have an advise for you: Don't read goatse comments. They are not worth it. You knew that already? I thought so. But I already told you that you'd not get anything valuable from my comment, didn't I?
#5: Still reading? Don't think I'll give you yet another advise. Obviously it won't stop you reading anyway.
#4: You are still not bored yet? I for sure am. So would you please stop reading so I can stop writing?
#3: You still read on? Well, I guess I'll have to use stronger weapons. May be som baad speling will bee enaugh too drive yoo away?
#2: So that didn't help either. Possibly can it help, if I some bad grammar use?
#1: I see, you are still reading, so that didn't help either. But then, I've finally reached #1, so it should be clear to you that there will not come any further advise about what comments to avoid.
Conclusion: You are still reading on anyway? Well, I've now found out how to make you stop reading: I'll just stop writing any more, so you don't have anything more to read here. I'm sure that will help!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What, no solution?
Okay, okay, okay.
I saved the damned thing to the hard-drive, and looked at the code, and there it is, right there in the META tag:
So the reason it didn't instantaneously move on to the presidential candidates article is because my Javascript debugger threw up a couple of errors, which held it back briefly.
So no, there is no solution, unless your browser supports turning off the META refresh [or else someone at 10zenmonkeys.com gets a clue, and removes that line from the file].
Idiots.
God in heaven, I hate bad code.