Writers Getting Paid - Latest Comments

Re: Twenty Years Ago, Grindr Would Have Been a Section in a Newspaper

njudah — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:58:45 -0000

Well that's my point - they understand a physically distributed medium that collects money as it goes (i.e. pay for a subscription, pay for a paper, or in the case of alt weeklies, cut distribution to 1x a week and rely on ads alone) but lose their shit when it comes to sending out the same amount of copies on a paperless medium.

In LA Craigslist is a distant 2nd or 3rd to Westside rentals and the Recycler, and in SF, you'd think that the geniuses at the locally owned Bay Guardian would have figured something out. But now the Guardian is a faint echo of its former self, in print and online. Funny how other locally owned papers like the Seattle Stranger seem to thrive in this new era...

Re: Twenty Years Ago, Grindr Would Have Been a Section in a Newspaper

mattymatt — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:51:06 -0000

I think that's it exactly -- they didn't want to invent. I can't completely blame them, since technical innovation is expensive and risky. But sitting still and hoping that nobody invents the horseless carriage is even riskier.

Isn't it crazy that alt-weeklies don't have better Craigslisty functions, given their position? It's just mad.

Re: Twenty Years Ago, Grindr Would Have Been a Section in a Newspaper

njudah — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:48:50 -0000

I've often wondered why the alt-weeklies, with their superior branding and name ID, didn't get ahead of the Craigslist.org trap, and instead were content to give away a big piece of their ad base and whine about it. With their distribution in print, they surely could have copied the model of the LA Recycler or something and been ahead of the game, since people were already using them for classifieds. Oh but it is better to whine than it is to invent.

Re: Video: Where Your News Comes From

mattymatt — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:36:14 -0000

Well, the articles have to come from somewhere.

In my case, I pitch the prospective stories with links, to an editor; they pick a few for me to turn into an article, and then I send the ones that they don't pick along to friends who might be looking for things to write about.

Re: Video: Where Your News Comes From

Beth Barany — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:27:23 -0000

Why would I want to do this? "It usually takes about an hour to gather up ten to twenty good stories." Am I missing something?

Re: Why CBS5′s Brittney Gilbert Loves the Newsroom

brittneyg — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:40:19 -0000

Hey look, it's me!

Thanks for the write-up. And for lunch!

Re: When is Taking an eBook Stealing?

njudah — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:19:11 -0000

it's a bit of a mix, isn't it?

Re: NewsTilt: A Brand New Market for Journalism

jchewitt — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:40:33 -0000

Yep. I certainly hope it works out. Word rates have been edging upwards online while they go down in print. I expect that it'll reach parity at some point. The growth in eBooks - especially short pamphlets, usually on business stuff - is pretty encouraging, but that's not traditional journalism.

I like how this differs a bit from True/Slant. While that platform seems to be growing, most of the views seem to accrue to a few superstars (like Taibbi). This is at least marketed towards paying markets rather than just accruing eyeballs.

Re: When is Taking an eBook Stealing?

phuong — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:28:14 -0000

This seems to be on par with the idea of owning a record album, but instead of uploading it to your computer you illegally download it instead. Although, i feel less bad about downloading music since creating a digital copy of music from a CD is far easier than obtaining digital copies of your print books. I think i just mooted my own point.

Re: NewsTilt: A Brand New Market for Journalism

mattymatt — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 06:45:52 -0000

Yes, that is definitely a risk! Working on spec is always a gamble. Of course, it's less of a risk if you have a really good reputation and a pretty good assurance that publications will be beating down a path to your door. How do you get a good reputation? By writing great pieces. How do you get the freedom to write great pieces? By depending on the strength of your reputation. Chicken, egg, etc.

Re: NewsTilt: A Brand New Market for Journalism

jchewitt — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:12:31 -0000

I applied, but I'm unsure that it'll work. Isn't this a bit of a downgrade from working with a publication to produce a piece that's mutually agreeable? It's riskier for the writer to put together a full piece before they know anyone wants it.

If word rates stay where they are, I doubt that it'll be particularly sustainable. Working purely in media has come to be a fairly bad lifestyle, especially related to the past. Maybe it'll become better if cost of living comes down in the US, but right now, labor conditions are fairly ugly in conventional media.

Re: New Book-Trailer for Prequel (!?!?!) to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”

mattymatt — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:34:15 -0000

The efficacy of book trailers is an interesting gray area. It's such a young phenomenon, it seems like it's still kind of an experiment -- there's no vocabulary or proven tactics. Maybe the medium needs an Orson Welles.

It's true that there's nothing very "bookish" about this trailer. It would be interesting to test this trailer against a version intercut with book-related imagery to reinforce the product -- although I wonder if that would cause confusion.

Re: New Book-Trailer for Prequel (!?!?!) to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”

jchewitt — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:50:27 -0000

This is pretty amusing, but I question the ability of the publishers to measure how effective this is. I'm not a frequent consumer of pop fiction, so I'm a little at a loss about how to market it effectively.

I know that many book trailers in the past have had disappointing results. Here's Jonathan Field's take on a similar trailer: http://tribalauthor.com/bad-bo...

You can make a similar criticism of this one. Where's the call to action? If you're going to put together a trailer, you've gotta tell the person to buy the damn book. That's how the mind control takes hold. :)

Re: Don’t Fall For Free: Harlan Ellison and How Unpaid Amateurs Mess Things Up

mattymatt — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:43:31 -0000

Very true. In fact, I have a post coming soon about John McPhee, a long-time New Yorker writer who advises his non-fiction students to regard all of their reporting as practice and research for an eventual book.

Re: Don’t Fall For Free: Harlan Ellison and How Unpaid Amateurs Mess Things Up

jchewitt — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:56:23 -0000

There's a place for writing for free and for doing it for pay. If you're writing for free, you have no idea whether or not your writing is actually valuable to someone else. It's the means by which you can calculate your economic utility.

On the other hand, a lot of paid writing these days won't create any brand equity for you as a writer. It's like if you go to work at the AP for 25 years or something - you're just another AP drone, and no one will get you a book deal. Or you write for Demand Studios, Seed, or whatever have you - those platforms do nothing for your future, even if you can game them pretty easily for a healthy hourly wage.

That's still where print has a role - it has some prestige, there's still cash sloshing around there, and it can assist you in finding a book deal, getting speaking engagements, or whatever have you.

Focusing on *just* writing for money can be myopic, though. The low end of the market is just a big cash bucket if you know how to press the right buttons, but it confines you to that low level unless you get to work networking, etc.

Re: How Blogs Forced a Rethinking of the News Industry — and its (temporary) Death

jchewitt — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:17:20 -0000

Oops, just to give another super-successful example other than GothamList, Groupon has been inanely successful. It's not journalism, but it shows how even broadly targeted offers can be far more effective if you first secure permission from the reader.

Re: How Blogs Forced a Rethinking of the News Industry — and its (temporary) Death

jchewitt — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:15:42 -0000

That's a hot infographic.

Just a quick clarification: permission marketing is different from targeting.

Permission marketing differs from what Godin calls "interruption marketing."

In interruption marketing, the advertisement isn't specifically solicited by the viewer. For example, if I watch the Super Bowl, I'm not doing it so I can see Doritos advertisements. NBC didn't ask me what sorts of ads I wanted to see. They don't know what kind of person I am. They're just showing an ad to millions of people and hoping that a small fraction of them will start buying more Doritos.

And when you give people a chance to opt-out by fast-forwarding on Tivo, they'll do it. I hardly know anyone who actively enjoys unsolicited advertisements. I hate 'em.

An example of permission marketing as it relates to journalism is something like Gothamlist. I provide my e-mail to GothamList in return for a newsletter that tells me about special offers for food and events in my city. I gave them permission to sell stuff to me.

Another great thing about that model is that you know exactly how effective a particular campaign is. You know exactly how many of your subscribers converted to sales. You can then use that to show future advertisers your record of performance.

The interactive advertising agencies that focus on search & mobile advertising are INSANE with targeting. I went to a conference held by Razorfish (which sold for over $500m in 2009) a few weeks ago. They know exactly how old someone they're targeting is. They know their buying habits. They know where they live. They know what brands they prefer. And they tailor the advertising to suit the target when they demonstrate some intent to purchase (like when they make a search).

They're even able to track how a user goes from each point in the marketing process to determine how effective a campaign is.

For example, they will know how many times someone saw a particular advertisement before they were enticed to click on it. And how many of those clickers went to buy something. And what they bought, where they bought it, and whether or not they became a repeat customer afterwards.

TV and print marketing by comparison are completely unscientific. They have no idea how many of the people that supposedly saw an advertisement acted on it. Even if they can find a correlation between an ad running and an increase in sales, they can't determine causation.

As to how this relates to journalism, the editorial side needs to focus on developing intent for whatever you're aiming to market to your readers. What makes search engine marketing so profitable is that it demonstrates intent on the part of the reader.

The intentions of readers become muddled in general-purpose publications. The Economist actually has relatively little display advertising and a lot of direct-response ads. I haven't read it on a weekly basis for a couple years now, but that's my recollection. It focuses on informing international business leaders and political operatives. It's still doing fine, as far as I know.

Direct-response ads are those that sell a product with a specific call-to-action. For example, you have an ad hawking a foreign-language learning class, and you have to send an e-mail to a particular address to get paid. That contrasts with an advertisement for whiskey that just has a big picture of the bottle on it with a sexy girl next to it.

I've only taught myself about all of this stuff because I want to do that shoeleather work. I love interviewing people that fascinate me and writing stories about it. I also want to stay housed and fed. If I can do both, I'll be pleased. Aggregation writing is boring as hell, exhausting, and serves readers poorly most of the time.

I'll get more into my thoughts in a post I'll have out later tonight. 'Till then, this post by Cody Brown on the past and future of journalism is worth reading: http://codybrown.name/2009/10/...

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

Saheli Datta — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:13:05 -0000

I have a hunch that only the thinnest of nerdy tails would actually care about attending government meetings.

Oh, absolutely. But right now even that thinnest of nerd tails isn't being targeted.. Serious local journalism is still topically broad, not engagingly deep.

I had a longer comment but it turned into thoughts I need to chew on some more. :-)

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

jchewitt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:12:11 -0000

Cruft is a slang term for extraneous, ugly material.

I suppose it's a matter of personal taste - I found his blog charming. He also writes columns about cheese for Serious Eats, and some of the guy's older posts are more in-depth.

I like the design of the blog you linked to much better. It's still not set up as a sales platform, though.

Amazon affiliate links, like Google ads, rarely pay out significant amounts of money. To me, a Google ad block on a blog signifies either senseless greed or laziness. Greed for a low-traffic site, as it will likely return a few dollars a month at most. Laziness for a high-traffic site which should be negotiating for more targeted advertisements at a higher rate that gels better with the overall design.

"Paying for hosting" might be a valid design argument for young children without jobs, but anyone else can pay for hosting trivially. Even if they're a dirt farmer or something.

The attention of your reader is limited on a web page. If you clutter it up with affiliate options and advertisements that distract the reader, you're less likely to make a sale.

For example, you can make something like .50 per thousand page views (CPM) with a block of text ads, or you could sell some product for $150 (like a cheese-of-the-month subscription or something). If 1000 people view that sales page and 4% convert to sales, you just earned $6,000 in revenue with the same amount of traffic.

Does it make a bit more sense now as to why pageview-based advertising is such an ugly business model relative to the alternative? I'll take that $6,000 over the 0.50.

On the other hand, ads on the Gawker network earn about $12 CPM.

I'm a fan of paywalls for certain classes of products. Investment newsletters work well with paywalls because the information becomes less valuable the more it gets spread around. If the information in the publication confers some kind of competitive advantage, then it deserves a paywall.

Most daily newspapers just contain way too much information for a person to consume in a single day. It's like buying a 10 foot long sub sandwich, taking three bites, and throwing the rest out. Not that many are likely to be willing to do that.

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

Saheli Datta — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:25:20 -0000

What does cruft mean?! :-) I've never seen that before!

It definitely needs a redesign. It almost looks like a spam blog. Spam & cheese? There's no about, no byline, no personality or voice. But it also looks very functional and optimized for group use, so maybe it's not trying to be pro, and the ads are to pay for the hosting. This magazine, Culture, about cheese is trying to be pro. Most of their content is behind a subscriber's paywall, which might be smart actually be smart.[1] I see this magazine for sale at Berkeley Bowl, which of course is its ideal selling place. Other monetary schemes: they have events, contests, and a 'center fold club," (!) (you get the cheese of the month). And of course, for certain advertisers, they're an extra special market. Theyr'e barely a year old, so who knows how they're doing, but I don't think there's any innate reason they should fail.

I'm curious why you want to get rid of the affiliate status? That apparently works quite well for some people?

Here, btw, is a personable blog that's amateur in the writing dimension but possibly professionaly motivated; I can't tell if she's a pro cook or not.

[1](The paywall debate is most applicable to daily newspapers, imho.)

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

JC Hewitt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:56:20 -0000

That's a cool find.

Here's what I'd do if I were cheese-man.

1. Eliminate the Google ads. Cruft!
2. Get rid of the affiliate links. Also cruft.
3. Redesign the blog to be less vanilla. Not my area of expertise - all I know is that it's too standard-looking.
4. Start exploring ebook or book-selling options.

He's already advertising events. You can charge for those. Note that he mentions a $30/year cheese newsletter that someone else runs. When you think about it, cheese is actually a huge niche internationally. The US is kind of dull in terms of cheese, but it's a major food category on the continent.

As for affiliate deals, Amazon just offers terrible rates. Maybe he could offer an affiliate deal for a cheese of the month club or something similar.

It's a good example of something that's too small to support through most forms of advertising alone, but actually has significant potential for revenue if structured properly.

There's a lot more to advertising than just the CPM, but for some reason, old-school types have trouble getting past it.

The cheese blog is a solid platform because the readers demonstrate intent to consume cheese. And people also like to drink wine with cheese, so you might also be able to get away with promoting that to them as well (wine has a much higher profit margin than for most cheeses). Unlike most other foods, cheese is also relatively non-perishable, making it a fairly good fit for online sales.

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

mattymatt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:13:23 -0000

I think you may be right! I just Googled the most niche-y blog I could think of -- "cheese blog" -- and the top hit is Curd Nerds, a blog that's monetizing its reputation with Amazon affiliate links. Enough to pay the bills? Maaaaaaybe. But if they set up a store or even just sold their own book I bet they'd do okay. Their traffic's pretty good and I would expect their readership to be pretty engaged.

I want to believe that interactivity like you describe is something that people want. I have a hunch that only the thinnest of nerdy tails would actually care about attending government meetings. But if it was a calendar of upcoming celebrity appearances at the local mall, maybe that would get some traffic. Bleh, I don't mean to sound so cynical about consumers, but as someone once said, "the heart wants what the heart wants."

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

Saheli Datta — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:55:50 -0000

My completely uneducated hunch is that it can be replicated, and in fact is being replicated--TPM Media comes to mind--in those markets that most readily see themselves in this light. At some level it's the same story with GigaOm & TechCrunch---they are successful because they have a niche audience that sees itself as making real use of the information and analysis they consume. But there's a certain kind of cooperativity between the publication and the community/market that has to be exploited for this tail to have enough room for a decent number and variety of paid writers. My hypothesis is that extending the interactivity in ways that suit the niche community at hand will both build the community up and build up its loyalty to and desire to pay for the media serving it.

Interactivity? Well, that's an umbrella term that actually covers a lot of conceptually different reader-publication relationships, but I'll stick to the theme at hand: empowering civic action. There can even be somewhat impartial or detached or cool-headed calls for action, they don't have to all be donate-here buttons. But stories about school district controversies can have iCal feeds of school board meetings you can drop into your calendar; government officials' names could always be linked to their office contact information (the mobile versions can be loaded with phone numbers); stories about razor thin votes in the state legislature cane a place where you can "ask" the story how your rep voted; stories about city plans being up for public comment could be able to launch copy of the of plan that's been ported into a PDF form that you can fill out with your comments. Make sense?

Yes, I'll be at Google tomorrow. ..DM me or something. :-)

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

mattymatt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:20:10 -0000

Yes, those finely-targeted publications seem to have a lot of strength. Do you think that's a model that can be replicated out of a few very successful niches? Or will we reach a maximum-capacity of long-tail publications?

And what more is required of interactivity than regossiping & social media? What are the opportunities being missed out on?

(PS: Are you going to Hacks and Hackers at Google tomorrow? Maybe we will bump into each other there!)

Re: Journalist’s New Clothes: Dress Yourself Up Like a Paradigm Shift

mattymatt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:14:45 -0000

I think rather than there being a "amateur advantage," there's a "professional disadvantage" -- that is, the folks used to getting paid are being undercut by kids who just give it away.

The solution would seem to be offering reporting that's so great and so scarce that nobody can duplicate it. But do enough consumers really want quality reporting to justify that, or are too many people satisfied enough with ONTD and Daily Beast?

Or, barring great reporting, maybe the solution is better advertising. I know a lot of journalists who really believe in The Purity Of Journalism and will cry if that turns out to be the case. I may be one of them.

In truth, a balance of the two -- great reporting mixed with sticky advertising -- is what's required. Finding that balance is the challenge.