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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.
Sorry, you lost me after "I think that means".
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
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.
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.
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.
If writers are perceiving a lower demand for longer articles, it's probably because they break them up into 57 pages of three sentences each, with 20 second page loads in between thanks to a bunch of flash ads.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will let you know how it goes, if you want.
Don't forget to build a garage when you start it, so that years from now we can still say, Oh, that guy? Would you believe he started his company in a garage?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
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.
--
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