If I’m right, and a lot of paid online commentary starts to go away (in part because there’s an army of people who will do it for free, and honestly some of the ones who do it for free are better than any who do it for pay), it’ll be really interesting to see how the how social dynamic plays out. The essential condition for people in that world has been, for this first decade or so of blogging and Internet commentary as viable professional opportunity, that if enough people like you, you can get work. I’m not saying that’s unique to this field, nor am I positing it as any less legitimate than other, subtler forms of networking and patronage. But if there are just less and less chairs to sit in as time goes on, what happens to an occupation where the fundamental mechanism for success has been popularity within the in-group? It’ll be interesting.
I think he’s right – the market for paid commentary will continue to shrink. This blog is a good example why. None of us are paid, ads and donations support it, and a fair number of people read it. Internet ads suck for big media incumbents and for smaller start-ups that want to have paid staff. They’re enough to run a self-supporting site like this one.
Also, too: whenever I post about changes in media, there’s a lot of noise in the comments because what I write is taken as advocacy, so let me be clear. I don’t want paid commentary to go away. I’m just agreeing with Freddie when he says that it will.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Oh, hell ya!. Maybe it’s just a growing pains stage of the internet via the blogs and such, but there is so much bullshit being manufactured from the left and right, to make Mordecai Jones blush. We sometimes call them grifters.
I will take someone writing about politics from passion only, over those doing it in part, or completely doing it for personal profit, any day of the week. That is not to say that every blogger getting paid is full of it, but the odds go up for that, when there is money at stake.
Count me as an advocate for the demise of play to pay blogging punditry, at least.
I seem to remember Cole saying that he was paying you guys a thousand bucks at the end of the year, for BJ front pagers. You ought to hold him to it, as it was earned.
urizon
I’m being paid to write this comment.
Maude
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Or pay us the thousand for reading them.
WereBear
The media has done it to itself; they don’t call it race to the bottom for nothing.
Greed for indiscriminate eyeballs, lowered standards, and flat out making the “news” something anyone can search engine up has all contributed. Why should we, with our shrinking paychecks, actually pay for a load of crap? Or for the stenographer role, when the outlets involved unleashed it on the public themselves?
katie5
Problem is that investigative journalism goes away too as the revenue infrastructure shrinks. Unfortunately the same structure supporting paid commentary is also paying for the foreign bureaus.
beltane
Does this mean there will be no more MoUs, MoDos, BoBos, and Chunky BoBos in the future? My sense of loss is palpable.
amk
I am all for doing away with paid commentary aka bovliating pundtwits.
Punchy
Who’s gettin paid? Serious question. Didnt know anyone was collecting scratch for typing 300 word screeds on Jon Bolton’s hemorrhoids.
Ash Can
Maybe the small-market paid commentators will go away, like the ones Freddie cites as an example, but I don’t see us getting rid of the big names unless their entire publications, as well as others that would be in a position to hire them, go under — and as much as we all like to piss and moan about the NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, et al., that would by no means be a desirable outcome.
And SQUEE! BABY KITTY! at Freddie’s link. :)
Seth Owen
Paid ‘commentary’ — as opposed to news gathering or reporting — as always struck me as a bit odd, frankly. With few exceptions, primarily those experts whose commentary involves original reporting, Krugman for example, I don’t see the value-added of opinion-proffering. Do it on your own time or as part of your job as a paid advocate for some organization. Pay should be expected for reporting, that is work and won’t be done without reward.
Joey Maloney
@beltane: Yes, I’m palpating my testicles as well.
MikeJ
@Seth Owen: If Krugman didn’t blog I’d continue to happily read Brad DeLong, just like Krugman does. I like Krugamn, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he didn’t blog, and there’s a good chance he’d do it even if he didn’t get paid.
jrg
Paid punditry seems like prostitution to me. With so many people commenting on so many issues for free, you have to ask yourself why someone else is getting paid to do it, when the writing from many non-paid bloggers is far, far superior (both in it’s content and it’s prose) to so many of the opinion columnists out there.
Warren Terra
As long as there are wealthy people (and corporations) willing to pay to have their ideas (and their interests) advanced, there will be paid online opinions emerging from The National Review, Reason, etcetera. Also on the left, in theory, but to a much lesser degree – look at the funding woes of The American Prospect, struggling to find donors for what’s probably the catering budget at The National Review.
But anodyne opinions, or opinions that neither flatter some wealthy fossil nor help line his pockets? Their revenue stream seems less secure.
Brachiator
I suppose so. This has been happening for a while in print media. It seems reasonable that it should happen in the online realm as well.
Calouste
Paid commentary will continue to exist, those talking points don’t spread themselves you know.
amk
An apt toon.
LosGatosCA
@Warren Terra:
Exactly. Propaganda requires monetary backing. This is not new. Ben Franklin, I think, said freedom of the press belongs to the man that owns one.
The market is changing from one where Edward Murrow set the standard in the media to where Howard Stern sets the standard. The media has always been paid for by people who want their message – in ads or editorial content – to get out. It will ever be thus.
Right now, the corruption is on full display, where in the past it was more subtle.
Ronnie P
Warren Terra is correct. Paid commentary will continue by rich sugar daddies who need opinions to back their interest.
rachel
@Punchy: Would they get paid for a 300 word screed comparing Bolton to a hemorrhoid? Think of the market for more such work, if so. Rumsfeld as tinnitus, Gonzalez as incontinence, Wolfowitz as kidney stones, and Limbaugh as a… Well, you can guess.
PeakVT
@Joey Maloney: Dude, you really need to work on your pickup lines.
j
Really? I can think of quite a few who could go away and the public discourse will be all the better for it.
Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn, Bobo Brooks, Ann Coulter and Tom Friedman. (Just to name a few.)
sharl
I rarely read the stuff at GOOD, but I’ve become a fan of Ann Friedman’s stuff that she usually does at her own sites. International Slutty Women’s Day: A Story in GIFs cracks me up.
I would hope there is a paying job out there for someone with her brains and wit. But as Freddie says, it’s increasingly looking like such jobs won’t be found at organizations that exist solely to disseminate commentary. Maybe she can find a minimally assholish ad agency, or something similar that comes with a paying customer base.
scav
Unpaid isn’t an really an indicator of quality either, to be utterly fair, nor does being paid instantly and necessarily make you an abject sock puppet and empty-vessel mouthpiece of the check-writer. The major media have been getting away with shit opinion writers because they’ve been able to, only that system may be breaking down a bit. I just somehow am thinking that the idea of an entirely unpaid pool of opinionators leading the way to a brighter, more intelligent future is rather akin to the ideal of a paperless office: ain’t really going to happen, although what happens in offices (and could happen outside of them) certainly changed.
Fair Economist
News gathering and investigative journalism are pretty classic public goods. For some time the fact that newspaper and broadcast journalism are difficult to copy in a short enough time or were oligopolistic meant that reporter’s employers could capture enough of their benefit to pay their salaries. Even then society would have benefitted from a lot more true journalism. With links on the internet and thousands of providers it’s now impossible for reporters or their employers to capture a meaningful fraction of the benefits of reporting.
As a result, we now have to have public support for the public good or reporting. We see that already with government statistics, what underly most economic reporting as it is. That needs to be broadened now, with things like online public registries for most information. The registries need to provide methods for aggregating and cross-referencing information too.
satanicpanic
In a just world you guys would be getting paid and Slate writers would be reduced to pushing their opinions on family members at Thanksgiving.
Freddie deBoer
Three quick things:
1. As I said in that post, I don’t wish this on anyone. That said, many of these wounds are self-inflicted.
2. Warren Terra is correct. I just would call that PR or advertising.
3. As much sympathy as I have for the people let go– and I genuinely do– it’s frustrating to see so many who celebrate “creative destruction” now mourning these layoffs. Factory in Ohio lays off 5,000= hey, that’s capitalism! Good lays off 5= tragedy.
Spaghetti Lee
@j:
I think those guys, unfortunately, will be the ones to survive, cockroach-like, and glom onto something else. One thing that always worries about me is that whenever people talk about the “demise of paid (some creative thing)” it always seems to be the less famous people that get the shaft.
ciotog
I look forward to Bobo’s final column celebrating his own creative destruction. Ha ha ha ha, that will never happen, because nobody celebrates their own creative destruction even if they’ve been busy celebrating everyone else’s.
Lockewasright
If it means that hacks like Jane Hamshire, Glenn Greenwald, or Slinkerweak over at the great orange satan no longer get a financial reward for being the best friend that the GOP ever had, I will be grinning as I watch it happen.
amk
What america needs is a legion of paid honest media critics. To burn off these fuckers’ feet completely.
Brachiator
@Freddie deBoer:
How are the wounds self-inflicted in the case of Good? What did they do or fail to do?
It seems to me that the demise of Good and other sites is the nature of the Internet, where free has an advantage over paid, and the false insistence that a writer is more authentic if he or she does it for passion, rather than for pay.
Any layoffs, particularly in this economy, are troubling. And it is not just that Good is an isolated case, but a situation that is being repeated many many times over.
scooter
um, josh marshall and talking points memo.
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
This. As long as there are “Think Tanks” spewing propaganda for the rich and powerful, there will be jobs for pundits.
Roger Moore
@rachel:
Only if it includes a brief mention of a hemorrhoid medicine that would cure up the problem quickly and with a minimum of embarrassment. [small print]This post brought to you by Preparation H.[/small print]
WereBear
The eternal struggle between art & commerce played out in the the recent quest to break the four minute mile in the 1950’s. The one who broke it, Roger Bannister, was a classic amateur athlete, playing for the love of the game, training during his lunch hour off from his doctor residency in Great Britain.
These days, that would be absurd.
My point is that there is money to be made; Angie’s List (spit because they went back to friggin’ Rush Limbaugh) nonetheless illustrates how people are willing to pay what used to be available for free in backyard socializing and social clubs; the word of mouth info on professionals in the area.
An enterprising muckraking organization, with national scope, would be available on subscription; kind of like Consumer Reports used to be. They are in trouble now because they slipped their standards; and people do want to hear from actual other people. But it’s a viable model and will rise again.
ice weasel
While I agree with the general premise there are a few glitches that bear mentioning.
Banner advertising will continue to decline and, for sites like this, that money will likely go away. How the independent sites deal with the issue will determine how many of them survive.
Adapt or die.
And the point about Think Tank money not going away is also an excellent one. This is a new paradigm for propaganda and it works.
gussie
Nah. The hobbyists will fall away. This is still new, even for the few who’ve been doing it for ten years. Life happens, amateurs need to take six months off, and that’s the end of that blog. This is just the online version of talking to your taxi driver.
brashieel
@MikeJ:
I’d disagree on Krugman’s importance, if only because of his sheer international audience, but I mainly just want to point out that he already blogs for free. The NYT pays for his column, they only provide hosting and comment moderators for his blog.
FlipYrWhig
@Roger Moore: But there are pundits who know things, or who are at least credentialed for expertise in something, and then there are people who manage to become pundits even though they know nothing about anything. “Think tanks” produce research and analysis, a lot of which is bullshit, but at least that’s the concept. Richard Cohen, Maureen Dowd, Jonah Goldberg… What the fuck are they for? Why is it a good idea to pay them to write for you?
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@j:
As others have already pointed out, this is exactly the kind of pundit that will not go away. As long as there are rich assholes with deep pockets and strong opinions, and enough idiots out there willing to be swayed, the Jesters will always be with us.
What has changed is that the punditry now has this growing ‘halo’ of non-paid amateur commentary surrounding it, that now must be reckoned with. That too, is here to stay.
“Media” is a verb now.
FlipYrWhig
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: Ah, the patronage model. I am his Highness’ dog at Kew/ Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Cohen and Dowd have backgrounds as working journalists, which they use or abuse, according to your taste. Goldberg has very thin journalism credentials and seems to have risen via a conservative media channel.
I guess that people imagine that the expansion of blogging will see the decline of pundits they don’t like and the rise of people they prefer. But you are likely just to get the same mix that you have now.
@WereBear:
The subscription only or subscription mainly model has rarely worked for media publications. And it may be harder to work it when people demand more stuff for free
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@FlipYrWhig:
.
I’d argue that never really went away. We just don’t address Murdoch, the Kochs etc as “My Lord”.
(Yet).
dollared
This is yet another step toward Latin America, where the upper class sends its pretty daughters to be news anchors and journalists, and its stupid sons into the military, where sometimes they behave unpredictably and kill the other sons who became intellectuals.
And of course, in that world, where only people who don’t need money participate in the media, poor people are invisible unless they are criminals.
The impoverishment of journalism is not a good thing, folks. It was an institution that served a role in our society. When journalists were unionized, they actually were powerful advocates for a better world.
El Cid
Just to be sure, actual paid media corporations have plenty of incentives to undermine investigative journalism above and beyond whether or not they have a budget for it.
It makes no business sense to continually push reporting which undermines the ideological tone your organization needs to establish for its investors’ and advertisers’ needs.
You could give plenty of publications 10x their existing readership, and they may continue to drop off serious and necessary investigative journalism at the same rate. Because it’s likely to make trouble for them anyway.