Pay the writer

[Zoya]

I set up a paper.li for the VG Words Twitter list, and it's pretty interesting this week! Check it out here

For those of you who haven't been dragged into Paper.li by the twitter spam, it's a service that collates links that people have shared on social networks into a 'newspaper' that is automatically generated at pre-set intervals. This one collates any videos or stories that VG Words members share on Twitter. It's worked out as a nice combination of video games, social justice, and writers' issues along with a bit of entertainment as well (I recommend the Sir Digby Chicken Caesar sketch).

Anyway there's lots of things ripe for discussion in the paper.li. In this thread I thought I'd highlight the stuff about writing and journalism:

Mainly, this article on the importance of demanding fair pay as a writer. I'm particularly disappointed by the Amanda Palmer anecdote, since I admire her faith and resolve in finding new ways to finance creativity when traditional publishers are becoming less relevant (not irrelevant, just not useful partners for every project). I think we need to find new ways to finance writing in an age of fewer publishers, free content, piracy and a fragile future for online advertising as a business model. This includes demanding fair pay from those who can afford it, but it also means crowdfunding projects that fall outside of traditional revenue models.

In a similar vein, here is an email exchange in which a journalist covering North Korean affairs unsuccessfully negotiates pay from The Atlantic. In case you thought that unpaid writing was unique to games criticism.

Other links on journalism and writing:

Homicide watch

[Alan Williamson]

The response to Thayer's exchange from the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal is interesting, but also disturbing. I described it on Twitter as "a tacit admission that ad-supported digital journalism isn’t sustainable", which I think is a pretty good tl;dr summary.

I was talking to a few people yesterday on Twitter about this, in the wake of Destructoid acknowledging half their users block advertising and they don't have an alternative in place. There seems to be this collective shrugging of shoulders among journalists. Apparently adverts are the only way to make decent revenue, even though everyone hates them and they bring an outlet's reputation into disrepute. Some examples:

1. Aliens: CM adverts on EGM juxtaposed with their bewilderingly positive review.
2. Gameranx hypocritically saying "The internet is a terrible place. It shouldn't be. We can fix this and we absolutely have to." on a piece about sexism and Feminist Frequency, with a rolling banner featuring "10 Hottest Babes in Gaming" and other gems beneath it. The implication is "we as a community can and must fix misogyny; we as Gameranx obviously aren't going to hurt our revenue stream to do so".

So advertising is shit. It is so shit that people go out of their way to block it: it wastes bandwidth, battery and patience. Here are some alternatives:

1. Paywall: reader can see very little without payment. This is the case with The Times, New York Times, Five out of Ten, and most traditional media like magazines and newspapers.
2. Subscription: Ars Technica allow readers to subscribe and have extra features. A friend on Twitter said they didn't like the idea of some users having a worse experience; I said to think of it as paying users having an even better experience, without any real compromises for free users. This is similar to the app development scene where you get free apps with ads and a paid version.
3. Kickstarter/ donation drive: As used by Penny Arcade (somehow) and Unwinnable. People contribute what they can until the site hits a donation threshold, then nobody pays again, then the site rattles a tin again when the coffers are low.

I don't know what the best option for going forward is, but I think we need to admit that advertising-driven journalism is unsustainable and potentially ethically dubious. There are good alternatives. Like a fair taxation system, those with most should contribute more than those that have less (that's why Five out of Ten has a tiered pricing structure).

If you're running a business, i.e. generating profit, and not paying your workers - and in fact, Madrigal says that unpaid labour is crucial to the Atlantic's business strategy - then I question why you're running that business at all.

[Zoya]

I think there is another alternative model, which is to build a product line. Generally I think anything that means less reliance on advertising and more direct contact with readers is a good thing, especially anything that means you don't need to race for volume but can nourish a niche audience that loves what you do.

[Ethan Gach]

I think there's some worthwhile points made about the whole situation here.

The business side is complicated, and something I'll have more to say on later (though I largely agree with Alan).

On the moral side, the issue remains: does one writer feel alright benefiting financially off of the work of another, even while that other earns nothing from it. They might earn "buzz" but unless that buzz ever actually materializes into a pay check--they haven't earned anything.

And if a great writer with a great article can't even make money off it at the Atlantic, a thoroughly profitable online and print mag, why should we presume that this buzz will help them get paid for it anywhere else?

The business problem is a tough one requiring a nuanced solution (most likely) but the ethical one is not.

[psepho]

You may be interested to know that there is actually an even worse approach than the 'write for exposure' approach.

In the legal press it is quite normal to write for free if you are a lawyer since it builds your wider professional profile -- it is essentially partly marketing which I'm fine with. However, some publications now go to the ridiculous extreme of asking firms to actually pay to be published (£££ per page). It's not something I've ever done obviously, but it is quite a surreal idea to be charging the writer as well as (in some cases) the reader. Needless to say, the firms that go for it are the less established ones who can least afford it anyway and the message it sends out doesn't even do them any favours.

[Maddy Myers]

I wrote about this a li'l bit on my personal blog last week: http://metroidpolitan.com/blog/2013/3/5/for-the-love-of-the-game

Publications have two ways to get money that I can see:

1. Subscribers
You can also choose, within this model, to reward people for subscribing. Some ways include: free merch (t-shirts, tote bags, etc), the privilege of being allowed to comment on the site, access to the content at all, or access to more content. Obviously this means if a reader can't afford to subscribe to the magazine, then they don't get to read it, so the publisher have an accessibility problem for people who can't afford them and has to decide whether those people matter more than the ability to pay their writers ... who need to eat.
I see this model as similar to the "old school" model of patrons paying artists to work. Several rich people fund a magazine and then, hopefully, "everyone" gets to reap the benefits of the product. ... Unless only subscribers get to see the product. (In case you couldn't tell, I'm not thrilled about that model. I always want everybody to be able to have access to everything. And yet I also believe writers deserve money. I know, I know.)

2. Advertisements.
The problems with this model have been laid out pretty well by previous comments (Gameranx's dissonant ads, the appearance of games websites being biased by their game-related ads, et al).
I think one solution to this is to find advertisements that have nothing to do with games but that still might appeal to gamers: ads for couches, for TVs, for computer parts, for cables, for internet providers, and so on and so forth. Advertising video games on a game review site seems like a terrible idea to me, and yet, so many websites continue to do it.
But, even getting better advertisers (if you CAN -- a lot of companies have cut back on their marketing budgets b/c of the recession, meaning it's harder to find advertisers now than ever before) does not guarantee that your audience will click on the ads. They might be using an ad blocker, or they might not be but just aren't interested in your ads.
Publications complain about ad blockers A LOT, but that's not the real problem either. The real problem is people hate internet ads far, far more than they ever hated ads in print publications.  For some reason, having a pop-up ad, or an ad that "interrupts" our online content (like a bar across the screen in the middle of a piece, say) annoys us more than flipping a magazine page and seeing an ad and then flipping the page over again and seeing more content. No one has yet figured out a good way to put ads online, ads that people will like and click on, ads that won't actively bother people.

I don't think this problem is unsolvable, no one has solved it yet. I'm glad to hear Five out of Ten is doing well with its subscriber model, though (see: other thread about Five out of Ten where someone asked Alan about that). That subscriber system worked pretty well for Kill Screen, at first, before Kill Screen changed its model. I don't know WHY Kill Screen changed its model, though. Wish I could have sat in on a couple of those meetings.

I'm mostly biased towards a subscriber model because I know about the inefficacy of internet ads. But the subscriber model assumes that people have money in the first place (they don't, especially right now), AND that they're willing to spend that money on content that they have been socialized to believe should be free (the advent of the internet has devalued journalism in a way that it was not devalued, say, 20 years ago when people happily paid to subscribe to a print newspaper). So there are both economic and cultural problems right now, surrounding the "value" of writers and writing.

[Ethan Gach]

I wrote somewhat at length about the whole thing here. The short version is that other writers shouldn't be alright with profiting from other writers work for free, and that all the talk about "buzz" and about how difficult it is to make the economics of online journalism and writing work are excuses.

 

Like Maddy, I favor the subscriber model as well. I think it forces publications or writers to build a better relationship with their readership and to write for the kind of readership they want, rather than chasing any old set of eye balls for a couple of extra page clicks.

 

As someone said, "we are all Buzzfeed now," and the sooner publications cop to that, the sooner they can accept it or try to be better and embark on a new path.

[Johannes Köller]

I've spent far too much time yesterday jotting down my rambling thoughts on the whole subject, but to give the short version I agree that ads are less than ideal, certainly from a business perspective what with adblock and all, but also from a purely idealistic standpoint. Ideally journalism shouldn't depend financially on the very industry it is supposed to be policing but the readers it is offering that service too. Sites moving from ads to other models seems to be the general trend and presumably we'll see more variety in these models too, for instance in how much content is exclusive to subscribers. You could simply put up a tip jar like Unwinnable or a full frontal paywall.... somehow I don't think the latter is as viable as the former, but theoretically any version between those two extremes might work. Curious to see what will come of that.

Past subscription, it seems to me .pdf magazines are in vogue again (and this has nothing to do with me running one, I swear): There's Five out of Ten of course, and Kill Screen, Continue, Nintendo Force and Pure Nintendo. The benefit of this model is that you get to offer a product, something more tangible than the general online service you support with a subscription. Five out of Ten and Kill Screen seem to show this works with exclusive content, but I think it might help back a traditional online presence too (I know I'd buy a pretty .pdf collection of my favorite games writing pieces). I'd consider it the games writing equivalent of a cartoonist selling t-shirts and prints.

And while we're on the subject, print might be coming back as the exact opposite of what it previously was: a luxury product. The ultimate collectors edition for word geeks like myself. I'm not sure if there's a big market for something like this (only that I am part of it), but as a kind of optional upgrade for digital magazines it might work well.

I'm really curious what's going on at Kill Screen too. They seem to have gotten a little sidetracked with their online business and that gathering in New York. Now it seems the actual issues are kind of low priority, but I really want to see another. Plus I know a guy who bought a four issue subscription two issues ago. He's a bit worried it's going to last well into 2015.

[Zoya]

I 100% agree with print as a premium product and I'm super excited about living in that world. I think there's a lot to be said for people paying for emotion and not paying for content. I love that feeling of owning a quality, physical copy of something that I care about, and I'm much happier paying for that than paying for access to information.

It's interesting to see people here making a similar argument for the subscription model. I'd always disliked it, since it creates paywalls in front of content, which creates bad blood, and it gets in the way of a big part of your acquisition funnel because people can't stumble upon your content. But I hadn't heard anyone argue before that it forces you to build relationships with readers so that they keep chipping in. I like that idea a lot and I'm much more amenable to the subscription model for having heard it.

[Bryant Francis]

My company has an interesting take on this. First off, all our games writing (which we're trying to grow/expand into better, more original writing), isn't our A level content. It's B level to serve The Jace Hall Show, which is what our revenue is tied to. Basically, me and my fellow writers at the site get to write about games because the hope is, our articles act as advertisements to watch the show. Because of that, we have no advertisements, but we also have no subscriber fees. (I guess we have Youtube advertisements or something but I don't know the literal business details, I just know we don't run ads.) 

Obviously none of us as a writer wants to consider our work as an advertisement, but the benefit of this model is we get to write about whatever we want, really. Obviously not a universal model, but it makes me wonder if, say, Thinkgeek were to increase their presence a little and having some geek writers on to expand their blog.

....Aaaaand the more I think about that model going any further the more frightened I am by the implications of games writing being tied to consumerism, so I might be walking back that train of thought a little.

[Sparky]

@psepho

Paying to be published is actually quite common in the sciences. For open-access journals especially one almost always has to pay more than $1000 in order to publish (organizations like PLoS have exemptions for impoverished countries but are not clear about what those actually are). Of course, peer-reviewed publications have a stronger indirect effect on the bottom line for scientists, so paying for exposure comes across as a somewhat better deal. As with the lawyer example, however, lower-end journals are more likely to charge publication fees, meaning early-career investigators are disproportionately likely to pay to be published.

[Kaitlin Tremblay]

I really like the idea of paying for an emotional connection, and I do see the rise in PDF publications that has been mentioned. There's been a lot of talk on this lately, especially in the Toronto book publishing scene (which is my background for the most part) and unpaid internships. A lot of independent companies can't afford extra help, so interns work for free (or like me, severely below poverty line) because it's the only way to get the actual experience you need to get hired at a somewhat better rate. It's complete bullshit, but everyone gets away with it by saying it's a "passion industry." So I think this idea of "pay your dues, build your CV" is prevalent in a lot of arts-related fields because we're told we have to sacrifice to do what we love, and I think that's especially true for writers. It's sad and frustrating, and other than joining an activist group to try and stop it, I feel entirely at a loss.

That venting session out of the way, I do like the idea of a subscription model that enhances a reader's experience, rather than limiting the experience for somebody who doesn't pay. And it makes sense, and seems to straddle both worlds of getting exposure but also ensuring writers are getting paid.

[John Brindle]

I don't actually mind advertising. As a consumer, I can handle seeing commercial messages bracketed around my reading. As a writer, I know that this is the way that the cover price of news and journalism has been subsidised ever since the 1850s. But you don't need to spot the adverts for cheap airlines next to articles about climate change in The Guardian to know that it's a deal with the devil. More importantly, it isn't working anymore. As Ken Auletta writes in his important book Googled, Google has basically destroyed the price of advertising online (though anyone else would have done it). The advent of automatic auctions and complex metrics has allowed companies to bid down the costs and to know exactly how effective their advertising is. By contrast, the traditional advertising industry has always depended on mystery and opacity to sell their products. Does having a Super Bowl advert actually help you enough to justify the expense? Who knows? But the advertising rep will tell you that everyone else is doing it, and that you'll have to outbid them...the whole industry was sustained by bullshit. Now that's far less possible - which means, ironically, that it's harder to pay for the truth.

At the same time, my (slight, mild) problem with paywalls is that they disrupt the fabric of the internet somewhat. They make it more difficult for readers to follow information and reference through links, and more difficult for writers to link to each other and be in critical conversation. In games writing this is a particularly acute problem because it depends, to such a profound extent, on collaboration and reference. This doesn't mean I don't cheer on attempts to make journalism pay with premium products - quite the opposite. I just question whether it's a model that everyone could adopt, and I know that as a critic and writer I am frustrated by knowing I cannot cite something which is behind a paywall, or be cited if I am behind one.

But there's no real answer to the problem. I did my dissertation on how to fund local journalism. My conclusion was nuanced, but bordered closely on "we're fucked". What I do know is that people need to be paid, and that it isn't right to make money off people writing for free. How easily that can be squared with the actual business of games journalism is another question entirely. I suspect the most viable answers will be a mix of methods: advertising, subscriptions, extra features, premium print products, and donations. There are ways forward, but it will require a lot of ingenuity and flexibility.