Dec 30 2009
Writing Is Dead
I was listening to the BS Report, that podcast that Bill Simmons does over at ESPN, and during his long conversation with Chris Connelly, they discussed some things that kind of piqued my interest. Connelly mentioned the demise of the various industries and brand names, like sports, music, and particularly writing. I’ll try to transcribe it as best I can below, but it happens at about the 69:45-ish mark.
Connelly: I never would have thought that magazines… newspapers too, but magazines would be in such dire straits as we head into 2010. That’s the saddest thing for me, you know? We grew up loving magazines, reading magazines, dreaming of writing for them, imagining the life we would lead if we were around a bunch of guys… I mean, that’s what I grew up thinking about and I was lucky enough to get to do it and I-I can’t believe now that it’s going to be so hard for the next generation to do something like that. I think it’s great that there’s all this multiplicity of voices, the explosion of the first person singular on the web and stuff, but the difference is that those guys who wrote the sports sections in newspapers and those people who wrote our entertainment magazines and stuff–because of their jobs, they got to buy homes. They got to have families. They got to send their kids to college. I don’t feel like the people who are doing that on the web now are going to be able to do that in the same way. They’re not going to be able to have full lives doing that the way the other guys did. I would never have expected that, in this boom of information that we experienced, that those things would be the casualties.
Simmons: I’m with ya on magazines. I thought it was going to happen to newspapers, and in fact, you know, the last part of the last decade, I was convinced that it was gonna happen. I just thought the Web was going to win. I just thought that…
Connelly: Your podcast with John Walsh, actually. You went into that in some fascinating degree also.
Simmons: Yeah. I knew it was going to win, but magazines, I always thought… you know, it’s 12 times a year or once a week or whatever, and you’re gonna be able to hire the best writers and all that stuff. It just seemed like they were infallible.
Connelly: Yeah, you’re gonna hold it in your hand, it’s always gonna be fun, you’re gonna look at the pictures, you know? So the idea that those have… those are fighting for their lives right now… is very disconcerting and–maybe naively–I never saw it coming.
It raised all sorts of interesting thoughts in my own head. I mean, I write every day. I write anywhere from 45-50 posts a week. Most of them are in the neighborhood of 150-250 words, but I do hit out 500 and 700 and 1000 word pieces when I have to do a review or write up something article-like for Den of Geek. Conservatively, I write 10,000 words a week, not counting weekends and stuff like this that I don’t get paid for. If all goes well, I’ll make (not clear) a nickle a word. More often than not, it’s more like 3 cents a word.
If I were writing some 20 years ago, would I be in a magazine or newspaper? Probably. Would I be getting paid better? Definitely. However, if I wasn’t doing this by myself and for myself, would I be getting paid at all? Would I even be writing? Probably not. Yes, writing would have been a legitimate job then, and maybe it’s still possible to cobble together a job as a freelance writer, but it’s a lot more work for a lot less return these days. Why hire more than a few staff writers and have to pay all those benefits when you can just pay grateful freelancers a quarter a word?
Is Bill Simmons a writer? Yes. Does he work for a magazine? No. He works for a company: ESPN. He writes for their magazine, he hosts a podcast, he writes for ESPN Page 2, he appears on TV… he makes a whole lot of money every year and most of what he does isn’t actually writing.
The writer is dead.
This is the era of the generalist… the dabbler, if you will. Simmons dabbles in writing magazine articles, online articles, blog posts, Tweets, podcast hosting, TV appearances, producing, etc. My friend Sarah, when she worked in the publishing industry, didn’t just write for Micro Mart or Wired or wherever; she wrote for the magazine and for their various online blogs and websites. TV talking heads have blogs; newspaper reporters take viral videos; bloggers do podcasts and make viral videos. If you’re a one-trick pony, you’re on your way out. That’s why magazines are struggling.
Example: Playboy Enterprises is turning a small profit, but it’s struggling. Why? Because the magazine is losing money. It’s one of the most popular men’s magazines in the world, but they can’t turn a profit. The magazine is worth significantly less than all the other Playboy holdings even though it makes the most revenue because the magazine market has changed and the company can’t adapt the flagship. They got used to doing one thing well, and now that one thing is dragging them down.
The solution is out there for proprietary companies (i.e., the Wall Street Journal model), but for writers who want to make a living off their words? The only solution is to kill yourself for less money and/or get a day job if you’re not one of the lucky 1% who can latch onto an old media salary for a few years.
But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m cranky that, between my day job and my side gigs, I’m lucky to get 5 hours of sleep a night. Killing Yourself To Live isn’t just the title of a Klosterman book these days, campers.
Honestly, I do most of my reading on the internet now, and it’s mostly the writing of people who aren’t reporters or columnists. If I want to find out something about a celebrity, I can Google it. The Internet has made it so that by the time someone gets the information from a magazine, it’s already old news. I know there are people who want to be published one day, but I really don’t have that desire, because I know I won’t be that lucky 1%.
However, I haven’t really gotten on the digital book bandwagon yet. I still like my paperbacks. I am sure one day soon, I’ll be holding a Kindle or a Nook in my hand, though.
The magazine is not so much dead as its method is outdated, much like the postal service has moved beyond the Pony Express. What people used to be willing to wait for once a week or once a month, they can now get online at any given moment. They will even pay for it if they believe they are getting something worthwhile for their money or if they feel they can’t get anything similar or better for free. I love reading magazines, but I also don’t need to have them taking up space in my house or filling up my garbage if I can get that same information online.
Of all people, writers should be able to handle this shift in mediums the easiest. There will always be a need for good writers, especially these days when they do indeed seem so few and far-between. Is it really all that hard to write for an online source instead of a newspaper or magazine? I doubt it–more like some people don’t understand or don’t want to understand the change in medium, like the grizzled old vet who still wants to use his typewriter to write a column instead of typing it into a computer.
[...] Ron Hogan, Den of Geek contributor, blogger extraordinaire, has an interesting point at his blog, Subtle Bluntness, about how the writer is dead, and that idea strikes me right between the eyes. Having wanted to be [...]
This one’s been knocking around in my head since yesterday, and I still don’t have anything to add to it. I mean, you’re right, but it’s just painful. I don’t think it has to be painful as far as the pragmatism of it, but for me, ideologically? I’m still telling people (most of all, myself) that I want to be a writer when I grow up.
Ironically, as close as I’m probably ever going to get is the very type of medium that you’re talking about, and that is my silly little blog. It brought me out of my shell and helped me write for a meager audience and thus turned me into a writer of sorts, but it could be the very thing that keeps me from being a (capital-W) Writer as I’d always dreamed of being.
Great post.
Lynda: Well, that wasn’t the Internet. Television made print media in general outmoded. I can watch a newscast in half an hour and get the same stories as I can get by reading the whole of the paper over the course of two hours. The draw of magazines was the fact that it was more in-depth; on the Internet, you can write as much as you want (if you don’t care if anyone reads it). The immediacy isn’t the issue, it’s the… omnipresence? The level playing field? Something to that effect.
Jade: Writers are adapting; publishers are not. If you’re writing online, the ad sales aren’t profitable enough to support the kind of salaries that working writers/journalists/copy slaves used to make back when books were printed on paper. The lower cost of distribution makes up for *some* of that difference, but not all of it. The issue, as I said above, is that you *can* get something *similar* for free, and in most cases that’s good enough for the average consumer. Hell, in a lot of cases, I can get as good or better online for free.
Holly: I don’t think having a blog is going to cause you not to become a Writer, if that’s what you want to do. It might satisfy that itch to string words together for a few readers, but it won’t satisfy that itch to be paid to do something you love. Even if it’s pennies, money helps a LOT, but it’s a whole different word from telling stories just for the love.