8 ms·

Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age?

39 points by ekpyrotic 16y ago

grovulent 16y ago
Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Now that this scarcity is being removed through innovation - they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost. Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred. in depth counterpoint: http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of-intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/ http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...
- psykotic 16y ago
  > yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point. The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek". The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!
  - wdewind 16y ago
    I would replace scarcity of knowledge with scarcity of information/media in general and expand this to the entire media industry. For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena. Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch. The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it. The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot. This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value. Hope that makes sense, /rant.
    - psykotic 16y ago
      Thanks for the long post! That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge...they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information. Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.
rabbitonrails 16y ago
Start a blog. My sister started a blog and after 3 years was making $200k/year. Not saying every blog or every topic will make this much, but it's certainly possible to make a good living as a blogger.
- swombat 16y ago
  What's the blog? Care to share the URL?
  - rabbitonrails 16y ago
    It is one of the top personal finance blogs. Don't want to divulge the url as I don't want to share her revenues with the world.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Yeah, but then you will have to stop complaining and start doing something - and most people just aren't willing to go that far.
- robryan 16y ago
  The majority of for profit blogs aren't great reading because they are constantly trying to put something new out even if they don't have anything interesting to say. I though the Coding Horror blog improved a fair bit when Jeff no longer had to rely on it for a living and just made the occasional post. I like the idea of using a blog to build up a following which you then sell some more organised a long form content to in book/ebook form, similar to 37 signals although best results would be to not just recycle the blog content.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    That's a failure of model and motive. You can make six or more digits posting drivel, or you can make a comfortable middle-upper middle class living with a quality-focused posting schedule. I'm going for the latter with my own blog, and I try to encourage it when possible.
fleitz 16y ago
Writers will be fine. In fact it will make it easier for writers to make a living as more of the share of income goes towards entertainment. Copywriters can make a goldmine in the digital age. Writers don't define civil society. Get off your high horse and start writing content people like. Look how much money 37 Signals makes from writing.
mechanical_fish 16y ago
“Bloggers couldn’t find that themselves,” he said, “because they’re corrupted, or they couldn’t afford to spend the time.” Actually, I'm pretty sure that bloggers have known about the Koch brothers for many years. The reason this guy had to wait until the New Yorker wrote about them might be that this guy doesn't read anything that isn't in the New Yorker. EDIT: Changed the wording a bit. As Daffy Duck used to say: "pronoun trouble".
- rst 16y ago
  Counterpoint: some of the best reporting on the nuts and bolts of the subprime mortgage mess, while it was happening, was by a semi-retired mortgage broker pseudonymously blogging as "Tanta", who never got paid a dime for it. When she died, she was mourned by everyone from Tyler Cowen to Paul Krugman. The pseudonym was because, if her cancer ever went into remission, she wanted to be able to get a job, and she thought it might be a handicap to have (quite rightly) savaged just about every major company in the industry. The announcement of her death was the first most of her readers had ever seen her name --- Doris Dungey. EDIT: Counterpoint to Lanier, that is. Sorry 'bout that.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    The fact that this comes labeled "counterpoint" makes we worry that I've screwed up my writing. I think this was my point. ;)
mkr-hn 16y ago
I think some people mistake the ease of filling niches for the decline of art. It's not that art is on the way down, it's that more niches can be filled profitably with the audience made available by the Internet. Great art is a niche now. It's in the pie, but its slice is smaller. The people reading the "junk" either wouldn't care about the great art, or they would look at both. I think this sort of pushback was inevitable when the digital publishing revolution people talked about for decades finally happened.
rst 16y ago
A couple of key bits: “If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working,” said Lanier. “If they can’t, it isn’t.” Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it. Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants." What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no one cares. What is a future like in which most authors of book-length texts need a day job? More like the present than one might think. Most authors need one already. [1] http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ --- online novelist; paid content [2] http://xkcd.com http://xkcd.com --- online cartoonist; free content, paid swag [3] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ --- the blog is his job
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- buzzblog 16y ago
  The fact that some are managing to make a put-their-kids-through-college living doesn't undermine his point in the least. The fact of the matter is that the number of content creators who can meet that threshold continues to plummet at an alarming rate. Those who speak so glowingly of the promise of "the new models" are almost inevitably either succeeding with one already (at least temporarily) or not at all personally dependent on doing so. Not only are new models needed, but they need to scale or the number of content creators sending their kids to college will continue to dwindle.
hessenwolf 16y ago
Write to promote, or write on commission. <speculation> Most of the intellectually valuable literature didn't make money anyway. </speculation>
shawnee_ 16y ago
Powerless? Hardly. The problem is that current business models for rewarding writers (in the emerging distribution format) are either broken, or they have not yet had enough time to mature. Although it's a bit "dated" (2005), I think the implications explored in Epic 2015 are pretty interesting insofar as the traditional writer -> editor -> publisher model is going. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015 http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015
Jubb 16y ago
He clearly has some conflicting views here,"The walled garden thing can’t last forever...Apple and Amazon can be publishers within the universal system. But they can’t have monopoly channels." This might be a nice idea, but aren't Apple and Amazon directly competing right now? How is it that they are both holding a monopoly on ebooks? People like choice, if there really were one massive distribution system I would worry that it would become the new monopoly.
- rick888 16y ago
  People have this notion that if you create a digital application or product and don't want it to be shared without your consent, that you have a monopoly over it.
NY_USA_Hacker 16y ago
'Writers' and 'writing' as in English literature, fiction, drama, 'belle lettre' are nearly dead. For some exceptions, might sell some romance novels or screen plays and write 'news' drawing on morality plays and formula fiction. Otherwise, broadly, first-cut, essentially the whole pile from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ..., Dickens, James, to the present and their goals, techniques, values, and traditions are dead economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally -- kaput. Why? Still in simple terms, they never made it into the 20th century with its standards of information safety and efficacy from mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, medicine, and law of the early 20th century. E.g., for learning about people, f'get about Shakespeare, ..., and just read clinical psychology. Or, don't read 'writer' Henry James and read his brother psychologist William James instead. The 'writers' didn't have to know much and, instead, wrote 'art' as in the 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. For the reader, it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people. So, 'literature' is now for light entertainment. No one would try to do anything serious -- design an airplane, drug, computer system, bridge -- using the techniques of literature. In the recent past, for media, the content was still from "the medium is the message". So, could pass out content, one size fits millions. Such content had to be of such broad interest and, thus, so superficial that it could be from a 'writer' who actually didn't know much about the subject. Commonly a reader who actually knows something about subject X when reading work of a newsie about X sees right away that the newsie understands next to nothing about X and gets a lot wrong. Now in great contrast, for each narrow topic, there are many experts who, as on Wikipedia, HN, Stack Overflow, eGullet, various blogs and fora, can, just for fun, write material of much higher quality for free and do. So there are over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati and some unknown, large number of long tail Web sites so that the focused content is far beyond the old, one size fits millions. Yes, 'literature' is gathering dust on the library shelves and otherwise nearly dead. We are losing nothing of any value. It should have died over 100 years ago. RIP. And we are losing something dangerous that has profoundly hurt our democracy for over 150 years: We're losing the work of the newsies who just gush their emotions and otherwise distort and manipulate to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, and pretend that they are contributing to an 'informed electorate'. They've been building a massively, deliberately un/misinformed electorate with consequences -- the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the 1929 market crash, the Great Depression and, thus, WWII, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the Great Recession, and more. I will leave details as an exercise. Hint: The Civil War started before Lincoln even took office and from essentially only the deliberately deceptive, inflammatory work of the newsies. There's an important word about 'fiction': It ain't true. Then, even if in some case by accident it is true, there's no evidence, certainly no proof. It's junk best left on the scrapheap of history from long, ignorant, efforts in the struggle to build civilization. The newsies have been among the most dangerous, destructive, and contemptible people in our democracy.
baguasquirrel 16y ago
Both programmers' and artists' work can be reproduced at the twitch of a `cp -a`. You don't see those goddamn Ruby hipsters up in SF complaining about compensation.
neutronicus 16y ago
No. Work on commission. Publish in serial format. If you're popular, you can demand an advance or a retainer. Lest we forget, many great authors (Dostoyevsky and Dickens) published their novels in serial form.
NY_USA_Hacker 16y ago
Of course you are attacking the messenger instead of the message. Maybe that's what all true, deep down, committed, card-carrying English majors do! Thanks for confirming my suspicions about Shakespeare! Teachers for six years, four in high school and two more in college, not counting the drooling Shakespeare fans for decades on PBS, told me that he had such great insight into people, e.g., manipulation, duplicity, self-deception, gullibility, ambition, collusion, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, etc. Good to know that actually he didn't know anything at all about clinical psychology; that's just what I always believed! So, finally you dusted him off: There's nothing there at all! In my unique world of subtle hints, clues, creative ambiguity, hidden references (all that good literary stuff), a 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Now, now: In not being willing to 'understand' 'newsie', you are insisting on being thoroughly literal. You must have had a heck of a time with nearly everything in English literature! Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning of 'newsie' should be clear enough! Actually 'newsie' was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a "crippled newsie" took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made the newsie give the gun back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers! A big Shakespeare fan like you should be able, along with many millions of movie fans, to understand the vocabulary in an old Bogart movie! I'm open to still better insults for the target set, hopefully something really contemptible. I like a good movie, but I know that it doesn't mean anything. I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature. The teachers kept leaning back in their chairs, gazing at the ceiling, transporting themselves to old maid English literature teacher nirvana, and going all ecstatic about how "great", "the greatest writer who ever lived", he was, etc. May I have the airsick bag, please, right away? Oops, I guess in this classroom they are all gone; BYOB. I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. I like it enough that at a late age, with too little talent, got a violin, took lessons, and made it through Bach E major Preludio and most of the Bach Chaconne, especially the center D major section. I still needed to practice parts of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Massenet 'Meditation' from Thais. To me some really nice music is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE So, that's the Charles Laughton character, or me, lusting after the young Maureen O'Hara character!

39 points by ekpyrotic 16y ago

Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Now that this scarcity is being removed through innovation - they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost. Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred. in depth counterpoint: http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of-intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/ http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...

psykotic 16y ago
> yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point. The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek". The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!
- wdewind 16y ago
  I would replace scarcity of knowledge with scarcity of information/media in general and expand this to the entire media industry. For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena. Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch. The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it. The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot. This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value. Hope that makes sense, /rant.
  - psykotic 16y ago
    Thanks for the long post! That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.
stcredzero 16y ago
this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge...they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information. Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.

rabbitonrails 16y ago

Start a blog. My sister started a blog and after 3 years was making $200k/year. Not saying every blog or every topic will make this much, but it's certainly possible to make a good living as a blogger.

swombat 16y ago
What's the blog? Care to share the URL?
- rabbitonrails 16y ago
  It is one of the top personal finance blogs. Don't want to divulge the url as I don't want to share her revenues with the world.
tomjen3 16y ago
Yeah, but then you will have to stop complaining and start doing something - and most people just aren't willing to go that far.
robryan 16y ago
The majority of for profit blogs aren't great reading because they are constantly trying to put something new out even if they don't have anything interesting to say. I though the Coding Horror blog improved a fair bit when Jeff no longer had to rely on it for a living and just made the occasional post. I like the idea of using a blog to build up a following which you then sell some more organised a long form content to in book/ebook form, similar to 37 signals although best results would be to not just recycle the blog content.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  That's a failure of model and motive. You can make six or more digits posting drivel, or you can make a comfortable middle-upper middle class living with a quality-focused posting schedule. I'm going for the latter with my own blog, and I try to encourage it when possible.

fleitz 16y ago

Writers will be fine. In fact it will make it easier for writers to make a living as more of the share of income goes towards entertainment. Copywriters can make a goldmine in the digital age. Writers don't define civil society. Get off your high horse and start writing content people like. Look how much money 37 Signals makes from writing.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

“Bloggers couldn’t find that themselves,” he said, “because they’re corrupted, or they couldn’t afford to spend the time.” Actually, I'm pretty sure that bloggers have known about the Koch brothers for many years. The reason this guy had to wait until the New Yorker wrote about them might be that this guy doesn't read anything that isn't in the New Yorker. EDIT: Changed the wording a bit. As Daffy Duck used to say: "pronoun trouble".

rst 16y ago
Counterpoint: some of the best reporting on the nuts and bolts of the subprime mortgage mess, while it was happening, was by a semi-retired mortgage broker pseudonymously blogging as "Tanta", who never got paid a dime for it. When she died, she was mourned by everyone from Tyler Cowen to Paul Krugman. The pseudonym was because, if her cancer ever went into remission, she wanted to be able to get a job, and she thought it might be a handicap to have (quite rightly) savaged just about every major company in the industry. The announcement of her death was the first most of her readers had ever seen her name --- Doris Dungey. EDIT: Counterpoint to Lanier, that is. Sorry 'bout that.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  The fact that this comes labeled "counterpoint" makes we worry that I've screwed up my writing. I think this was my point. ;)

mkr-hn 16y ago

I think some people mistake the ease of filling niches for the decline of art. It's not that art is on the way down, it's that more niches can be filled profitably with the audience made available by the Internet. Great art is a niche now. It's in the pie, but its slice is smaller. The people reading the "junk" either wouldn't care about the great art, or they would look at both. I think this sort of pushback was inevitable when the digital publishing revolution people talked about for decades finally happened.

rst 16y ago

A couple of key bits: “If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working,” said Lanier. “If they can’t, it isn’t.” Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it. Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants." What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no one cares. What is a future like in which most authors of book-length texts need a day job? More like the present than one might think. Most authors need one already. [1] http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ --- online novelist; paid content [2] http://xkcd.com http://xkcd.com --- online cartoonist; free content, paid swag [3] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ --- the blog is his job

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
buzzblog 16y ago
The fact that some are managing to make a put-their-kids-through-college living doesn't undermine his point in the least. The fact of the matter is that the number of content creators who can meet that threshold continues to plummet at an alarming rate. Those who speak so glowingly of the promise of "the new models" are almost inevitably either succeeding with one already (at least temporarily) or not at all personally dependent on doing so. Not only are new models needed, but they need to scale or the number of content creators sending their kids to college will continue to dwindle.

hessenwolf 16y ago

Write to promote, or write on commission. <speculation> Most of the intellectually valuable literature didn't make money anyway. </speculation>

shawnee_ 16y ago

Powerless? Hardly. The problem is that current business models for rewarding writers (in the emerging distribution format) are either broken, or they have not yet had enough time to mature. Although it's a bit "dated" (2005), I think the implications explored in Epic 2015 are pretty interesting insofar as the traditional writer -> editor -> publisher model is going. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015 http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic2015

Jubb 16y ago

He clearly has some conflicting views here,"The walled garden thing can’t last forever...Apple and Amazon can be publishers within the universal system. But they can’t have monopoly channels." This might be a nice idea, but aren't Apple and Amazon directly competing right now? How is it that they are both holding a monopoly on ebooks? People like choice, if there really were one massive distribution system I would worry that it would become the new monopoly.

rick888 16y ago
People have this notion that if you create a digital application or product and don't want it to be shared without your consent, that you have a monopoly over it.

NY_USA_Hacker 16y ago

'Writers' and 'writing' as in English literature, fiction, drama, 'belle lettre' are nearly dead. For some exceptions, might sell some romance novels or screen plays and write 'news' drawing on morality plays and formula fiction. Otherwise, broadly, first-cut, essentially the whole pile from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, ..., Dickens, James, to the present and their goals, techniques, values, and traditions are dead economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally -- kaput. Why? Still in simple terms, they never made it into the 20th century with its standards of information safety and efficacy from mathematics, physical science, medical science, engineering, medicine, and law of the early 20th century. E.g., for learning about people, f'get about Shakespeare, ..., and just read clinical psychology. Or, don't read 'writer' Henry James and read his brother psychologist William James instead. The 'writers' didn't have to know much and, instead, wrote 'art' as in the 'communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion'. For the reader, it was vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment, not useful information, not anything solid even about the emotions of real people. So, 'literature' is now for light entertainment. No one would try to do anything serious -- design an airplane, drug, computer system, bridge -- using the techniques of literature. In the recent past, for media, the content was still from "the medium is the message". So, could pass out content, one size fits millions. Such content had to be of such broad interest and, thus, so superficial that it could be from a 'writer' who actually didn't know much about the subject. Commonly a reader who actually knows something about subject X when reading work of a newsie about X sees right away that the newsie understands next to nothing about X and gets a lot wrong. Now in great contrast, for each narrow topic, there are many experts who, as on Wikipedia, HN, Stack Overflow, eGullet, various blogs and fora, can, just for fun, write material of much higher quality for free and do. So there are over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati and some unknown, large number of long tail Web sites so that the focused content is far beyond the old, one size fits millions. Yes, 'literature' is gathering dust on the library shelves and otherwise nearly dead. We are losing nothing of any value. It should have died over 100 years ago. RIP. And we are losing something dangerous that has profoundly hurt our democracy for over 150 years: We're losing the work of the newsies who just gush their emotions and otherwise distort and manipulate to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears, and pretend that they are contributing to an 'informed electorate'. They've been building a massively, deliberately un/misinformed electorate with consequences -- the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the 1929 market crash, the Great Depression and, thus, WWII, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the Great Recession, and more. I will leave details as an exercise. Hint: The Civil War started before Lincoln even took office and from essentially only the deliberately deceptive, inflammatory work of the newsies. There's an important word about 'fiction': It ain't true. Then, even if in some case by accident it is true, there's no evidence, certainly no proof. It's junk best left on the scrapheap of history from long, ignorant, efforts in the struggle to build civilization. The newsies have been among the most dangerous, destructive, and contemptible people in our democracy.

baguasquirrel 16y ago

Both programmers' and artists' work can be reproduced at the twitch of a `cp -a`. You don't see those goddamn Ruby hipsters up in SF complaining about compensation.

neutronicus 16y ago

No. Work on commission. Publish in serial format. If you're popular, you can demand an advance or a retainer. Lest we forget, many great authors (Dostoyevsky and Dickens) published their novels in serial form.

NY_USA_Hacker 16y ago

Of course you are attacking the messenger instead of the message. Maybe that's what all true, deep down, committed, card-carrying English majors do! Thanks for confirming my suspicions about Shakespeare! Teachers for six years, four in high school and two more in college, not counting the drooling Shakespeare fans for decades on PBS, told me that he had such great insight into people, e.g., manipulation, duplicity, self-deception, gullibility, ambition, collusion, loyalty, disloyalty, conspiracy, etc. Good to know that actually he didn't know anything at all about clinical psychology; that's just what I always believed! So, finally you dusted him off: There's nothing there at all! In my unique world of subtle hints, clues, creative ambiguity, hidden references (all that good literary stuff), a 'newsie' is someone who writes for a newspaper or other news service. Now, now: In not being willing to 'understand' 'newsie', you are insisting on being thoroughly literal. You must have had a heck of a time with nearly everything in English literature! Since in literature we are supposed to play with words, the meaning of 'newsie' should be clear enough! Actually 'newsie' was from 'The Maltese Falcon' where the Bogart character said that a "crippled newsie" took a gun from the thug and he, the Bogart character, made the newsie give the gun back! There the newsie was likely someone selling newspapers! A big Shakespeare fan like you should be able, along with many millions of movie fans, to understand the vocabulary in an old Bogart movie! I'm open to still better insults for the target set, hopefully something really contemptible. I like a good movie, but I know that it doesn't mean anything. I like art, but I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise English literature. The teachers kept leaning back in their chairs, gazing at the ceiling, transporting themselves to old maid English literature teacher nirvana, and going all ecstatic about how "great", "the greatest writer who ever lived", he was, etc. May I have the airsick bag, please, right away? Oops, I guess in this classroom they are all gone; BYOB. I like art well enough to be wildly in love with a large fraction of everything in music from Vivaldi through Rachmaninoff. I like it enough that at a late age, with too little talent, got a violin, took lessons, and made it through Bach E major Preludio and most of the Bach Chaconne, especially the center D major section. I still needed to practice parts of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti and the Massenet 'Meditation' from Thais. To me some really nice music is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts5t_5HeECE So, that's the Charles Laughton character, or me, lusting after the young Maureen O'Hara character!