He’s an editor for the Huffington Post, and was asked why the HuffPo doesn’t pay its writers.
I love this question, because I’m proud to say that what we do is that we have 13,000 contributors in the UK, bloggers… we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.
See, you’re inauthentic if you get paid fairly for your work. You can trust someone if they did the work for free, which implies that you ought to be deeply suspicious of people who expect to get paid.
Isn’t that a conveniently beneficial attitude to take, if you’re rich? We saw this same thing in the Roman and British empires, where as wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, working in the trades was scorned, merchants were despised, and laborers were the filth and scum of society. Money was evil, if you worked for it, but was simply the fair and virtuous reward given to those who had it fall into their laps.
But HuffPo has lots of traffic and lots of ads, and the money that comes in must go somewhere…just not to those wretches who only work to get paid. The Queen of Virtue is Arianna Huffington, who contributes nothing but the occasional vapid column of banality, and is rewarded with a net worth of about $50 million.
If you want something to be proud of, Freethoughtblogs pays its writers every bit of profit — there are no paid executives, we have a part-time tech we would like to pay more, we have hosting costs we pay for out of advertising revenue, and every penny we have left over gets divvied up to our bloggers. When we’ve had to invest more to improve the site, our more successful bloggers in stable jobs have voluntarily reached into their own pockets to pay for it. We can’t pay much, because we unfortunately don’t have HuffPo’s traffic, but there are no managers collecting all the money and making excuses for why the people who do the actual work can’t be paid.
Managers do have an important role to play — we’d love to have a staff who’d work and get paid for ad management and promotion and expansion — but not management who are working to screw over the people who are implementing the whole purpose of the web site.
The Oatmeal comes to mind…
I wonder if the same attitude applies to the person who fixes the brakes on his Porsche.
You’re missing the point a little — if HuffPo did pay writers, it’d only be in the context of paying them to produce sponsored content. Most web news platforms are only able to pay staff by egregious content whoring. Of course HuffPo doesn’t need to pay anybody to produce specious bullshit, their specious bullshit is, truly, authentic, free-range and organic.
@1 While I enjoy the Oatmeal and he’s correct on this, he had a somewhat more nuanced attitude when it came to paying people who produce TV shows he likes.
It’s hard to pay people to produce content good content that isn’t just advertising, when the consumers demand to either get all their content for free, or nominal cost, and insist that if you have a paywall of any kind, that entitles them to pirate.
PZ, you can’t truly love science. If you did, you wouldn’t expect pay for what you do.
Am reminded of a right-wing coworker who thought the best solution to issues with school systems was to stop paying teachers at all (or possibly start charging them a fee for being a teacher). I believe the reasoning was was “Women love to play with children. Why should we be paying them to do it?”
My jaw was too much on the floor to craft a response. Don’t have to work with them anymore.
@sigaba, #3
So the more accurate point is that HuffPo’s business model is so broken that they can’t afford to pay their writers, and the only way they could possibly afford to do so is to if those writers brought in more money with native advertising. I see no reason to take this claim at face value either, since as noted there’s plenty of money available at the top.
PZ:
Your link is borked.
I didn’t know about HuffPo not paying its writers until fairly recently. When I read about that, I was damn gobsmacked. Such a shitty thing for them to do.
Best business advice I ever got: Never do anything for free.
@Tony! #7, I’ve done my best to avoid HuffPo clickbait ever since. Not easy, unfortunately.
Reminds me of my days working during the Nixon years when that administration imposed the infamous freeze on wages and prices. Our top management gleefully imposed their “patriotic duty to comply” on those of us in the trenches, while reaping big gains in deferred bonuses and stock options based on the savings generated by their “patriotism.”
@7 I’m pretty sure they pay their political writers and correspondents, the people who don’t get paid are the “editorial contributors,” which is to say, bloggers who use HuffPo as a content platform.
I see the argument for the sequence of the writer-publisher transaction.
1) (a) Paying a writer (first) to write a piece that the publisher, then (b) uses to attract advertisers.
Known round here as clickbait, or in paper: Tabloids.
or
2)Going in reverse, (a)writers submitting proposed works to the publisher that the publisher then agrees to publish and (b) pays the writer for the work behind the piece. Which is the _Optimal_, Fair, approach.
Seems HuffPo is leaving out the second (2) approach and focusing only on the poor first (1) approach. To proudly proclaim that the HuffPo doesn;t pay its writers for anything it publishes, does not bode well that what they publish is worth reading. (i.e. “worth every penny”)
@12 Option 2 is called “writing on spec,” and sometimes writers make a lot of money doing it. They submit to many different publishing modes and a bidding war determines the price.
There’s no bidding war for Huffpo’s farmed content, because if the writing was any good at all, the writer wouldn’t be submitting it to Huff.
Because my public health work brought me to some interesting places, a few travel magazines — whose readership were the sort who had already been to London and Paris and Rome, and hence were interested in more arcane destinations — began contracting with me for travel article. When I began, it was a dollar a word. Then 75 cents. Then 66 cents. Then 50 cents. Then it converted to a fixed fee per piece. And then in 2009, as the recession sank in, all three of the rags told me that they had been told to stop using freelancers, and have in-house underpaid 23-year-old interns just Google and Wikipedia their way to travel articles, never having actually visited the places they were writing about. Since then I’ve only written for them on an emergency basis now and then, or some sidebars when the topic is cuisine.
But they still send me their quarterly editions, and for about two years after switching from professional freelancers who had actually visited the cities or countries being promoted, they were deluged with letters from subscribers saying: “that article was a piece of shit, what, did some student intern just Google it?” And my former editors told me this as a way of trying to be sympathetic, “aw, see old sport? The readership misses real writers like you!” But did they hire me back? Nope, only when they’re in a jam, some employee quitting on them three days before the submission deadline.
It sort of undermines the rightwing conceit that uber-capitalism leads to better quality goods and services.
I will be glad when the internet finishes killing off the traditional media. Those assholes have been lapdogs of power for far, far too long.
Right now we are in a trough of badness because the traditional media are being priced out of existence and the “throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks” internet crowd are in control. I hope that eventually there arises personalized subscription or aggregation of high quality content funded not for profit or crowdfunded (e.g.: the intercept) Because the traditional media has made it so they can’t be fired for sucking (New York Times to its readers: fuck you! We’re for sale!) we have to let them die off, then let the new internet media die off (adblockers will kill them)
Remember – every ad you block helps kill bad websites.
And pay for the websites you value.
Cut the middleperson out – whether it’s Rupert Murdoch or some bunch of internet hipsters: directly support the writers and reporters you value, and let content be king.
I for have not noticed any superior quality issues with the Huffpo’s over other media. What I have read it’s linked on AOL is the same useless shallow crap as AM radio headline news or the level of stuff found fashion mags. so close to advertising as to make no difference. The site is so full of adds and pop-ups and automatic videos to be more trouble than it is worth.
I suspect that some of those unpaid writers are getting support from “concerned outside organizations or groups” from the content
uncle frogy
@3, sigaba:
That “nuanced” position was that if you make it so that people who do want to pay your for your work are unable to do so, they will steal it. It wasn’t that somehow TV programming is different from web content.
Wait. Content? There’s been content at HuffPo? I just go there for headline aggregation and updates. If I find something interesting and actually want to know about it, I find another source. No wonder the writing is so lackluster.
Hell, I read the comments sections as much as I read the articles. It’s a fantastic gauge for asshole activity on the internet.
@17
And Stephen Hull’s point is, “we don’t have to pay for these articles, people give them to us for free, maybe we should pay them, but they don’t demand it, it’s just what people do. They seem to just be happy with the exposure.”
This isn’t a discussion about what people do, this is about what’s right; piracy is indefensible, just as paying writers nothing for good content that you monetize is indefensible, what “people do” is beside the point.
Jackbooted thugs from HBO do not break into your home, put a Beretta to your head and force you to click on the magnet link in TPB. People have a choice and the mere fact that they don’t want to pay a price doesn’t justify theft, just as HuffPo isn’t putting a gun to anyone’s head demanding content, idiots actually volunteer and get in line for the opportunity to run stuff on that damnable site, for nothing.
He certainly doesn’t seem to notice the inconsistency.
why does his argument remind me of ” see how happy my slaves are see them smiling and singing!”
uncle frogy
@17 I mean like, how many times have you heard from someone downloading music or movies, “This is actually helping the artists because it helps market them/helps them get noticed/makes it likely that I’ll pay money for work in the future”? And how is that different from telling the artist that he’s working for “exposure.”
gmacs@#18:
I just go there for headline aggregation and updates.
Other than that you’re giving Google a lot of information, you can get some pretty cool results if you use google news and punch in your own search strings for whatever your interests are.
@19, sigaba:
I think you need to read that comic again. The entire comic is pointing out how he’s trying to pay for the content and despite there being any number of ways for HBO to get paid for their content, they have made it impossible to do so without buying cable.
He then gets distracted by how easy it is to pirate the content.
The point is not that pirating is somehow good or ethical or can be justified.
It’s that HBO is a greedy company. Blinded by their need to make all the money, they can’t handle the concept of getting only some. And thus, people who want to pay for their content and know that stealing it is wrong and illegal will do it anyway because HBO has decided that the only way to see their content is if they can siphon all the money out of your wallet.
@21, sigaba:
What does that have to do with anything, Franklin? I don’t see Hull actually justifying anything. There’s certainly no claim that the pirating of GoT is somehow going to increase ARRRRRR (get it? Pirate voice? Oh well.) Martin’s publicity. In your example, the guy pirating wouldn’t pay for it at all.
In Hull’s example, he wanted to pay. He tried to pay. He went to the various places you would go to pay and was blocked at every single attempt. The only way to buy it was to have HBO suck out all your money.
Hull’s point is that when you make it difficult for people to acquire your content and impossible to pay you for it, you are encouraging the very piracy you are trying to prevent by making it difficult to acquire and impossible to pay for.
That doesn’t make piracy justified.
@sigaba:
OK…I realize I just confused Hull with the author of the Oatmeal, Inman. Why did you switch back to Hull when we were talking about Inman?
Here’s what Harlan Ellison has to say on the subject: https://youtu.be/mj5IV23g-fE
The only way paying people for their writing can make it ‘inauthentic’ is if the publisher/editor starts telling writers what to write, how to write and what judgments to make as a condition of payment to an excessive degree. At that point, writing becomes as mercenary as advertising. But provided the writer doesn’t feel like the management is interfering with their self-expression, any talk of payment producing ‘inauthenticity’ is just someone wanting free content.
And then for many writers, ‘authenticity’ can’t pay the bills. Writers throughout the history of print have done hack work, often under multiple pseudonyms as a way of funding what they considered their ‘legitimate’ work.
@23
I disagree, he’s offering tacit support for not paying for content when you can get away with it and the alternative is too “inconvenient.” You’re right it’s not a outright endorsement, it’s more like a Glenn Reynolds-style “Heh Indeed.”
More generally though this attitude totally not the exception for the New Media, when @Marcus Ranum says that this is all some symptom of the old media players grasping for power, he’s almost perfectly wrong, This is exactly how New Media is supposed to work, the creator gets almost nothing, unless his work can be shoehorned into an advertising and marketing strategy for some other operation. Meanwhile Time Warner Cable and Google make billions of dollars “aggregating” and facilitating your connection with content, profiting handsomely at every transaction, while paying almost nothing to the people making it.
In the 1990s, you’d pay maybe $30-$40 a month for a basic or basic premium cable sub, and about half of that ended up with the people who made the programming. Today, you pay $50-$100 for a fast internet connection, and exactly zero dollars of that go to the people who make content — and any high-impact content like movies or games is on top of that. The entire entertainment business has been reconfigured around not turning good entertainment into revenue, but collecting tariffs from people for using data pipes and inserting ads, with perhaps the last marginal 5% going to creators, but only on a near-voluntary basis. That’s where the money is now, this is what it looks like when everything is working perfectly.
This is why 30 minute TV shows are actually about 22 minutes; and most movies are either commercials for toys, the State of Louisiana, the Pentagon, or the Chinese government. It’s also why Matt Inman is nominally a cartoonist but makes almost all his revenue off merchandising — The Oatmeal is basically an intellectual property holding company that makes toys, with a loss-leader webcomic attached.
Not impossible. The dude wanted it immediately. But you can get Game of Thrones discs at just about every store in the country that sells such discs, in addition to numerous online retailers.
I certainly wouldn’t get how being impatient is enough justify piracy or theft. So I guess it’s fortunate that you won’t have to explain that one to me.
It’s that HBO is a greedy company. Blinded by their need to make all the money, they can’t handle the concept of getting only some. And thus, people who want to pay for their content and know that stealing it is wrong and illegal will do it anyway because HBO has decided that the only way to see their content is if they can siphon all the money out of your wallet.
Hmmm, explain this. In what sense are they getting “all the money” instead of “only some”? HBO is, of course, still getting money for the content it produced, but far from all of it. Are they getting too much, and retailers not enough? Possibly. But it’s simply not the case that HBO gets it all, or that even if it did get it all, they would thus siphon all the money out of your wallet (which depends on the amount in a specific person’s wallet.)
Or simply wait until the discs are actually released, by those who actually have the right to release it. I don’t see why they don’t get to release their own content, in your preferred format, on their own schedule, if they want to. There was a time when HBO’s business was running a television network. That’s what they did. If beyond that, they decided to sell recordings (or merchandise) of the shows produced for their network, which of course they’re under no obligation to do, why can’t they do that whenever they want?
If, for example, a musician like me puts on a show at a certain venue, we can restrict the kinds of recordings that are allowed to be made of that show (perhaps no recordings, perhaps only our own version, perhaps no restrictions at all). If somebody doesn’t pay for a ticket to watch the show themselves, in the format it was produced, they may never get the experience at all. It may be lost to them forever, not a few months until the DVDs (or pirated recordings) inevitably come out. Their fucking loss. If we decide not to allow others to sell recordings of our own work, nobody at all is being forced or put into any kind of “impossible” situation. You say you’re not justifying it, only explaining how people sometimes behave, but at best it’s a piss poor fucking excuse that they’re giving themselves.
If they have genuine problems to worry about, like homeless or starvation, and somehow having a fucking Game of Thrones boxed set was going to solve that if it weren’t for the greedy greedy HBO Inc., then I’m sure I’d see things differently. But is there any coherent reason why they “need” this shit (perhaps right this very minute) and “can’t” have it because “greed”? If people are so incredibly bored, so that it’s such an urgent problem that they’re not being entertained at all times by their chosen entertainer, then their local library has lots of books (and often CDs, DVDs, etc.) which they can check out for free. Also, watching a sunset doesn’t cost anything or pick anyone’s pocket. Having a conversation with a friend (perhaps about how greedy HBO is) doesn’t cost you either. Making some some kind of art yourself, if only as a hobby and not as a profession in which you’ll be paid, is a fantastic way to pass the time. There are many, many things that can alleviate boredom.
@24
@Gorogh brought up Inman. He earned my eternal enmity for the Game of Thrones strip.
Fair Disclosure: I work in film industry and have friends that work on Game of Thrones, I’ve recorded foley on GoT’s foley stage (a very awesome room full of quite awesome things you can imagine). The sad fact is, when HBO doesn’t realize revenue, they don’t cut David Benioff’s salary, or Peter Dinklage’s, and the certainly don’t pay George Martin less. They just cut the foley schedule by a day, they hire two less violins, they use fewer extras, they don’t hire people to make as many original costumes or props as they might have otherwise. That’s who piracy hurts.
@27, sigaba.
Then you really need to re-read the cartoon. It doesn’t say anything of the kind. There is no justification for piracy in it at all. In fact, he goes out of the way to say that it is illegal.
You seem to have forgotten that a 30 minute show has always been 22 minutes (actually less since you have the opening and closing credits to deal with, but they’ve pretty much gone away these days). There’s a reason that the stars of the TV programs of yesteryear did ads for the sponsor of the program during the program. I Love Lucy was sponsored by Philip Morris and they made no bones about telling you that. Lucy and Ricky did ads for them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ALtcAO69M
Promotional tie-ins have been around since radio, or have you forgotten the scene from A Christmas Story where Ralphie finally gets his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin only to find out that the message was just an ad for Ovaltine? That wasn’t made up. That’s how programs made their money.
Now, what Hall is doing is preposterous, especially the justification he is giving for why he’s doing it, but that has nothing to do with Inman’s point nor anything to do with the fact that TV has always been about selling ads. When all you have to do is buy an electronic box and pull signals out of the air, exactly how did you think the studios made any money at all?
And by the by, the channels charge the cable companies. ESPN charges your cable company to carry its programming, for example. Your cable bill goes to pay the content creator. If you don’t like the way they are using their carriage fee, then you need to talk to them.
In the Oatmeal GoT comic, he WANTS to pay the creators of the show, but he’s being told that in order to do so, he has to buy something entirely unrelated, for a far, far higher cost than anything price charged for the show.
A GoT box set is about $40 for a season. They COULD charge the same for a digital purchase, which would make them a bigger profit than the dvds, since they don’t have to actually make and ship the physical objects.
Instead, what they’re doing is basically charging you a monthly fee to access the store in which you’re allowed to watch the dvds, and then the store gives some of that money to the people that created the show you watched, and some of it to other shows that you will NEVER watch.
That’s not a matter of going for piracy because it’s more convenient, it’s a matter of going for piracy because the alternative is unaffordable and unreasonable.
It would be like if a bookstore charged you a flat rate for all books that cost more than any one book in the store would.
And open-source software is different from this because reasons.
I gave a couple of guest lectures at my old university. It started after I helped one of the staff with some research and she invited me to come and talk to her class. The following year I was asked to do an a whole lecture with half an hour’s questions, the year after that it became a two-hour session.
I was really surprised to be paid for the lectures. I’m of a generation that has been taught that to get anywhere you have to work for free. The tutor told me that one of the other guest speakers had insisted on payment and he was the one who needed money the least so she arranged for everyone to be paid.
Later, I was telling one of the professors that I keep in touch with how pleased I was to be paid and he was very insistent that I damn well ought to be. I’ve learned since that starting out in an academic career is difficult as the qualifications cost a lot and work is unstable. The problem gets worse when people are expected to work for free just to get their foot in the door.
You’ll be pleased to know that these lectures I was paid to give were titled “Law, Religion and the Unbeliever”.
#5, Evil Twin:
Yes, exactly that attitude. That’s why pay can be so goddamn poor in lots of fields: you do it because you love it, and you’re expected to accept the pleasure you get from your work/hobby as some sort of compensation for poor pay.
As a freelance translator I find that there are plenty of people who’ll work for half the rate I ask. Agencies and customers offer low rates because they know that there’s always enough poor saps who’ll accept it. And it shows in the quality of work delivered – “pay peanuts, get monkeys”, as a friend of mine is wont to say.
Fuck that for a bunch of bananas.
@31
That’s not for you to decide.
@36 sigaba
Who gets to decide? I think its a personal choice what is unaffordable and unreasonable for yourself.
@31, sigaba:
I should think it is most definitely for the individual person to decide. You only have so much money and you only have so much effort to put out.
There are many possible ways one could distribute the material online. To choose precisely none of them save for a single one that force people to pay for much more than they want is a sure way to drive your customers away.
They still want the content, though, so they’ll do what they need to do. Remember the cartoon: “Oh wow, look at how fast it’s downloading. That was really easy.”
The pirates have made it cheap and easy. The owners have made it expensive and difficult. That doesn’t make piracy acceptable.
But are you really surprised that piracy is common given the above scenario? Do you think making piracy more illegal is going to stop that? Might there be a better solution that reduces piracy?
Why has no one mentioned the library as one resource for (albeit slightly delayed) legal access to Game of Thrones DVDS?
My public library rents full seasons of popular TV shows for $2, and they’re due back in 7 days with a 24-hour grace period (de facto 8 days).