The Web 2.0: Content Creators Starve While Techies Eat Free Lunches

I had planned on posting some more on the whole bipolar child business percolating in the blogosphere today (and I owe a reasoned reply to someone asking me smart questions about my critique of the bp kiddos realm), but an email I received on an-already-crappy late Monday sort of changed my whole outlook on blogging and the journalism thing that I've poured much of my adult life into, so I thought I'd share. Because that is what the Web 2.0--blogs, social networking sites and such--is all about: sharing.

Sharing your thoughts on the world, your life, the state of the nation, what your baby urped on the floor this morning and what hinkey-dinkey Paris Hilton is up to in jail so that no one ever again has to be dependent on the corrupt mainstream media for their news and views of the world. Yep, we've got us a whole world of sharing content out there courtesy of the Web 2.0. The mind of mankind is better for it. Go off in the corner you bad old mainstream media print types and don't come back until you've cleaned the ink from your hands. You can't share with dirty hands.

But some folks in the Web 2.0 world aren't game for sharing. And that brings me to the email I got on an already-crappy-late Monday, one of those days where I am wondering about just-losing-my-health-insurance and how-I'll-make-August's-rent because I-can't-find-full-time-reporting-work-in-Seattle. It was from the editor of a health care website which focuses on chronic conditions:

"I'm the blog editor for HealthTalk, a Seattle company whose site focuses exclusively on living with chronic illness (www.healthtalk.com). I found "Furious Seasons" while researching blogs about mental illness, but I've also read some of your work in the [my former employer, Seattle] Weekly.

In July we plan to launch three new "networks" covering bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia, and I'm looking for bloggers who would be interested in creating an audience and community around each of those topics. The blogs (http://healthtalk.com/blogs/), most of which we aim to update 2-3 times per week, are a blend of personal experiences and reactions to news.

Do you think that writing a blog for HealthTalk would interest you? The work is unpaid, but the site could help attract an even larger audience for your work and views. I think an authoritative, thoroughly informed writer is crucial to building a strong following. (As an example, please see Trevis Gleason's "Life with MS" blog: http://blog.healthtalk.com/multiple-sclerosis/life-with-ms/)

If you aren't interested in writing for HealthTalk, I wonder if you can recommend other potential bloggers to cover bipolar disorder, depression or schizophrenia.

I really appreciate any help you can offer."

My response:

Dear Blog Editor:

Thank you for your email and interest in my work. It's been a long-standing dream of mine to write for free. I have 13 years as a paid professional print journalist who specializes in investigative reporting and has won two dozen or so awards for my work. I have graduate degrees from UC-Berkeley and the University of Utah and studied for a semester at Cambridge University as well. My work has been published in national, regional and local newspapers and magazines.

But I know the world has turned due to the Web 2.0 paradigm of sharing and readers just don't like print media anymore because they can read wonderful content on sites like yours--or, paradoxically enough, on my blog--for free. And their hands stay clean! So I think it's time for me to stop pretending that I need to make a living from this kind of work and blog for free for a corporation whose executive suite features former Web MD employees, former Real Networks employees (can they introduce me to Sen. Maria Cantwell?) and former FDA officials. I am sure they are working for free too--in the interest of sharing information with the world.

I have such a keen interest in working for free that I began this blog almost two years ago. Unlike the Health Talk blog you recommended I browse, mine isn't even semi-popular. To whit, our competing Technorati rankings:

Life With MS: Authority: 6. Rank: 863,169.

Furious Seasons: Authority: 180. Rank: 25,886.

So I can totally see why it would make sense for me to stop what I am doing here and blog for you for free, especially since my average of 2,500 readers a day have no sense of community and the academic researchers who write to me or link to my work have no respect for me. Besides, Seattle is so expensive to live in now that it's actually free!

You know, the Web 2.0 and its gracious thought leaders are providing all sorts of freebies these days like the five-star food Google's Seattle employees get for free and all the other perks that go with the high-tech Web 2.0 share-o-sphere. It's well-known that the snide 20somethings working in high-tech who I bump into in my travels throughout Seattle didn't work for that cash they are slinging around like baby gangtas at a strip club. Nope, they got it for free. And all for creating algorithms to push around content created by over-paid, under-worked, corrupt reporters and mainstream media companies who just don't get that information is free and that the world will be saved by bloggers working for free.

I want in on the free stuff.

I once saw an interview with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and as one they said, "We would've reported on Watergate for free. If only there were blogs in 1972 and 1973! Nixon would've resigned in five minutes if we'd broken that story on Daily Kos. But we were trapped in an old media paradigm, where people expected to make a living wage, that wasn't intent on sharing. We regret the error!" And I know for a fact that David Halberstam's dying words were, "I want to write for free. I regret the error!"

I want to be like Woodstein and Halberstam. So, when do I start?

Some of you who've been around for six month's or more (may God make your every wish come true), may remember that I opened up a can of rhetorical whoop-ass on the Web 2.0 paradigm and how it is fucking up the media, especially print media in this country, and how that's a bad idea for us as a culture and part of a general drift into cultural narcissism that amuses, and frightens, the hell out of me.

Web 2.0 proponents often point out that the media, and especially print media, in this country only tell the truth when it is convenient for them and that democracy of the unhinged-Internet, American-style is best served by an army of Davids who will, as their civic duty, undertake to tell their fellow citizens what really matters in their worlds via blogs and the like. Google and others will paste up their ads on the resulting sites and mint money for themselves and make sure their algorithm-writers (or whatever it is they are up to over at that Fort Knox in Kirkland) always get a free lunch. Dinner and breakfast, too, from the sound of things.

Meanwhile, the people who actually create the content in the media world--here comes that word the Web 2.0 dorks really hate: reporters--are getting pushed out of their jobs in numbers that can't have been around since TV started sticking it to newspapers in the 1950s. And where they aren't losing their jobs, they are discouraged and running scared and concerned about how they will make ends meet in a post-print world--because that's where the economics of the game are pushing the information space ship--and puzzled about how it is exactly enough people will be able to be employed to undertake the professional task of producing precisely the content and the depth of content the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs need in order to push varied content around enough in their big old electronic library of mankind for them to become as rich as oil sheiks. And gift their employees three squares each workday, gratis.

My thoughts back in December 2006 were:

The Web 2.0 and the Net in general have been disasters for my profession, which is print journalism—-a vastly different beast from broadcast journalism such as TV and NPR which are too often news presentation packaged as real reporting. Newspapers are dying. Talented people are being forced into public relations work. In Seattle, the speculation is that we will lose one of our two daily newspapers in the next year or so. The sad fact is that no one will care too much because no one knows the difference anymore between intelligent reporting and regurgitated information repeated endlessly in little echoes around the Net by people who have no fucking idea what they are talking about (this may be true of me sometimes, as well) and would have no idea how to hold the government or big corporations accountable if their lives depended on it.

Part of my argument then was that no one will do for free the kind of journalism the Web 2.0 crowd thinks it's creating. Journalism costs money. If you're talking investigative reporting, it'll cost more especially if there are loads of public records and lawyers at the party. If you just want to slap content around that sort of sounds like it's floating around the truth in the half-informed commentary that the blogosphere is heir to--instead of being able to legitimately offer said truth--then I guess you can get it for free. But I'm not blogging for free for someone else. I can do that for myself quite nicely. And, who knows, if Google ever gets interested in creating original content--as opposed to the amateurish tripe of tens of thousands of blogs and YouTube vids--maybe I can get a free lunch out of the deal.

Until then, the purveyors of the Web 2.0 need to start offering the same kind of cold hard cash they offer the people who are allegedly steering their business models unless they simply plan on rewriting, repackaging, reformulating and re-shuffling content produced by an ever-shrinking cadre of reporters.

Let me know if that strikes anyone as a good idea.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at June 19, 2007 12:38 AM
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