intercourse with biscuits a modern miscellany

I’m but a minnow in the world of journalism. I skitter around in the lower depths writing about things that interest me on this blog for free and things that sometimes don’t so much for people willing to pay me. Chris Anderson is a big cheese, a head honcho, a ginormous bloody whale of a figure. He makes a hefty wage as Editor-In-Chief of Wired, schleps around raking in cash for telling companies why the future is “free” and writes big provokative THINK books like Free and The Long Tail which get him a cheque and more notoriety that he knows what to do with. But Chris doesn’t think we should all be able to get paid like him. No, like the Martin Luther King of future media he has a dream and that dream is feudalism. Let’s digest this hunk of meaty prose:

Ken [Denmead] is, by day, a civil engineer working on the BART extension in the SF Bay Area. But by night he is an amazing community manager. His leadership skills impressed me so much that I turned GeekDad over to him entirely about a year ago. Since then he’s recruited a team of volunteers who have grown the traffic ten-fold, to a million page views a month.

So here’s the calculus:

• Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
• Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
• The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

It works great for all involved. Is it the model for the newspaper industry? Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level. And I can imagine far more subjects that are better handled by well-coordinated amateurs than those that can support professional journalists

Wired.com makes “good money” selling ads on a blog Ken writes for but he only gets a “nominal fee”. There’s a difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write” Chris, one’s equitable, the other is exploitation.

The idea that getting people to work for nothing while the company earns is the future of publishing is the modern equivalent of feudal serfs toiling for their Lord. You might already be in the journalistic aristocracy Chris but some of us are still establishing ourselves. We can’t work for nothing on the vague promise of some future book deal or ephemoral profile.

I understand that the web is a link economy. I know that you’re worth online is tied closely to your reputation. I realise that the advertising models are not cut and dried yet. But if a company like Conde Nast employs someone for peanuts and leverages advertising cash from their work, that is nothing to crow about and be proud of.

Plenty of you established blowhards waffle on about “the democratisation of media” and the fact that the old systems are broken but you can theorise about “free” because you’ve already found your revenue stream. Telling us to work for squat is making you money. That must be a really tough game.

You make it sound like Ken should feel pleased with his elevated profile and book deal and in some ways that it is impressive. But profile doesn’t pay bills unless the banks start allowing me to deposit kudos instead of cash. The enthusiastic amateur is great in theory but the web still feeds of high quality sources of journalism by expert voices. Without The Guardian, The New York Times and hell, even Wired, this beautiful utopia link economy would have a lot less to feed on.

I believe in getting paid for my labour. If a writer brings value to a website, they deserve to get paid not fobbed off with promises of future book deals and exposure. This is not a beautiful tale of a bloke-done-good. This is exploitation. Enjoy life in the castle Chris because down here in the fields, we need paying for our labour.