I work as a copywriter and content writer, and I disagree with you.
Firstly, you're putting a lot of different types of writers in the same bag, which complicates matters.
It's basic supply and demand. There's a glut of skilled writers willing to work for free and a dearth of people willing to pay for journalism, either through subscriptions or advertising. There's an idea that this is the cynical exploitation of journalists by publishers, but that simply wouldn't be possible if demand for writing outstripped supply.
You are mixing things up. There is a glut of bad writers. There are very few skilled writers. I say this from a writer's perspective.
From a business person's perspective, many companies have lowered their expectations with regard to a writer's ability. Why in the world would they do this? This is actually pretty easy. They think they know how "artists" and "writers" work; they believe they are too slow and worry over superfluous details.
Let me first say the problem is less people are spending less money on the arts than, say, 40 years ago. Companies focus on their bottom line, of course. They ask of writers for specific things that will either protect their bottom line or help their visibility (mostly online now).
Nate Thayer said it: "I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired". I highly respect Nate Thayer. His display of professionalism and humility is admirable.
The company I work for makes me rewrite stories. This is why we do it: SEO keywords increase visibility by adding new/unique content to our site that really didn't originate or isn't unique to the company I work for. It is an easier way to add diverse content and then add the keywords we focus on, apart from the whole Google campaign stuff. We operate thusly because, since I am a writer and hardly anyone thinks we're worth anything, I have many, many, many other tasks that I must do throughout the day unrelated to the act of compelling writing. So I have very little research time and time to let what I write sink in. Therefore, I cannot get to it later after a week with fresh eyes. I am also the only editor and proofreader. This is wrong. I am meticulous. But I work at an actual factory (technically a "warehouse") in an industrial city where most companies are wholesalers. This city smells of rotting pig carcass. (Literally, though, which is rather funny-interesting and ironic. And I hesitate to say this, because you will probably now know where I am located.)
What has happened is companies, rightly so, get to why they really need the writer for in order to gain visibility and be searchable online. I'm of the opinion that many online places like Huffington Post don't care for what they are actually reporting on. I used to follow them on Twitter and they constantly A/B test articles with different headlines, switching the titles depending on hot or trending keywords. They will write headlines or articles based on trending keywords that will get them the most clicks, not because it provides compelling writing that is needed for us to improve as a society. But now I am imposing my own aesthetic and worldview on what writing should be.
I can't say The Atlantic does this, but I look at their headlines carefully and sometimes question their intentions. It's a little harder for me to discern The Atlantic's agenda, though. But the writing industry has made me jaded and sceptical of most online magazines.
A good friend studied journalism (I didn't) and they teach him that magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the NY Times and others no longer provide any real value to the art of journalism. Now it's mostly bloggers (working for free, for the most part) who have more valuable things to say. However, you will always find a couple of writers within large organisations who still offer compelling journalism. This is what makes things a little tricky. We usually follow these few on Twitter instead of visiting the front page of the companies they work for. By doing this, we don't need to rummage through all the trash.
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
This doesn't even make sense to me. What are you trying to say? All of writing can be written automatically by drones? Huh? Writing is not all scientistic. It's not all about numbers and data. In some theoretical world, computers may write all types of texts (novels, stories, journalism, etc.) so well we may not distinguish them from human-generated texts, but I am not here to hypothesise.
With regard to writing being a leisure activity, the arts have switched back and forth from being entertainment to didactic. The period in history which preceded the Enlightenment period is an example of this. Before the Age of Reason, the arts were seen as entertaining. If you view the arts as historico-cultural movements, you would understand the pendulum has swung back and forth. And my own bias is to think that it will continue being so. In the mid-20th century, I believe both existed almost harmoniusly, but with the creation of the World Wide Web, we seem to be confused as to what is entertaining and what is didactic and their respective values as a society. The whole culture of irony does not help matters either.
I don't really understand the whole "temporary blip" thing. Care to elaborate? Obviously writing is not just a leisure activity, so you have me ultimately confused. I do believe that the very nature of writing is suberversiveness or experimentation. I find it difficult to fathom that a computer can write something like In Search of Lost Time, and more importantly, I don't know why anyone would prefer to read something similar written by something without a heart.
Photography is the clear forerunner.
Photography is palpable. Language deals with meaning, connotations, subtexts, etc., which are all intangible. It is clear when we see a bad photo meant for, say, a travel magazine. It is difficult to find an equivalent in writing.
The real villains are educational institutions
I partially agree with this. I think there are good and bad professors in the arts (which I know is not saying much, if anything at all). The bad ones are looking out for themselves, either by just focusing on trying to get published or recruiting easily manipulated or "lost" arts students into their master/doctorate degree programme. There are a few who are more idealistic and want to help someone who they think has the potential to have an impact on society by transforming a small part of literature and how writing is perceived. They know the odds are against them and most likely it will never happen, but this is the romanticisation ofacademia and old educational institutions. Incidentally, I've found most of these types of profs teach literature & politics/poli sci, so they emphasise political writing.
You make some interesting points, but I feel you misunderstand the OP's remark that Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
They said nothing about computers doing all the writing. It's about technological conditions (printing being really expensive and thus information hard to share) that lead to economic conditions (newspapers as semi-monopolies both for publishing and for advertising, limited inventory because paper isn't free). It turns out that people have always wanted to write and didn't mind not getting paid for it, but they couldn't get anything published without passing by a gatekeeper so it didn't matter.
Now that everybody can be a publisher online and supply nearly endless, it's perfectly possible that writing might primarily become a leisure activity or something experts (e.g. lawyers, academics, coders) do as part of their main job. "Leisure" in this context doesn't mean that the writing itself has no goal other than to entertain the author, it just means writing because you want to, whether you get paid or not.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Toy example. If there's a demand for 10 great pieces of journalism every day, 10,000 pieces a day get published and great journalism is so hard to produce that your yield is only about 1 percent or one great piece for every 100 that are written. Well, do the math and it'll be clear that you are still overshooting demand by a factor of 10.
Even among professional media, there's a move towards seeing the journalism as a loss leader for more profitable things like events, speaking gigs, books etc.
(And you truly have to be kidding with those remarks about photography.)
Thanks for taking the time to reply. You're right, I didn't know how to interpret the technological and economic conditions statement.
However, it is still unclear to me. jdietrich and yourself suggest, then, that profiting from writing and publishing was due to only a handful of organisations holding a monopoly on the the 'writing market'. If we had X number of writers applying to fill writing positions at these few organisations, before these writers were profiting from it because fewer organisations meant bigger profits for themselves (they didn't have to share the 'wealth' with as many competitors) and their 'employees'. I hope I'm getting it right so far. Fast forward to the present, and now they are not. You are saying this is because writers can basically post their texts to be read for free on the Web and competition in the publishing world has increased. Please let me know if I misinterpreted anything.
What I say to this is, if I have interpreted what you're saying correctly, how do you get that these same people wanted to write for free? I get that when you do something you love, it doesn't feel like work, but everyone wants to get paid for their services rendered. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. People need to pay bills and feed families. This is how our society is set up. I offer a service, you pay me for it. Similar to bartering practised in the past. Why is writing the exception? This I do not understand and I will not even start to guess, though I do have some ideas (information should be free, knowledge has no sole owner, etc.).
Writing as a leisure activity, as you have defined it, has existed ever since the Greeks. There is no "might primarily become a leisure activity"; it already has. Euripedes wrote about things that went in direct contrast to what most, if not all, Greek playwrights were writing and were supposed to write about. The equivalent of "being published" back then was winning literary contests to gain recognition. Euripedes (~400 BC) only won a few times while many out-won him by a lot (Sophocles by five times, winning 20 times or so, I believe). This isn't some new phenomenon. Writers's desire to write without getting paid or publishing has had very little to do with only oligopolies or semi-monopolies being in existence at a certain point in time. Another example: Don Quixote (1605 AD) by Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges (early 20th century) spoke at length about his embarrassment for wanting to publish, because his father never wanted to be published and they speak of a long history of writers who publish as losing a sense of integrity.
And yes, all this meant, little to no pay.
The fact that most online writing isn't very good doesn't matter. As Paul Graham pointed out a couple of years back:
> Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. [0]
Actually, I wasn't referring to only bad online writing. In fact, bad writing in print is more dangerous and can cause more harm, because the average person still puts more weight and confidence on the printed word, because people think it is harder to publish a book.
Just to be clear, I never said that there is no or little or lower quality writing than before, be it on or offline.
With regard to photography, I think there is a creative side to photography that is hard to measure. But I'm not referring to that. At my workplace, we have an in-house photographer. We don't use artistic photographers. There is very little creativity involved (my photographer colleague tells me this himself). I don't know much about photography, but he tells me they should know about lighting, shutter speed, aperture, and take the photo so they can easily edit the white space out of the photo to be published online. They take product photos. If a product looks dark or distorted, we re-shoot it. Colour-matching only barely matters. Unless it is totally off, we don't re-shoot because the colours are slightly off.
In writing, even scientific and technical writing can be good or bad, depending on who reads it. What's interesting is that a lot of technical writing is not written for technical people or those well-versed on the topic at hand, so these people make the worst critics of it. It is harder to get someone not well-versed in it, who actually is your audience, to get to tell you what needs to be improved or what they don't understand about the technical writing, because they don't understand what they don't understand to begin with.
Why do you insist on picking the most unlikely interpretations of whatever someone is saying? :-) What I meant was that people will still write even if not getting paid, not that they actively prefer not getting paid for their writing and putting it on the web for free. And when there's tons of supply (as there will be if people write regardless of demand), prices go down, meaning that very few people actually will get paid.
This is off-topic, but it always interests me how someone trained in the arts approaches argument and discussion compared to someone trained in the sciences. Sometimes I feel like you do; people seem to interpret what I say very differently, emphasising different parts of my argument.
I had a feeling we were still not understanding each other, but we'll leave it at that.
Firstly, you're putting a lot of different types of writers in the same bag, which complicates matters.
It's basic supply and demand. There's a glut of skilled writers willing to work for free and a dearth of people willing to pay for journalism, either through subscriptions or advertising. There's an idea that this is the cynical exploitation of journalists by publishers, but that simply wouldn't be possible if demand for writing outstripped supply.
You are mixing things up. There is a glut of bad writers. There are very few skilled writers. I say this from a writer's perspective.
From a business person's perspective, many companies have lowered their expectations with regard to a writer's ability. Why in the world would they do this? This is actually pretty easy. They think they know how "artists" and "writers" work; they believe they are too slow and worry over superfluous details.
Let me first say the problem is less people are spending less money on the arts than, say, 40 years ago. Companies focus on their bottom line, of course. They ask of writers for specific things that will either protect their bottom line or help their visibility (mostly online now).
Nate Thayer said it: "I am sure you can do what is the common practice these days and just have one of your interns rewrite the story as it was published elsewhere, but hopefully stating that is how the information was acquired". I highly respect Nate Thayer. His display of professionalism and humility is admirable.
The company I work for makes me rewrite stories. This is why we do it: SEO keywords increase visibility by adding new/unique content to our site that really didn't originate or isn't unique to the company I work for. It is an easier way to add diverse content and then add the keywords we focus on, apart from the whole Google campaign stuff. We operate thusly because, since I am a writer and hardly anyone thinks we're worth anything, I have many, many, many other tasks that I must do throughout the day unrelated to the act of compelling writing. So I have very little research time and time to let what I write sink in. Therefore, I cannot get to it later after a week with fresh eyes. I am also the only editor and proofreader. This is wrong. I am meticulous. But I work at an actual factory (technically a "warehouse") in an industrial city where most companies are wholesalers. This city smells of rotting pig carcass. (Literally, though, which is rather funny-interesting and ironic. And I hesitate to say this, because you will probably now know where I am located.)
What has happened is companies, rightly so, get to why they really need the writer for in order to gain visibility and be searchable online. I'm of the opinion that many online places like Huffington Post don't care for what they are actually reporting on. I used to follow them on Twitter and they constantly A/B test articles with different headlines, switching the titles depending on hot or trending keywords. They will write headlines or articles based on trending keywords that will get them the most clicks, not because it provides compelling writing that is needed for us to improve as a society. But now I am imposing my own aesthetic and worldview on what writing should be.
I can't say The Atlantic does this, but I look at their headlines carefully and sometimes question their intentions. It's a little harder for me to discern The Atlantic's agenda, though. But the writing industry has made me jaded and sceptical of most online magazines.
A good friend studied journalism (I didn't) and they teach him that magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the NY Times and others no longer provide any real value to the art of journalism. Now it's mostly bloggers (working for free, for the most part) who have more valuable things to say. However, you will always find a couple of writers within large organisations who still offer compelling journalism. This is what makes things a little tricky. We usually follow these few on Twitter instead of visiting the front page of the companies they work for. By doing this, we don't need to rummage through all the trash.
Personally, I think we'll come to accept the idea that, for the most part, writing is a leisure activity and not a profession. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the profitability of writing and publishing was just a temporary blip, as a result of a peculiar set of technological and economic conditions.
This doesn't even make sense to me. What are you trying to say? All of writing can be written automatically by drones? Huh? Writing is not all scientistic. It's not all about numbers and data. In some theoretical world, computers may write all types of texts (novels, stories, journalism, etc.) so well we may not distinguish them from human-generated texts, but I am not here to hypothesise.
With regard to writing being a leisure activity, the arts have switched back and forth from being entertainment to didactic. The period in history which preceded the Enlightenment period is an example of this. Before the Age of Reason, the arts were seen as entertaining. If you view the arts as historico-cultural movements, you would understand the pendulum has swung back and forth. And my own bias is to think that it will continue being so. In the mid-20th century, I believe both existed almost harmoniusly, but with the creation of the World Wide Web, we seem to be confused as to what is entertaining and what is didactic and their respective values as a society. The whole culture of irony does not help matters either.
I don't really understand the whole "temporary blip" thing. Care to elaborate? Obviously writing is not just a leisure activity, so you have me ultimately confused. I do believe that the very nature of writing is suberversiveness or experimentation. I find it difficult to fathom that a computer can write something like In Search of Lost Time, and more importantly, I don't know why anyone would prefer to read something similar written by something without a heart.
Photography is the clear forerunner.
Photography is palpable. Language deals with meaning, connotations, subtexts, etc., which are all intangible. It is clear when we see a bad photo meant for, say, a travel magazine. It is difficult to find an equivalent in writing.
The real villains are educational institutions
I partially agree with this. I think there are good and bad professors in the arts (which I know is not saying much, if anything at all). The bad ones are looking out for themselves, either by just focusing on trying to get published or recruiting easily manipulated or "lost" arts students into their master/doctorate degree programme. There are a few who are more idealistic and want to help someone who they think has the potential to have an impact on society by transforming a small part of literature and how writing is perceived. They know the odds are against them and most likely it will never happen, but this is the romanticisation ofacademia and old educational institutions. Incidentally, I've found most of these types of profs teach literature & politics/poli sci, so they emphasise political writing.
Just the $0.02 of a rambling writer.