My mother turned 80 and we had a party last night, and I had a conversation with an academic friend about monetizing the internet. She is worried that I won’t be able to support myself as a journalist. (So am I). And she is worried that she won’t be able to read good writing anymore. She gets pleasure from reading good writing.
Like every other journalist, I find these issues fascinating. But one problem in her formulation is the belief that the old system somehow created profit for good writing. It didn’t. Good writing was cleverly bundled within profitable enterprises and thus was subsidized by other parts of the enterprise. When Mark Bowden (he of Black Hawk Down) built up his African storytelling skills years ago by going off for months to write about the rhinoceros for the Philadelphia Inquirer, his salary wasn’t paid by his readers and the advertisers who followed them; no, he was subsidized by more profitable portions of the newspaper. Like the weather story. (When I was in newspapers I was told it was the most popular story in the paper, so work hard at it, kid.) Good writing has always been an elite choice. Maybe that’s what makes it good writing. The problem for traditional journalism is that the internet has unbundled the old relationships, leaving the rhinoceros-writer unsubsidized.
Citizen journalists on the internet are self-subsidized, but so were a lot of magazine journalists. When I went into magazine journalism 25 years ago or so, I lived with my grandmother for years so as to enable my training, and I learned that many of my magazine journalist friends were from wealthy families. They were subsidizing their work. I bet that’s true of many magazine journalists to this day; they have trust funds. They’re volunteering just like the people on the internet; but they had more social status.
Woolf
My friend last night recalled that Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas that to be a writer, you have to have an independent income. So– some of this is an old story.
My friend also worries about the loss of the civic function of newspapers. I believe that volunteer journalism will surprise us on that score; and I wonder how much of the piety about the old system comes from corporate journalists who are experiencing salary tailspin (as I have) and are trying to valorize their old activities as somehow more responsible than journalists today. When it was precisely those journalists, as I constantly point out, who gave us the Iraq war on a silver goddamn platter. The new journalist is someone like Rob Browne, who writes about Middle East policy for DailyKos and subsidizes his work through dentistry. He feels privileged to be a journalist, and takes the work enormously seriously, and doesn’t have the kind of elitist mentality that would allow him to sleep well while directing other people’s kids to fight a war. If there are a million Rob Browne’s out there, I don’t see a civic deficit.
How much of the lamentation over the internet is strictly a class issue, with a highly-connected losing their traditional privilege–Informing Society–to a much broader group. Of course they’re bitching about how it’s tearing the fabric of society.
I’ve gone on long enough. It’s the internet, people have short attention spans! And that’s the last point about good writing. My friend likes to read pleasurably. She means a book, or a magazine, and a sustained experience of being inside someone else’s head. I love reading for that reason too: the book I look forward to ending the day with. I’m reading Herzl’s Complete Diaries with devotion. I don’t think that pleasure is ever going away, but the social/temporal space for it does seem to be eroding. People are choosing to read in a different way. The readers are choosing.
