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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.
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.
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.
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.
It depends. Professional hacks like Haydn and Mozart cannot possibly have been passionate about the hours upon hours of symphonies and string quartets they had to churn out for their patrons (Haydn wrote more than ninety symphonies and an even larger number of string quartets - though he is possibly the most extreme example of a composition hack). At the same time a lot of what they wrote for money is now considered to be exemplary of the European music tradition. At the same time, I think you're generally right. Of the 20th century writers, I feel the amateur Franz Kafka has stood the test of time much better than his contemporary (a professional starved artist) James Joyce. At the very least I feel his work has a lot more to say about the human condition in the 20th century than that of his rarefied contemporaries, whose work fell out of public favor as soon as the people who grew up with them and who worked in trend setting English departments the world over went into retirement.