Is the Internet Bad For Professional Writers 193
destinyland writes "The internet democratized writing — but has there been collateral damage? A former magazine editor asks 10 professional writers how the net has changed their profession, and even the act of writing itself. Has the net changed the demand for longer articles, or created more opportunities for more kinds of writing? It's a fascinating read that belongs in a time capsule for the variety of reactions captured — including the author who complains reading time was traded away for time to maintain our applications, and adding "Gates and Jobs...ought to be disemboweled — yes, on the internet.""
In a word, yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
the internet is just new technology that will help in some ways and hurt in other ways. me, i'm not concerned about this dinky little group. my concern is - how has it impacted the reader. there have always been many more of us than the writers. have we been benefited by the internet? i think so.
Fucking whiners. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the internet has made a lot of people much stupider (witness your average idiot's abbreviated text message session) but the probability of such people being consumers of quality magazine or book content is low to begin with, even if the internet doesn't exist.
The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing the article says it's bad for professional writers with limited talent. And everyone else is to blame for the professional writers' comeuppance.
The net hasn't changed writing as much as TV has. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's bad if you can't write for the 'net audience (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the Internet is necessarily bad for professional writers. There is a trend, certainly among technical folks, to rely on blogs and wikis and the like for information, but I think that will pass. Just as politicians can get away with sound-bites for a while, so the technical audience will tire of reading the same 200-word blog posts with a somewhat rehashed idea of someone else's 200-word blog post, which was just a combination of a couple of ideas mentioned on a wiki they linked to anyway. People don't just read technical writing for a quick idea. They read it for some depth of understanding, an insightful explanation, clear examples, and countless other goals that Joe Amateur just can't satisfy with his 200 words of quickly and casually constructed blog post.
However, the Internet is going to be bad news for people who can't write for an Internet audience. You need a different writing style on-line. Most people don't sit down and read many screens of essay-like text all at once, nor do most people print such articles to read off-line. We can still have depth and insight and all that good stuff, but it has to be written the right way. It needs to be easy to scan. It needs to be organised in relatively short sections, or with other natural reading breaks that suit the material. There needs to be some effort put into effective presentation — and I don't mean turning every essay into a 3Gazzilibyte 1hour video interview, just because you can!
The Internet is also going to be bad news for bad writers. There are plenty of decent writers on the web, and more than enough excellent ones in technical fields. No-one needs to read paid-by-the-hour, padded-out-forever-to-bump-the-word-count text-that-goes-on-forever-pointlessly. Writers who have specialised in producing such text to satisfy their contracts are going to be out of luck.
The Internet is also going to be bad news for professional writers who occasionally write something really good, but mostly write filler. It is easy to link to a single article or blog post directly, and good work will typically be recognised as such. But if you want your home page to be the thing people think of, or you want people to subscribe to your blog, you're going to have to produce consistency. Sure, some work will always stand out from the everyday writing, even for the best author in the world. But no-one's getting famous for writing one article and then having nothing.
So the bottom line is, if you're a professional writer who can consistently produce worthwhile content with occasional really good stuff, and you can adapt your presentation to the medium, then there's no reason you can't be successful. If you're not a good writer, even if you once write a brilliant piece five years ago, or if you can't adapt your writing to the target audience, well, you're going to find fewer opportunities than you used to. It's not like writing books is going to die out (though writing for magazines is fast going that way), but the Internet is the ultimate meritocracy when it comes to content, so if you're not up to standard with enough material a cut above to get you noticed, this isn't the career for you.
Probably (Score:4, Insightful)
It certainly seems that the net has created a cottage industry built on not citing the original article and driving technorati. One might say that one denies the other. The drive isn't news anymore, it's notoriety and advertising. Long articles and sources sour both of those. I don't think there's a shortage of people who want to read the long stuff, there's just so many that can't be bothered. Both groups pay the same per view, so who are you going to appeal to?
The internet may have changed some things, but it's AdSense that is murdering information on the web. Is it any wonder that the more successful google is, the less useful their index has become.
Re:a better question (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that a major portion of the "real" journalism I see these days is notes from a press conference from , I don't think that equal footing is undeserved. Good investigative journalism is more and more rare, and weeks of coverage on some starlet's alcohol problem seems to be on the rise. There's some good journalism out there, still, but it's harder and harder to find.
Left wing censorship to ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, censoring porn from kids is bad; censoring porn from hurting women's feelings is good.
Re:meh (Score:4, Insightful)
But as tough as it may be for the professional writer, it can be a boon for the unpublished writer. I've spent a while editing and publishing science fiction, and I can say honestly that with so few professional outlets for new writers, the Internet provides a gateway for them to get noticed. Mind you, it also allows a lot of dreck to be published that has no business lighting up pixels, but that's the price you pay for the freedom to publish.
Internet bad for second-tier essayists (Score:5, Insightful)
Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up.
The real damage from the Internet is that pounding-the-pavement newspaper journalism is no longer cost effective. That's not because anyone can blog; it's because Internet advertising is killing local newspapers. Ads for jobs, apartments, garage sales - all have moved to the Internet. Classified ads were a major money stream for newspapers, and that stream has dried up. Most newspaper content today is driven by press releases and other publicity. "News is what someone doesn't want published - all else is publicity". Pick up your local paper and mark the stories that didn't start from a speech, press release, wire service, or police report. In many papers, there won't be any. That's the problem.
GOOD for Fiction Writers (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of having to rely on jacket cover blurbs, these writers can steer me toward other good writers with links to their websites. It's what the world wide web was designed for, it works well, and I believe these types of writers benefit from it. Not to mention that they can sell things directly to their fans (not just books, other novelties or even autographed works and limited editions).
A perfect demonstration... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe you're a good editor when serving as that extra pair of eyes looking over someone else's work; we all tend to have that blind spot looking at our own writing.
Beware (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel for writers, but their not the only ones feeling the squeeze. This morning I came up with a fairly depressing argument about where the new startups are in high-tech: practically nowhere. If you want to do a startup making chips, forget it. If you build digital, then FPGAs, microcontrollers, and DSPs have it covered on the low-end, and digital high-end ASICs are too damned expensive. Analog is just too hard, though there's some room there. If you want to do a startup in software, you've got Microsoft dominating the market, and tons of free open-source to compete with. What's that leave? The web. The big successes that quickly come to mind for new high-tech companies over the last 15 years are Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, and Google. Not software, not chips, but something else entirely. Since all those companies started back before the web bubble burst, what's left for us geeks now?
Re:Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about content length or page count. I think most people here have read long articles or other works online before. The key is that they have to be *interesting*.
I don't know about that - I can personally attest that I've stopped reading things because of the moronic pagination on the web. I read fairly quickly, and there have been many times that I simply gave up because I was spending more time watching the page load than actually reading it.
You're right - articles on web or elsewhere have to be interesting. And a ton of page loads is one of the best ways to kill that, in my opinion. It's not web specific - what if newspapers split columns across 7 different pages and made you wait 20 seconds before you were allowed to turn the page? When I'm reading something, I don't like being interrupted, and I don't think I'm alone.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but I've actually seen articles split into up to 10 different pages with two short paragraphs per page. I can read a couple of short paragraphs in 5-10 seconds. I don't want to get the next page every 10 seconds. I won't read it.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you've been given the gift of 'imagination'. Please let us know when you intend to unwrap it and take it out of the box...
I see this as the same as proprietary versus (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe time is the primary resource that's in competition, not subject matter. Many blogs, message board posts, and websites I read are much more narrowly focused than print media, so competition for subject matter seems limited. Narrowly focused topics are a good thing. If it were not for the Internet, I simply would have no outlet for what I write about, because my stuff is unpublishable due to the nature of the content. In the print world, that would be bad for me and those who read my blog.
There is a societal benefit to free information and the online publication infrastructure. More people writing means more people learning to communicate, which makes more effective workers. It also means audience reach is farther compared to print publishing, so there will be more people sympathetic to your issues. On my blog, I regularly see readers coming from China, India, Russia, Iran, and Australia. If I were publish a magazine column, my readers would only be Americans. It's easy to convince those culturally similar to me, but it's satisfying to know I may be convincing those very different from me.
This concept that articles and fiction pieces have to be brief, power-packed, and trendy strikes me as a cop out. People eat up message board threads consisting of nearly 500 words each and 20 messages deep. A thread can easily reach 10,000 words of material, so I don't buy the short attention span argument.
What I buy into is that people are simply uninterested in your work if you believe you need to be brief and trendy. If someone buys a $25 hard cover book, they have an investment in the book for which they need to recoup by reading it from beginning to end, so they may put up with a book that's less than thrilling. They have no investment with your free online piece, so they're going to be far more sensitive deciding if your content is interesting and thus worthy of further reading.
People like interactivity. How many times have you read a newspaper article and disagreed with a critical point? You had no means providing feedback, other than "letters to the editor", which was up to the whim of an editor to publish or not. The Internet provides the ultimate channel for feedback.
Re:I don't think it has... (Score:4, Insightful)
But the idea that writing is now "shorter" is a bit skewed. There is a lot more information being conveyed these days.
Re:Left wing censorship to ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It all boils down to: (Score:3, Insightful)
An unpublished writer.
A copywriter or web content writer--it's a new venue and a new market to make money.
A writer, published or not, who doesn't live next door to the library.
A writer who works with others in collaboration.
A writer who plans to self-publish and promote.
Someone who writes for the joy of writing, ("open-source" writing) and if someone notices, that's icing on the cake.
A small publisher/printer working with self-publishing authors.
The internet is bad if you're:
A large publishing house.
A journalist who thinks their degree makes them "special." Yes, there are some bad amateur journalists, but providing you do the research and you can construct a sentence, there is no special anointing from on high that makes one a reporter. (And before anyone starts loading up stones, my degree is in journalism.)
Against a diversity of ideas and opinions, whether a government, a news outlet or an individual.
As long as there are readers, writing is good no matter what the venue. But therein lies the question: Will people keep reading as we turn into short-attention span, sound-byte monkeys? A few years ago, I had my doubts. But the Harry Potter, Eragon and other series have left me with some faith that, if you can write it, readers will come.
There's really no downside to having a new venue in this business, unless you choose to create one or are so insecure you're afraid of a little competition.
Re:The Internet is the best news ever for pro writ (Score:3, Insightful)
At one time it was my ambition to be a dead-tree author, but no more. I'm happier publishing on the web. Read, for example, [link]my essays on mental illness and recovery.[/link]
Wow. And you managed it without stooping to shameless self promo... wait a minute.
Not just hyperbole (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's another factoid for you armchair publishing-industry pundits to ponder: That same year, the Christian book market was said to be worth about $1.3 billion in net sales. [marketingymedios.com] You may not realize it, but there's a whole parallel market for Christian romances, Christian mysteries, and even Christian sci-fi and fantasy. And in 2004, it apparently brought in more money than romance books -- or, the equivalent of more than 55 percent of mainstream paperback book sales.
Remember these points, the next time you want to start mouthing platitudes like "only bad writers need to worry" and "the quality will rise to the top." When it comes to the business of writing, those writers who are most capable at reaching the market -- the real market, not the one they assume exists -- will be the most successful.
If you want to be "paid" simply for writing? Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Writing is now much more like mass media. You (the writer) write something good, and then you get an audience, and you're going to have to take additional steps to make money from that. If you can't do that, then instead of going to a publisher, the writer will need to find some marketers to help with merchandising.
This new economy doesn't translate well for florid, Victorian era writing because you can't fit that crap on a coffee mug or a T-shirt. No one's being paid by the word any more. Many don't have the time to read all that verbiage.
But when something is available to everyone, as publication now is, it becomes essentially worthless. QED.
Publication, the ability to physically publish or produce media, is rapidly becoming worthless, because everyone can do it for negligible costs. I sense that the publication/distribution industry is running on inertia at this point, or, if you prefer, it's in free fall and has just about hit terminal velocity. Mind you, it doesn't necessarily have to hit the ground, but it's not going any faster.
The workers now own the means of production in this industry. Creative Commons is one seminal, if somewhat inchoate, way to "profit" from it. Money is not the only form of compensation. It's a tool amongst many, not an end. Some of the authors in this article lack the imagination to realize that.
They should take note of Bulwer-Lytton's old saw that "The pen is mightier than the sword." That would sell some serious T-shirts. The only writers who are worried about these developments are the ones who never figured out what "Step 3. Profit" actually means. You have to do something with all that money for it to be a meaningful profit.
--
Toro
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
"No one gives a fuck what you think."
This is exactly how I feel about modern 'Journalism' and writers. I don't want some long flowery introduction which contains no new information, and is usually designed to cloud my opinion with the authors bias. Or worse 'teases' me with a hint of what might be the case later in the article. I want the facts. If I had by way news would be in bullet points. I don't care how good you can spell, how pretty your prose is or how how wonderful you write. I want facts. I don't read the news to be given opinions or bias, I don't read it to admire how well written it is.
I also don't care what the experts say unless they have some actual evidence to back it up. I don't want to hear 'Well if I was a betting man I'd guess that...', I want to hear 'In 1967 there was a similar incident with...'. I can make up my own mind. Write the news like the person reading it has more than 3 functional brain cells.
To anyone thinking of going into 'Journalism' who wants to appeal to me and others like me in my generation, cut the crap. We have no patience, and it is a good thing. When we want to be entertained, we read fiction. The other day I picked up a magazine and after 3 paragraphs I gave up. After three paragraphs there wasn't a single fact. I didn't know anything about the article except about where it was written.
I have no sympathy for 'Journalists'. If they spent half as much time actually doing real investigations, exposing all the crap that goes on in this world and less of it brown nosing themselves into cushy positions and working on their pretty prose, then they might actual out perform the bloggers.
Even the article itself is unbelievably indirect and full of opinions without facts. Three paragraphs in and I still don't know any new information, other than some artist thinks he has an unquantifiable talent. Big wow. All artists think they have an unquantifiable talent. Eventually I find out that we are talking mostly about people who write books. Writers. Great, so am I going to find out how writers have been affected? No I'm going to get a bunch of opinions from a sample of unknown quality. Great, so I might as well go ask my mate Dave what he thinks the internet has done to writers.
Of course this problem is indicative of a much wider one. Virtually no one who works in a field which is primarily artists know how to determine facts. And what information they do have, they have no idea how to present concisely. Half the books I read could be one third the length. You want an example of a well written factual book? I advise every Journalist to go and read 'General Relativity' by P. A. M. Dirac. It's only short, but contains a bucket of information. That is how a book should be.
It isn't just people who write books. Take the media, we have 24 hours of non-news. They speculate and get half baked experts on to double the speculation, and don't bother to go and get any new details themselves. Save for the odd human interest story that tells you absolutely nothing about the big picture.
Case in point, when is the White House press core going to grow a pair and ask some tough questions and demand real answers? When are we going to get reports with some real statistics in that talk about how Iraq is actually going? I shouldn't have to watch a report to congress by General Petraeus to see some actual charts and data on how things are going. Heck I know his report is going to be biased but when no one at CNN seems to know what a pie chart is and prefers to endlessly run off the same pictures of Baghdad while pointlessly speculating what am I going to do? I don't care about human interest stories. I don't care how patriotic you guys in the media think you are being. I want the facts.
The president compares Iraq to Vietnam, I have to go to bloody Wikipedia to bring up the differences in casualty rates so I can decide for myse
The Internet is a godsend for pro writers (Score:3, Insightful)
The first is that you get to see just how bad a lot of writers really are, and it gives you a kind of perspective that writers in previous generations never had, given that they were working in a bubble back then (relatively speaking.) There's nothing quite like the ego-boost a writer can get by perusing blogs and various writer sites and seeing the kind of grammar-challenged twaddle that 90% of the so-called writers out there produce. And it's sort of sad that most are neither educated nor experienced enough to know they should be embarrassed by it. It's amazing how often you see some unpublished writer on a writing forum float a query letter for public review that has some glaring grammar or spelling errors.
The second reason is that, with the Internet, you can dig up tons of information about agents, publishers and other writers. On top of that, you can make contact with many of them in various forums to gather information that would have taken a lifetime of writing and publishing to gain in the past. There's a wealth of information and resources for aspiring writers out there that should be explored and absorbed. The Internet has allowed working writers to consolidate information about agents and publishers and start separating the bad from the good. A lot of shady agents and underhanded business practices have been exposed on the Internet, and every writer should avail himself to that information.
Anyone who thinks the Internet is bad for professional writers has their head in the wrong place.