Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect, Part I: When Media Content is Free, It's Worth Every Cent

By Ted Rall

Created Nov 27 2007 - 8:42am

This is the first of a three-part series.

NEW YORK--August J. Pollak was thrilled when the Huffington Post asked him

to blog for them. Joining the widely-read liberal website was a great break,

thought the astute political cartoonist/blogger whose work appears at the

perfectly-named "Some Guy with a Website." Then they told him about his

salary: Zero.

"I love the Huffington Post, and I love the exposure I get from them,"

Pollak told me. "But it's never going to pay my rent."

He's right. The Huffington Post, capitalized to the tune of $10 million,

employs 43 full-time employees, all of whom presumably receive actual cash

money, and health benefits, and maybe even a 401(k), for their efforts. But,

USA Today reports, "it has no plans to begin paying bloggers. Ever." Ken

Lerer, company co-founder, former Time Warner executive, and probably

himself in it for the money, says: "That's not our financial model. We offer

them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company." Sorry,

August. Vampire capitalism offers its sincere regrets to you, and your 1600

unpaid colleagues.

(Disclosure: I interviewed Pollak for my alternative cartoon anthology

"Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists." We are friends.)

Content is king, dot-com gurus of the 1990s told us. People who made cool

pictures, songs and strings of word cashed in. Then Andrew Odlyzko of AT&T

Labs wrote an influential essay titled "Content Is Not King."

"Content certainly has all the glamour," wrote Odlyzko. "What content does

not have is money...The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are

well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money

every two weeks! Those 'commodity pipelines' attract much more spending than

the glamorous 'content.'" Moving and packaging information pays. Producing

it does not.

Leaders of America's corporate mass media have embraced a financial model

that relies upon a fatal internal conflict. The future of media, they

believe, belongs to "consolidators" like the Drudge Report and Huffington,

who pull together creative content--in these examples, news stories and

opinion columns--they don't pay for. But who will write the stuff they

steal--er, consolidate?

In the short run, they're getting luminaries such as late JFK biographer

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. They buy the pitch, sold by scruffy cool 29-year-old

guys who look like the Mac guy in the "Mac vs. PC" commercials, that the

intangible benefits of exposure online will lead to tangible paychecks.

(When, they don't say. From whom, they know not.) In the long run, hacks and

amateurs like the right-wing bloggers who destroyed Dan Rather's career at

CBS by "debunking" his scoop about George W. Bush's Air National Guard

records. (Rather, it turned out, was right all along. Sorry, Dan.) And who

will produce boring old content in the really long run? No one. No one worth

paying attention to, anyway.

Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader in

my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd love to

use your cartoon about..." "We can't offer a salary per se, but you would

get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if..." Content is still

king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.

"Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative

types...who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden,"

computer scientist Jaron Lanier wrote recently in the New York Times: "Stop

whining and join the party!" Like other old media types, I'm working

overtime to try to smash these economic lemons into sweet, lucrative

lemonade.

In the meantime, I called the bank that holds my mortgage. "I don't have a

budget to pay you per se," I cooed. "But think of the awesome prestige your

corporation receives just by being associated with a cartoonist and

columnist whose work is literally read by millions of--" Click. Citibank

(Bangalore), Ltd., signing out. Back to work!

So I'm cranky. I've already been through this give-it-away-for-the-exposure

crap before. It wasn't any more fun in the 1980s than it is now.

In my 20s, when I was starting on my quest to become a full-time dispenser

of drawings mocking the president, I let shoestring operations like "Poetry

Halifax North," a tiny review in Nova Scotia, and "Against The Current," a

socialist magazine out of Detroit, print my cartoons for free. They didn't

offer much exposure, but I needed the tearsheets. Not getting paid sucked,

but giving away my "content" was understandable--my "clients" were broke.

Over the years, I got better known. Big newspapers and magazines

published--and paid for--my cartoons. Working for free had paid off. I

became a full-time cartoonist.

But then the big newspapers and magazines started giving away their content.

Violating the first rule of capitalism (charge as much as the market will

bear, stupid!) publishers became obsessed with securing "market share"

online. It costs tens of millions of dollars a year to produce, but you can

now read all of today's New York Times--plus special Web-only articles that

don't appear in the print edition--for free.

The Times projects that online will account for 8 percent of its revenues

this year. But that's not so impressive when you consider that NYTimes.com

has 1300 percent more readers than the Old Gray Lady. Why don't newspaper

executives understand that a 50 percent market share, times online

advertising rates that basically round off to zero, equals zero? Internet ad

rates have been, remain, and will likely remain for the foreseeable future,

a joke.

Online media is growing too slowly to make up for the decline of print.

"Despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet,

[a Harvard University study] found that teenagers and young adults were

twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web,"

reports The New York Times. Yet newspapers are eviscerating print operations

to invest in an online presence without a discernible fiscal future.

Print is dead, Internet evangelists have convinced media executives. But,

financially, there is no Web.

True, newspapers are boring, stodgy, and losing circulation. But abandoning

them in favor of their possible-maybe-cross-your-fingers online successors

is like getting rid of Saddam without planning for his successor.

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes

downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to

peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to

submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local

rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon

that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The

Washington Post--the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the

United States--brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have

paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Internet users won't pay,

technology blogger Dan Bricklin asserted in a 2000 column: "People will pay

money for things that give them emotional satisfaction, especially those

things that involve interacting with others, or have a high emotion content,

like music." (I found the essay online, for free. Sorry, Dan.)

I think people are willing to pay for more than iTunes and text messages. So

does Jaron Lanier, who now renounces his days as an

information-wants-to-be-free cheerleader. "Information is free on the

Internet," he writes, "because we [computer scientists] designed it that

way. We could design information systems so that people can pay for

information--so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author

and yet can also be paid."

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode

journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture

will accelerate. We can't get the toothpaste back into the tube. The

Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more

profitable--to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism--will require

us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts:

the illusion of Internet privacy.

NEXT WEEK: The solution.

_______

About author Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is

Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel

analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

--

NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not

always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material

available to advance understanding of

political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I

believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as

provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright

Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson

Gandalf Grey wrote:

>

> Future Imperfect, Part I: When Media Content is Free, It's Worth Every Cent

>

> By Ted Rall

> Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader in

> my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd love to

> use your cartoon about..." "We can't offer a salary per se, but you would

> get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if..." Content is still

> king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.

>

There is a bit of irony in that Gandalf Grey presumably is posting this

because he thinks that content should be king yet he's one of those

"online leeches" that take materials and reuse them without sending a

check to the content maker. And he doesn't even require that we click on

a URL, which might at least get the guy some cash, something that Drudge

nearly always does.

--

"Throw me that lipstick, darling, I wanna redo my stigmata."

+-Jennifer Saunders, "Absolutely Fabulous"

"Bill Bonde ( 'Hi ho' )" <tributyltinpaint@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message

news:474DB889.59F83BF@yahoo.co.uk...

>

>

> Gandalf Grey wrote:

>>

>> Future Imperfect, Part I: When Media Content is Free, It's Worth Every

>> Cent

>>

>> By Ted Rall

>

>

>> Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader

>> in

>> my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd love

>> to

>> use your cartoon about..." "We can't offer a salary per se, but you would

>> get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if..." Content is

>> still

>> king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.

>>

> There is a bit of irony in that Gandalf Grey presumably is posting this

> because he thinks that content should be king yet he's one of those

> "online leeches" that take materials and reuse them without sending a

> check to the content maker. And he doesn't even require that we click on

> a URL, which might at least get the guy some cash, something that Drudge

> nearly always does.

Sure he does, >wink<wink>

"Wm J. Clinton '08" <GeoShrubya@WH.net> wrote in message

news:QFj3j.3001$Dt4.66@newssvr19.news.prodigy.net...

>

> "Bill Bonde ( 'Hi ho' )" <tributyltinpaint@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message

> news:474DB889.59F83BF@yahoo.co.uk...

>>

>>

>> Gandalf Grey wrote:

>>>

>>> Future Imperfect, Part I: When Media Content is Free, It's Worth Every

>>> Cent

>>>

>>> By Ted Rall

>>

>>

>>> Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader

>>> in

>>> my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd

>>> love to

>>> use your cartoon about..." "We can't offer a salary per se, but you

>>> would

>>> get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if..." Content is

>>> still

>>> king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.

>>>

>> There is a bit of irony in that Gandalf Grey presumably is posting this

>> because he thinks that content should be king yet he's one of those

>> "online leeches" that take materials and reuse them without sending a

>> check to the content maker. And he doesn't even require that we click on

>> a URL, which might at least get the guy some cash, something that Drudge

>> nearly always does.

>

> Sure he does, >wink<wink>

Yeah. Matt Drudge. Now THERE'S a source you can trust. Figures that Bill

Bombe would try to make that kind of comparison.

>

>

Gandalf Grey wrote:

>

> "Wm J. Clinton '08" <GeoShrubya@WH.net> wrote in message

> news:QFj3j.3001$Dt4.66@newssvr19.news.prodigy.net...

> >

> > "Bill Bonde ( 'Hi ho' )" <tributyltinpaint@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message

> > news:474DB889.59F83BF@yahoo.co.uk...

> >>

> >>

> >> Gandalf Grey wrote:

> >>>

> >>> Future Imperfect, Part I: When Media Content is Free, It's Worth Every

> >>> Cent

> >>>

> >>> By Ted Rall

> >>

> >>

> >>> Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader

> >>> in

> >>> my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd

> >>> love to

> >>> use your cartoon about..." "We can't offer a salary per se, but you

> >>> would

> >>> get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if..." Content is

> >>> still

> >>> king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.

> >>>

> >> There is a bit of irony in that Gandalf Grey presumably is posting this

> >> because he thinks that content should be king yet he's one of those

> >> "online leeches" that take materials and reuse them without sending a

> >> check to the content maker. And he doesn't even require that we click on

> >> a URL, which might at least get the guy some cash, something that Drudge

> >> nearly always does.

> >

> > Sure he does, >wink<wink>

>

> Yeah. Matt Drudge. Now THERE'S a source you can trust. Figures that Bill

> Bombe would try to make that kind of comparison.

>

Almost everyone on Drudge's site is a link to major media. I don't

believe he takes materials from major media and posts them without

permission, unless it's a "scope" and I suspect that's his writing about

whatever the media isn't covering.

I didn't make any claims that you should just trust everything or

anything on Drudge's site. You shouldn't do that with any site.

--

"Throw me that lipstick, darling, I wanna redo my stigmata."

+-Jennifer Saunders, "Absolutely Fabulous"