Brendan’s interlocutor is right about the model she describes being really fucking depressing. She’s wrong about it being the future of journalism, though. While it might be the a current way to make money on the Internet, it’s not the only one, and it’s almost certainly not the one that will prevail.
The pay-for-pageviews model is dying fast. Publications that are cynically flooding their articles and sites with SEO keywords are playing a losing game. Google and other search engines are improving their systems every day to make these strategies less effective. Google wants to provide relevant and quality results, and they know that if their search turns up keyword-flooded crap, it’s Google who ultimately suffers.
She describes how many people writing online have never “published an article in their lives.” Not true. They have by definition published, just not in print. The medium of publication is incidental—they published an article on the Internet. Publishing in this way is vastly cheaper and technically easier than publishing (and crucially, distributing) in print, but that has no bearing on the inherent value of the writing, or the quality. It removes the barrier of the printing press, which means there’s a lot more publishing going on, and so a lot more of it is of low quality. But there has never been a shortage of low quality work being published, in any form.
Of course, with such easy access to publishing tools for all, low-quality work is now just as easy to find—or stumble across—as high-quality work, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference. Telling the difference, or at least having those sources that you trust presented to you first, or more prominently, etc., will become easier as the technology improves. Companies like the one the letter-writer describes are retarding that process by filling the Internet with garbage, making it harder for the quality work to rise to the top.
The expense of operating a printing press provided a handy but accidental way to make publishing the domain of the very few, which naturally made it harder to become one of those few, and meant there was much more editing and proof-reading happening before words were committed to print. This wasn’t only driven by a high-minded desire to get things right—it was driven by economics and by the fact that you can’t change print once it goes out the door. Now publishing can happen in real time and can be infinitely edited after publication, and while this means far less forethought may go into a lot of online writing, it’s also extremely powerful. Think about the events of the last 10 or 15 years and how quickly we’ve learned about them, how the new publishing tools have allowed people worldwide to have instant access to world-changing events in ways that print publications could never accomplish.
The publishing world has to face these change with more optimism and innovation, and less lamenting the idealized past. A new model will emerge, and quality work will continue to be appreciated, and compensated. I don’t know what that model will look like, but I promise it won’t be SEO trickery.
Great thoughts Anthony. Would read again A++++
Oh yes.. good thoughts about questions and answers.
Dictionary games with large security firms and screen actors crddits… that’s where it is at…
sure as flour sifters in a cake decorating contest… the credits will take you to where you want to see.
@2 cake decorating? put the bong down, phelps.
The thing that’s worrisome, Anthony, is that the good stuff may rise to the top, but there may not be any way to make it pay. The internet is full of formerly-hot sectors of discourse that have been abandoned by intelligent people. And the power of SEO-driven garbage, and the INFINITE army of brain-dead envelope-stuffer drones to do their bidding, shows no sign of abating. Those people, unlike real writers, will keep going forever even if they never make any money, as long as the promise of money is there.
I noticed today that my blog was being flooded with SEO spam comments — in Chinese. There are a lot of people in China.
Fighting SEO crap is like fighting spam; it’s an arms race, with better detection and control always being outstripped by the enemy.
There needs to be a new model for profit. I’m waiting for someone to team up with Google to create an ASCAP-like payment system, where writers get royalties for having their online content propogated in other forums in the same way musicians do. Publishers and aggregators over a certain size would be required to “subscribe” to the service, and rates for advertising would go up to reflect the cost of paying writers for their work — and for the exposure that ads when paired with certain content.
This idea has been suggested before, but as time goes on, I think it’s more and more important that we actively change the payment model.
An additional thought — an ASCAP model for writer’s royalties would get around the problem of having SEO-laden posts rising to the top of the Google charts, and thus being more “valuable”. If content is rated by how frequently it gets reposted, AND by the hit statistics, you could come up with a clearer picture of the quality of certain content. Granted, you may still get overwhelmed by LOLcats, but you could filter them, I’d think.
But there has never been a shortage of low quality work being published, in any form.
Very true. I remember attempting to read some zines at Left Bank and wound up laughing my ass off at the pure drek people would put out.
The publishing process traditionally included proofreading, fact checking, and deliberate content editing to ensure logical flow and objectivity.
Now UR chezburger online “articls be 99.3% LOL IMHO drivn by commy chstian proboganda that scoop th epoop.
Q: What’s the difference between an English major and J-School Comm major?
A: The journalism student feels entitled to a paying job after graduation.
@9,
Or rather, a paying job in the field they studied in college.
Q: Do you believe 2009 will be the death of the American automobile industry and American print journalism as we now know it?
A: Only if you read the papers.
“journalism” has been on “deaths door” since before the time of morning and evening papers. any “journalism” student since the 70’s knew full well what they were getting into … that the information age was and is going to be cyperspace based and read on an electronic pad.
I remember reading old copies of Punch from teh 18th century and how funny the cartoon images of newspapers being prognosticated to go out of business with all the reporters were.
(at the SFU library … had a job reshelving my first year)
Look, the death of reporting and journalistic print has been supposed to happen for a long time now. This is just a shift in things, a bit chaotic, but something will come out the other end.
I’m hoping it will be more tawdry rags with Page 2 girls myself. Like in the good old days of reporting.
Was that Shut the Fuck Up University, Will? I guess you didn’t graduate.
Punch never had Page 3 (not Page 2) girls, dipshit, and Page 3 girls are in no sense the “good old days”. You know NOTHING. And nobody gives a shit what you were doing your first year at Stupid Fucking University.
This is just stating the obvious, but maybe it merely comes down to consumer demand…the market will pay for what it wants. People willingly pay for subscriptions to the publications they value…at least to a point. But as we transition to new revenue models, there will be casualties and some quality work will be lost. Then, we can only hope for big-money innovators (like Ted Turner) to step in and do some totally crazy shit (like start a 24-hour news channel).
Or maybe we could go back to a quainter time when benefactors simply paid people to be interesting. Here’s money…be my interesting acquaintance. Say something smart. Bemybenefactor.com anyone?