Go, Read: A Day In The Life Of A Digital Editor

So I totally missed this post on The Atlantic about the difficult realities facing on-line publishing. I think it's a good companion piece to some of the writing from this week and especially last about writing for free. I can remember a time when people writing on-line were turning down dollar-a-word gigs because they didn't sound as fun as these other gigs over here. I turned down gigs that I would consider cutting off a toe for now, and I'm far from the kind of writer that gets those gigs first.

So yeah, I think the model is changing, for prose and for comics, and the only real standards to apply involve seeing where the money that exists goes and if that's fair to the content being created. That's why I would suggest that not working for free -- and not asking people to work for free -- is important as a fundamental guideline and operating principle as opposed to some abstract declaration of Internet rhetoric. If we're in a situation where there isn't a lot of money at all, it's triply important that we don't indiscriminately support institutions because while some of them may well pay their people as much as they can and support them in ways that compensate, others may not. That includes some institutions that are just structurally unable to make what they have going on work in a way that allows for creators to be paid. The same thing happened at a lot of newspapers the last decade. It wasn't that the idea of newspapers became suddenly and completely non-viable, but newspapers were legitimately diminished a bit in overall stature and income, they were diminished in stature and income in specific areas of past strength, they were diminished in a way that exposed an infrastructure that was slow to react and maybe unable to react to the extent it needed to, and as a result of all of these things a lot of them didn't recover and another bunch of them are still reeling.

So yes, things are tough all over, but that doesn't mean that it's on any one segment of the creation cycle to take the lead when it comes to sacrifice. Let's do more to make creators being paid our starting point instead of one potential outcome.
 
posted 12:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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