When Distribution Is Compensation

Over in Advertising Age, Simon Dumenco is irritated that Syracuse University’s j-school is going to give Arianna Huffington a lifetime-achievement award. The reason? The Huffington Post doesn’t pay its bloggers — and if its co-founder Ken Lerer sticks to his guns, it apparently doesn’t intend to ever do so. Dumenco is still steaming about this rather blunt quote Lerer gave USA Today in late 2007 when asked about compensation: “That’s not our financial model. We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company.” In fact, Dumenco is now more livid, since he thinks the Huffington Post is now beyond break-even and making money.

It’s pretty easy to get me worked up about most anything, but I’m having trouble joining Dumenco at the barricades on this one: His is a “what should happen” argument, one that strikes me as based on civic principles rather than economic ones.

The idea that journalists are now brands is an old one on this blog — heck, it’s a category — and the dark side of that is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Earlier this spring, I spent two days at McGraw-Hill’s Media Summit, and one of the most interesting speakers was Smokey Fontaine, a veteran of the magazine world who’s now Interactive One’s chief content officer. Fontaine talked about having come to the online world expecting that compensation for online content would be a small slice of compensation in the magazine world, only to discover that in fact, that compensation was … nothing. In the new online order, he said, journalists were brands. So were online publishers — and what the little brands got was a chance to piggyback on the bigger ones.

“It’s a distribution deal for journalists,” he said, then added: “We are all freelancers now.”

A few weeks ago, I was down in Florida at the Poynter Institute, talking to a room full of young sportswriters about blogs. One of the questions I addressed was why a young, ambitious reporter should serve an apprenticeship covering high-school sports (or night cops, or whatever) when he or she could have a blog up and running in minutes, expounding on anything desired before a potentially global audience. The Internet really is the world’s greatest talent show, so why not sign up for it instead of trying to climb an industry ladder that seems to have more and more broken rungs?

By way of an answer, I used the New York Mets blog I co-write with my friend Greg Prince as a cautionary tale. A typical month’s traffic on Faith and Fear in Flushing is around 200,000 page views for more than 60,000 distinct hosts. We’re not the Huffington Post, but by most measures we’re a pretty big blog. We started Faith and Fear while I was still a columnist at the Wall Street Journal Online, and one of the ground rules for that arrangement was that we wouldn’t try to monetize the blog. With those ground rules no longer applicable, Greg and I probably will put ads on the blog sometime this year. But our dreams are pitifully modest — to be able to cover our server costs and stop running Faith and Fear as a charity.

Financially, Faith and Fear has been a sinkhole — Greg and I have no chance of being able to be full-time bloggers, even though most bloggers would kill for our numbers. But that’s an awfully narrow way of measuring its success. During our first year of writing for Faith and Fear, Greg and I appeared on SNY, the Mets’ TV network, and became sources for Mets writers — and Greg got a book deal for his memoirs of life as a particularly intense fan.

Faith and Fear has been a lousy money-maker, but it’s been a terrific billboard for Greg and me as writers. Our writing on the blog hasn’t directly paid us one thin dime, but it has created other opportunities — and some of those opportunities have come with chances to make money. Albeit on a different scale, it’s the same deal the Huffington Post offers its bloggers: Distribution that could lead to contribution.

Accepting this isn’t the same as liking it: Smokey Fontaine didn’t seem particularly happy about his analysis, and the reception to the Media Summit panel ran the gamut from sullen to stricken. Life under the distribution-drives-compensation model forces journalists to be brands, to get good at selling, to become hawkers of themselves as wares, and a lot of us rebel against the idea.

But Arianna Huffington didn’t create that model any more than Smokey Fontaine or a lot of unpaid bloggers like me and Greg did. Rather, the Internet revolutionized the distribution of journalism, which created a huge boom in its supply, which in turn gave a big advantage to the most-powerful distributors. Arianna Huffington may not deserve an award for having exploited that particularly well, but I fail to see why she deserves condemnation.

That Whole Dow Jones Social-Media Thing

You might have heard that the Wall Street Journal issued rules for how its reporters and editors should conduct themselves on social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I’d like to add a few points to the conversation, while stating up front that I’m going to tread a bit carefully, seeing how Dow Jones is my former employer and one of my current employer’s customers. (Call me a tremendous wuss if you want.)

• Reading criticism of the memo, it’s easy to miss that the vast majority of the directives are thoroughly non-controversial. Don’t use fake names, don’t pick messy public fights, don’t get political or partisan, don’t send your friends and family into battle on your behalf, don’t advocate for specific products or solutions if that’s not your job, don’t friend your top-secret sources. All basic, sound advice, and nothing that should give even the most networked Web journalist pause.

• Anybody who’s worked for any big organization knows there are Rules and there are rules. The former are electrified fences, clearly marked and well-respected by any responsible employee. The latter are things for which you get written up if you’ve screwed up something more substantive — the corporate equivalent of disorderly conduct. Memos don’t make such distinctions; worker bees do without breaking a sweat.

Ultimately, it’s two points in the Dow Jones memo that are drawing the real fire — the apparent prohibition against crowdsourcing and the warning about mixing business and personal.

I understand why people have seen the warning not to discuss unpublished articles or interviews as a crowdsourcing veto, but as a Journal alum I doubt it was intended that way — given the Journal’s long and proud history of news that moves financial markets, I read it as a reiteration of the paper’s deeply held and understandable prohibition against showing your cards to competitors, sharp-eyed investors or the subjects of  articles. I doubt the Journal would apply the same rules for reporters covering the SEC to those investigating fitness or travel trends. Besides, journalists have always been crowdsourcers of a sort — you could fill China with the number of people quoted in trend pieces who turn out to be friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends. As with so many things, the Web has improved this process (sources come from wider social circles, as they always should have) and made it more efficient, while also making it transparent and preserving a record of it.

The second point is the warning about business and pleasure — and the real rub. Both journalists and the papers they work for are adapting to fairly massive cultural changes here, with pressure to change coming from all sides:

• Web readers are wading through a glut of commoditized information from a dizzying number of sources, and personality is a welcome bit of signal amid all this noise.  But that encourages a level of openness and disclosure from journalists that marks a change from the old rules.

• Papers are struggling to deal with the low returns (in money and reader loyalty) made from drive-by traffic to articles from search and sharing of links. With the article having replaced the paper as the unit by which news is consumed, papers are experimenting with creating new contexts to capture reader attention and loyalty. Turning writers into “micro-brands” is an obvious answer. But it’s less obvious how much of that brand equity benefits the paper as a whole — or if it can be made to do so any longer.

• Journalists are keenly aware that their articles are now disseminated world-wide, that they can distribute and promote their work themselves, and that the tumult in the newspaper industry means job security is but a memory. All of this understandably pushes journalists to think of themselves as brands to be looked after, in ways they didn’t consider just a few years ago.

• Younger journalists have grown up in public with Google, email and social media, and think very differently about where the lines are drawn between professional and personal and private and public. But they don’t make the rules just yet — nor is it obvious that their birthright as digital natives means they should.

All of this has encouraged and even pushed journalists to be more open about themselves with readers. It’s also led to a very interesting push and pull between journalists and papers, one that’s unfolding differently in different places. Like a lot of journalism today, it’s exciting and a bit dizzying — but also can be uncertain and even painful.