Writers would love it if someone wrote them ... a check

Advertising Age's Simon Dumenco posits:

As for the notion of the self-actualized, non-wage-slave blogger? That's turned out to be, for many semi-famous bloggers, complete bullshit. Never mind all the hype about the select few blog stars, mostly in the tech realm, who are actually getting rich doing what they're doing; they've invariably fashioned unhealthy, obsessive-compulsive-disordered lifestyles for themselves way worse than anything any old-media slave drivers ever concocted. (See: GigaOm blogger Om Malik, heart attack victim at 41.)

Meanwhile, many pseudo-celebrity bloggers have finally figured out that they're as disposable -- as cog-in-a-wheel-ish -- as any of the cubicle-dwelling suckers populating old-media combines. That realization started, in part, when Gawker Media dismissed a blogger who didn't make her page-view quota. But just wait until the Huffington Post -- which still doesn't pay most of its bloggers -- tries to sell itself.

-- "From Media Darlings to Public Enemy #1 in Five Years of Less," June 1, 08

I've written on group weblogs for love of the blog, but man, oh, man, at some point you've got to stop being sentimental and start taking a hard look at what your product is worth. I'm a little surprised that the phrase "digital sharecropping" hasn't entered the lexicon of bloggers yet.

Comments

[Polly]

at some point you've got to stop being sentimental and start taking a hard look at what your product is worth.

FUCK YEAH!!!!

Sorry about that. But OH MY GOD my biggest complaint about freelancing was the ASSHOLES who were like, "You're an artist! I don't have to pay you--you get to starve to death in a garret!" Like, thank YOU so much, I don't see YOU doing without YOUR paycheck. [I could include a stream of suitable obscenities here, but I shall refrain.] You know that HuffPo's writers are going to get the shaft big time, just like the National Lampoon's did.

Part of it is this boho mentality that you are not a REAL artist unless you're desperately poor (this is why on a certain level I really dislike the musical Rent). A lot writers who are young and really very naive buy right into that.

And younger people just don't realize what being able to write is worth. When I graduated from college, I just assumed that everyone could write, because it wasn't hard for me, and I'm no Einstein. But then I got my first job at a publishing house and started looking over the manuscripts that were coming in, and I realized that very few people can write well--even very highly educated people often can't string two words together. And that is when I was like, Wow, I do have a saleable skill!

[Kerry]

I'm pretty militant on not giving away work for free, or at least being selective about it based on how it will in the end benefit me. For instance, on some reader blogs I follow there's been some controversy about Amazon reviews and posses gaming the system and getting reviews deleted, and I'm pretty boggled that people would give their intellectual content to a gimormo corporate entity that makes and enforces unclear rules for what? The chance to be noticed and score some ARCs after you write thousands of reviews? Social networking and Web 2.0 be damned, I'm not going to inprove your product for you. And writing is work, and harder for some than others.