Alyssa Rosenberg wrote today about the happy news that The American Prospect is going to be saved, and about the vanity project being launched by the former editors of Good Magazine. Rosenberg sounds a guardedly hopeful note about crowd-funding and patronage, although she points out that the scale here is important. I’m rather skeptical.
Think back to the layoffs at Good. In this post from Raw Story, I found a little nugget that I think is interesting: Good‘s education editor, Liz Dwyer, appears to be one of the few who was not let go, presumably because her position is “underwritten” by the University of Phoenix. That strikes me as a more likely development for paid media than a lot of crowd-funding.
I’ve found Dwyer’s work to be interesting and frustrating. She’s written a lot of interesting, appropriately researched posts, and also a lot of head-scratchers. That tidbit about University of Phoenix suggests a possible explanation. To be clear, I’m not accusing Dwyer of anything, and I have no idea what her relationship with U of Phoenix means for her output. But it would make a lot of sense if her inconsistency is the product of her sponsorship, if she feels she has to write certain things (or more likely not write certain things) because of the relationship with the organization that pays her salary. Even if she isn’t directly influenced, there’s a clear conflict of interest here, and what she writes about for-profit and online education is suspect.
This is exactly the dynamic several commenters have described here at BJ, when we’ve talked about these issues: paid commentary as a form of PR or advertising. You can get paid to write online commentary, and even produce smart, insightful stuff, but you’ve got to remember who’s cutting the checks. This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, nor is it bad in all contexts; I certainly understand, for example, that people employed by the Center for American Progress or the Cato Institute are there in part to advance a particular point of view. But sponsorship by a for-profit entity, and in publications that aren’t explicit about that kind of advocacy, is a different story. Might we get the Washington Post Health and Nutrition Blogger, brought to you by Coke? Science journalism sponsored by Monsanto? I don’t think that sort of thing is outside the realm of possibility.
As for crowd-funding in general, well, look– there’s a lot of cool stuff going on out there. I don’t want to belittle the awesome projects being funded through Kickstarter. But crowd-funding is subject to all of the wildly optimistic, idealistic hoopla that you find with any new online development. And there’s a lot of problems with it, principally that most of us recognize a divide between the best projects and the most popular projects. I was discouraged by a recent case of Kickstarter fraud; I was downright pissed off by the reaction of a board member, who insisted that fraud on Kickstarter isn’t a big deal because, hey, it’s only little bits of money, and that Kickstarter can’t be expected to police itself and prevent future exploitation. When a board member is washing her hands of any responsibility to root out fraud and protect the integrity of the business– I’m sorry, “platform”– it doesn’t say much for the future of the website.
Gin & Tonic
I’ve contributed to 10 projects through Kickstarter. All reached or exceeded their funding goal. 3 of the 10 have been an endless source of delays and excuses for non-delivery, eventually fading into more or less silence. That’s a pretty high shit rate, and Kickstarter doesn’t give a damn. If they think that makes me more likely to contribute in future, they are delusional. Great idea initially; in five years it’ll be pets.com.
MaximusNYC
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” –Upton Sinclair
BGinCHI
Saw a vid on YouTube recently with Liz Dwyer speaking at TED.
Thesis: technology cures all of education’s ills. Any questions?
Fucking pathetic.
PeakVT
@BGinCHI: Until the underlying technology (ie, kids’ brains) is changed somehow, positioning assorted electronic devices near students isn’t going to do much except make electronics vendors rich.
slag
@BGinCHI: But is there any ill that technology can’t cure? Maybe those that it causes? Or those too?
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
Apropos of bad Ted talks: enjoy!
MariedeGournay
Just contributed to a project on Kickstarter, but only because it was someone who’s project I trusted and have followed her work elsewhere for years. The site is a good idea, but really don’t like the creators’ sense that it will run correctly without constant maintenance. It’s too much like free market magical thinking for my tastes.
Walker
@Gin & Tonic:
I have only given to kickstarter for known individuals, for which non-delivery would cause them serious “brand damage”.
Walker
So, all that time that Liz Dwyer was contributing to Good magazine, was it disclosed that her position was underwritten by U of Phoenix?
Warren Terra
I’ve contributed to a few Kickstarters, but all were essentially pre-orders from books from established brands. Fulfillment was fine, unsurprisingly.
RE the main thrust of the post, I think it’s a mistake to conflate Opinionating and Reporting, even when it’s opinionated reporting and a lot of the output is pure opinion no better than you can get here. One of the reasons I admire, subscribe to, and donated to The American Prospect is that, while they’ve produced plenty of opinion, they’ve also produced plenty of serious reporting, often from the same people. More importantly, they’ve produced plenty of serious reporters, often quite opinionated, and they produced them by paying them. The Washington Monthly and The New Republic, and other institutions, tout the many fine people who interned there, and got a foothold in the opinion-media world. The American Prospect has a noble track record of actually paying the young people whose careers it is fostering. Not paying them much, I imagine, but as someone who believes in Opportunity, and doesn’t want the next generation of left-of-center reporters to all come from wealthy homes, slumming it for no pay in a bohemian lifestyle, this factor seems rather important to me.
Villago Delenda Est
The University of Phoenix is not going to underwrite something they don’t expect a return on.
They are a for profit outfit. They are not a non-profit.
They expect some sort of return.
arguingwithsignposts
FdB, you might find a better example of journalistic crowd-funding by looking at Spot.us, founded in 2008, and now part of American Public Media. Kickstarter is just this week’s shiny web 2.0 toy.
RSA
See PepsiGate, in which ScienceBlogs started a science blog sponsored by Pepsi. They lost about a quarter of their bloggers by doing this.
jayackroyd
You’ve got Beltway agenda setting brought to you every week courtesy of Boeing at Meet the Press and This Week. That kind of thing is a good deal more insidious than print sponsorship, because (see Fallows’ Breaking the News) these programs reach far beyond what happens in broadcasts themselves–they are mechanisms for delivering the week’s sphere of legitimate debate, and parceling out the talking points.