This blog has been very helpful in extending my freelance career, and I am pretty much down with the part of the TwistImage post "The Part of Social Media That Freaks Out Freelance Writers" which enumerates all the ways in which blogs can be good for freelancers.
But here's the thing: The cost to being a content producer is dramatically lower than it used to be (you no longer have to own a newspaper to control public dialogue), and the cost of being a consumer is way down. Like, down to free. And the model as it is now is broken. Let's enumerate the ways:
1. Surprisingly, some people want to get paid for their work. Investigative reporting takes time and resources; not everyone can blithely jet hither and yon while their partner with the day job supports them. While giving away your work can be a great way to get a foot in the door (I wrote about television here for free before I ever did for here and here.), it is also a great way to send savvy businesspeople the lesson that rigorous, truthful reporting and intellectually honest criticism are a cheap commodities. Consider this: In the past decade, people are depending more on anonymous user reviews -- which folks are happy to write without any financial incentive.
2. When anyone can publish, anything gets published. This sounds wonderful -- until you need to know something and you're not sure who's telling the truth, who's got accurate information, who's not trying to deliberately misinform people because they have an ax to grind, who will stand behind their work.
There was a lot of snickering at Christopher Kimball's gauntlet-tossing -- a wiki recipe versus a Test Kitchen recipe -- but he's making a valid point: it's hard to find the signal amidst all the noise sometimes. In a way, this is the Wal-Mart'ing, self-checkout model of content: The burden of fact-checking, editing and informational synthesis has shifted from the writers and editors to the readers. You want your cheap content? Work for it.
To go in a tangent off the second point: I have been tremendously baffled by the outcry at the new FTC regulation for bloggers. Maybe this is because I have never been approached to try any consumer product, nor has any (obviously misinformed) company attempted to fling expensive baubles my way in an effort to curry my favor. Or maybe it's because I don't trust most blogs to have, much less be transparent about, their practices for avoiding conflict of interest when reviewing a product. (See also: Wal-Mart'ing of content production; niceties like editorial guidelines are no longer the responsibility of bloggers or their editors.)
When I read something like this:
Why just for bloggers? Do New York Times book, music, and movie reviewers disclose that they received review copies for free?
My answer is: Because bloggers tend not to have institutionally-enforceable conflict of interest policies. On the other hand, many established publications do; there is a framework in place to ensure that writers aren't easily bought. Heck, back when I was at Macworld, part of my job included boxing up and sending back all the hardware we tested. Giveaways were not allowed.
So what's my overarching point? It's that there's been a lot of blah-blah-blah about what so-called "old media" should learn from bloggers and content aggregation sites -- but I think the lessons go both ways. If you want the freedom to produce content unfettered from any umbrella institution, then take it upon yourself to assume the chores that institution used to do for you: keeping yourself transparent and accountable to the readers, and finding a way to make all that content pay.
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