Online content farms, social media and iPads...
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ShareAnother new online wrinkle being tested out is the so-called “content farms”. These sites, like Seed (through AOL) and Associated Content, seek out writers to cover trending/hot topics, with the pay scrapping in as low as $5/article. Needless to say, a number of writers have cried foul about this, noting that these sites are making good money while forcing writers to settle for less. Even though professional journalist groups are fighting back against these ‘content mills’ (specifically about the pay, quality of the articles and degradation of their work), how effective can they really be if these sites are raking in money? In the end are they fighting against the future of the industry?
I had my own experience with Seed in early 2010, writing for them for their big SXSW 2010 experiment where they tried to get writers to cover some 2,000 bands playing the festival. It was easy to sign up, get the assignment and make arrangements for it. I wound up writing about a Georgia metal band called Blacktusk. The interview was peachy and I got to learn something about a local scene I wasn’t aware of before, but the editors were kind of picky about the format and made us choose a set of mostly predetermined questions to ask the band, which took some of the fun out of the work. In the end, I got the princely sum of 50 bucks for my work. That doesn’t seem like much at first, but truth be told, that’s not much less than I’ve made from articles I’ve done for a number of other publications I’ve written for recently (as for $5 jobs, I’ll pass but I worry about writers who have no choice but to bunch up on them to earn some income). As for their overall SXSW mission, Seed fell way short of covering all the artists, later explaining that they didn’t think that they could get every band covered. Don’t be surprised if they modestly scale back their expectations and plans for 2011’s festival.
Two other big players made their own online moves by recognizing the growing and growing and growing importance of social media. Billboard announced in early December that in addition to their regular albums and singles charts, they were also going to have a social media chart to track the music action there. Not to be outdone by that magazine’s Social 50, MTV also announced that they would have their own social media chart, called the Music Meter, though they position theirs as a place to discover new artists as well. Obviously, both places have to try to keep up but how much traffic can they draw from the popular social sites themselves (i.e. Facebook)?
Along with these individual publication ideas, there were also a trio of wide-ranging tech solutions that many in the scribe biz were pinning their hopes on, including the new iPad, apps (applications for mobile devices) and what the Independent calls “expertly written sites”.
The ever-savvy Steve Jobs and his minions at Apple had the media eating out of their carpal-tunnel-ridden hands again with their latest gadget the iPad, which was meant to steal thunder from the Kindle and other digital reading devices. After they were unleashed April, millions of iPads were sold in the first few months and it was estimated that by the end of 2011, 30 million of them will be added to the tally. A pair of media moguls were also bullish on the not-so-little device’s future. Ol’ Man Murdoch tried again to keep up with the Net buzz (especially after News Corp’s 2005 purchase of MySpace looks like a disaster now) by launching a new iPad-specific publication called The Daily. Part of the attraction here is that the publication is boasting noted contributors like the New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones, who’s been hired as cultural editor. Richard Branson also announced plans for an iPad publication called Project, which will include a number of Bauer faces as part of it. Judging by its blog, they look to cover high tech and pop culture items there, though the content right now ain’t exactly what you’d call fetching.
As sexy as Job’s not-so-little device seems now, it’s also got its problems. Despite the seemingly strong sales at first, the overall sales of iPad were still less than expected and also soured in the following months. Also, a number of magazines, who were worried about their publications seeing their purchase price degrade on the device, managed to wrangle pricing concessions for their iPad versions which made them no cheaper than their regular subscription rate. Another problem is that, as Mediaweek and Business Insider point out (the latter’s headline: “Print Publications Hallucinating That iPad Will Save Their Asses”), the publications don’t offer up their goods at a cheap price and the material there is generally not thought out very well, offering little that’s more appealing than a regular media website now. If that wasn’t bad enough, a year-end report said that sales of magazines on iPad were dropping now too.
Some of the same problems apply to “apps” or applications that you can download for your smart phone. The idea here is that magazines and/or individual issues can (and have) be turned into apps. Since they’re being gobbled up quickly by users (Wall Street Journal estimates 2010 sales at $6.7 billion), apps are also seen as possible saviors for the media world. Brand Week nicely summed up the apps problem: where they’re not easy used with all mobile devices, different versions have to be developed for each phone system, which gets expensive very quickly. As Forbes also notes, the publications also have to pay for development and bandwidth associated with the apps. On the subject of when media businesses might make money back from their app investment, Brand Week‘s assessment is pretty grim, saying that it’ll happen “...not in the near term and, perhaps, never”. With many apps offered for free, companies must rely on sales from ads to make money but as the Wall Street Journal article points out, that only accounts for “5% of the $23 billion in annual Internet advertising”.
And finally for the generalized tech-end solutions, there’s “expertly written webistes”. As noted in the Independent, a number of former print journalists are taking their trade online, continuing to cover their field on their own sites, specifically for “specialist audiences that are no longer being served… by more traditional media.” It’s an intriguing and laudable idea for sure and you might as well include DeRogatis and Christgau in this group too. Though some of the biggest sites are drawing advertisers, the article doesn’t pin down how self-sustaining these online destinations are. While the idea of writing what you like seems liberating, the future of these sites is far from certain—unless they’re attached to well known entities, they probably don’t generate a salary (ad money specifically) comparable to the writer’s old print jobs, which makes you wonder if they’re meant to be just a side gig to generate a bit of cash (if possible).
One intriguing idea to help the media boat float that’s tech-tied in a different way involves grad school students. As newspapers and magazines are forced to slash their staffs to cut costs and still somehow maintain the quality of their work (usually by pilling up more jobs on the writers left there), these budding scribes might be able to take up some of the slack. As this PBS article notes, some of this work is turning up in major publications too. Wired Magazine reported on Columbia University’s efforts in this area specifically with a New Masters in Science program which is “a combined engineering and journalism degree”. The students’ work could become a promising way to try out new media possibilities, not only benefiting themselves and the school but the whole media landscape in general.
There was a host of other intriguing ideas out there which may or may not pan out as journo saviors but at least deserve some scrutiny or maybe a good try. This includes, but isn’t limited to, interactive writing via digital reading devices, stories with paid links, non-profit grants though Google and the Knight Foundation (and hopefully others), federal support, plus selling subscriptions via Facebook.
But as much as we need to think about and worry about maintaining the business side of writing, we shouldn’t forget about the aesthetics involved too. One particularly interesting salvo that was fired off was from Christopher R. Weingarten at April’s 140 Character conference, where he spoke out about how nowadays, getting information out to the Web first is more important than good writing per se. Here, he also was right to say that aggregators like Hype Machine are probably harming the original sites they aggregate (at least in terms of web traffic), but the same thing’s happening in other media with sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Google News. So what’s going happen when the original sources start drying up and there’s no reviews left to gather up? Will new sources just spring up and will they be as good as they old ones they replace? Is this a trend worth fighting? But maybe you can’t fight this and it’s smarting to figure out a way to take advantage of it instead.
One thing that I’m hopeful about is how music scribes now see their own work and the potential for the future. In May, I interrogated over 100 music journalists to ask them what kind of advice they would have for any young, eager writers out there. Though it was surprising to hear a number of them take exception to be called a “writer” (maybe that term’s just being so abused lately and fallen out of favor), it was heartening to see that though many of them talked about the difficulties of doing their work nowadays, only two of them (Ed Ward, Richard Meltzer) said that the best thing to do was not to find some other kind of vocation. Everyone else expressed some kind of encouragement or at least advice to weather the up’s and down’s of their profession.
Along with advising readers to pick and chose the best pearls of wisdom from these writers for their own use, the best advice I can think of is still the same thing I said two years ago: don’t fear tech change, embrace it. Because the writing profession is tied to tech as much as the rest of the media landscape is, there’s not going to be any kind of long-term solution to the problem of keeping afloat and maintaining a job in this business that changes so quickly. Just look at November when Newsweek and the Daily Beast merged, the previously hot Guitar Hero franchise went up for sale and former Net search giant Yahoo had to make major lay-offs. That doesn’t mean that writing and publishing is hopeless, but instead that we’re all going to have to keep accepting, learning about and experimenting with all kinds of short-term solutions as the tech world keeps throwing curveballs and changing the game. That means learning about and trying out all sorts of new technologies, sites, platforms, type of social media to connect with readers and get the word out. As a so-far nameless tweeter has proved by becoming the Village Voice‘s rock critic of the year, the evolving online platforms and mediums out there can provide a forum for a host of new and interesting voices too. For any writer, keeping with the tech side of things can be pretty exhausting work and you might think it detracts from your ‘real’ work of writing, but it can’t be ignored if you want to keep doing ANY of your writing work. In other words, you gotta be something of a tech geek to get by. Such are the wonders of the Net age.
For you fellow scribes, if it makes you feel any better, keep two things in mind: Facebook is eventually going get replaced by a hot new online portal (it happened to MySpace) and you could be a role model or even a hero (maybe just for one day) by finding at least a short-net solution to the tech/scribing puzzle or at least inspire others by your example. This has never been particularly glamorous work for most who do it and it’s definitely shaky now but it’s also wide-open, exciting and challenging. Maybe iPad, paywalls and apps won’t pan out now but there’s gonna be some techies that figure out ways to milk it. Any writer, magazine or publication that stares down the tech demon this way will stand a good chance at whupping its ass and maybe even get a half-day decent paycheck out of it too.
