If writers don’t get paid, internet publishing will die
We risk returning to an age when writing is the preserve of gentlemen of leisure
Nicking stuff is a problem. So let's decriminalise it. Nick what you like. Just one proviso: if I find you've got my stuff, I will send you a letter saying so, and you have to give it back.
Silly? No. It's the way of the future, enshrined in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
What the DMCA says is, you can distribute anything you like, but if the copyright-holder gets wind of it, they send you a "takedown notice" and you have to take it down again.
What the DMCA means is that before very long (it's difficult to guess a timescale, but let's say 20 years at most) the content-driven web will have no fresh, high-quality content to drive it.
The reason is fairly simple. Let's take YouTube as an example. You may think YouTube is, as its name suggests, for you. You put stuff up. You watch stuff in turn.
But you don't get the money. Google gets the money, selling ads aimed at the million upon million who made it worth Google's while to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube.
This is the model of the content-driven web, and the problem with the model of the content-driven web is, as Robert Levine says in his book Free Ride, that, just like television, the internet is only as good as what's on.
Which is fine, you might say. What's on isn't that bad. The only problem is: right now, it's about as good as it's going to get.
Levine's argument is essentially that the high-tech industries stole a march on the "culture business".
Underlying it, though, is a graver problem: that if what we might call "culture workers" don't get paid, then they will go out of business. And if they go out of business, the internet - or at least that part of it which distributes entertainment - will eventually become a gigantic digital back-list.
It may work out for some. Musicians, for example, can make a living (though perhaps not the old-style megabuck rock-star living) from live gigs and merchandise. The same thing applies to comedians: establish a (free) internet presence, and pay the bills from live appearances.
But for writers at one end of the scale, and film-makers at the other, there's no such recourse. Nobody would pay to watch a writer... what? Type? Stare at the wall? Mutter to himself as he goes for a walk with the dog? And nobody would pay to watch a live performance of a movie because there's no such thing as a live performance of a movie.
Journalism, too, has been heavily hit and will continue to be. The First Post is an unusual publication, for the web. It actually pays its contributors. Most don't. The indefinably strange Arianna Huffington has made millions from selling The Huffington Post but none of her writers have. The online aggregators, just like YouTube, are brilliant devices for squeezing the value out of "cultural work" and leaving just the skin and pips for the creators.
And more: much of the vaunted blogosphere is built on the work of paid, experienced newspaper journalists. Without those paid-for articles, commenters would have little on which to comment.
"Citizen journalism" is all too often just being somewhere by chance. Citizen journalists seldom pick up the phone and ask questions.
But if the newspapers fail, which seems horribly inevitable, who will fund journalism? So much faith has been placed in advertising; but advertising, like everything else, is valued by supply and demand. The web has no page count; advertising space is virtually (in both senses) limitless; and so the revenues fall.
I confess, of course, a personal interest. As a writer, I'm in that odd trade which underpins almost every cultural enterprise: TV, films, comedy, advertising, theatre, news, publishing. Take any enterprise based on writing, gather everyone involved in it, and you will be able to spot the writers instantly. They'll be the poorest ones in the room.
The business is an inverted pyramid with the writer at the point. The trouble now is that the point is almost underwater. Perhaps we're returning to the pre-modern - actually, pre-19th century - model, before the trade of writing, when it was an occupation for gentlemen of leisure to impress their friends.
It would be ironic if the most democratic medium in history were responsible for returning written culture to the hands of a moneyed elite. But it's not inconceivable.
Purely by chance, as a postscript, I picked up Tom Rachman's marvellously achieved novel The Imperfectionists. Telling the intermeshed stories of 11 people working for a Rome-based newspaper not unlike the International Herald Tribune, it works superbly as a stand-alone fiction. But for anyone who remembers even the dying days of the old Fleet Street, it's a shock to see, laid out plainly, just what we've lost.
What we've gained... that's another story, and we'll just have to wait and see.
• Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business by Robert Levine, Bodley Head. ISBN 978-1847921482
• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, Quercus. ISBN 978-1849160315 ·
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Comments
The problem with this analysis - and most others - is that it presumes the continuation of the paper-based publishing model, with high printing and distribution costs. These become irrelevant on an online model.
I recently looked to purchase an ebook which had recently been released in paperback form after a successful hardback phase. The publisher was still quoting a price which reflected the hardback price, so I looked elsewhere. I have no problem in paying the author a reasonable amount (possibly in line with current royalties), and a little on top for the distributor (whoever that may be).
Whining that the world is unfair only makes everybody annoyed. Think about a new model. It's not rocket science.
In the past, writing as an adjunct to the gentleman of leisure was an essential part of the beginnings of journalism. Today though, the writer has become an essential part of the whole spectrum of media, about art, reviews of books, films and articles, opinion and editorial writing, and much more.
While there may be a death of the paid journalist, for instance of the writer for a newspaper, there will be many jobs available to those whose skill is interpreting the days events for the masses.
We will see a death of newspapers, that is an inevitability, yet we, in my opinion won't see the death of the "writer" for many years to come if ever. Writing as an art, whether fiction, non-fiction or journalistic will never disappear, for this reason, people need someone other than themselves to interpret the days events and put these pieces of skilled writing where they will be available to the masses.
But this is exactly what the New World Order want - the only writing and reporting which appears is what suits their case. Christopher Hitchens has lived the life of Reilly off commissions for his drivel from extreme right-wing organisations, for example. The Iraq War was hymned by envelopes stuffed with cash slipped to "authors". Even in allegedly "left-leaning" newspapers we find foreign affairs being written-up by Chatham House muppets like Simon Tisdall... his weekly Tuesday Russia-bashing has become a memetic joke. Nicko Cohen keeps up the case for Zionism, while over in the Indy fellow self-confessed Zionist whackjob Julie Burchill vies with paid-up warmonger John Rentaghoul to bring you What NATO Want Reported. The message is brutally simple - write what NATO wants, and the rewards are bountiful indeed. The BBC is the best example of all.
I can relate to this. It is not only culture which is beset by this problem, but some aspects of IT and business information services. Everyone seems to expect everything for free, or a very low price which does not cover the effort involved.
This leads people to exit these "businesses" resulting in, in the case of business info services, more data swamping the customer but less value-added infomation and analysis.
Especially in the IT domain, with the introduction of open source, whilst this has been very positive, it has led to a massive misconception that opensource always means free software and free support.
Bottom line is that while we all like to receive something free of charge, let's not allow ourselves to become freeloaders taking advantage of people's hard word.