[Ipg-smz] [Ipg-l] Check out Heidi Moore's Twitter thread on freelancer pay rates

[Stephen Satchell]

On 9/28/19 6:29 AM, sjvn via Ipg-l wrote:
> https://twitter.com/moorehn/status/1177242146849665024
> 
> It's both great and horrifying. There was way, way too many people
> out there stuck at a dime a word or even less.
Writers aren't the only word professionals who are short-changed.  It's
a question of perceived value, in the light of the changing business models.

For the press, the old model was that there were two distinctive sides:
 (1) the editorial, where the product goal was to attract eyeballs, and
(2) the sales, where advertisers were sold those same eyeballs to
present said advertisers' message.

I haven't figured out what the new model is yet for press people.  The
value of "quality eyeballs" seems to have dropped, because "quality"
doesn't seem to be the emphasis.  In some respects, advertisers have
ruined it by being greedy -- witness YouTube and the almost-random
invasive break-ins to show ads, to name one.

Newspapers and magazines, to name two, have lost their way in making it
easier for readers to give them money.  It's not a question of gathering
the revenue, it's a question of making the DRM almost invisible for the
paying customer.  The movie people have figured it out, more or less,
with CSS and its children:  the product will work only in devices that
"know the code", and those devices are designed to make it hard to rip
the product and strip the DRM.

It's the difficulty with dealing with the DRM methods that stop me from
subscribing to paywalled publications.  It's too much work on my part to
deal with the current subscription systems.  As a customers, what I want
is a system that makes reading one or more publications as easy as
watching one or more movies.

A complication for publications is their "brand" of journalism.  If
given the choice today, I would shun _The New York Times_ and the
_Washington Post_ because of their biased selective editorial and
rampant editorial bias in the news pages.  I base this opinion of the
headlines I've seen on news aggregation web sites, in particular the
sematic baggage in the language used.  Is that fair?  Probably not.  But
it's the only thing I have to judge the quality of the journalism
practiced by paywalled publications.  Oh, some paywalled pubs give out a
very limited number of free samples, others don't.

One idea is to have a version of "Publishers' Clearinghouse", when I can
purchase subscriptions, and then the publications query the
clearinghouse to see if I have a valid and current subscription.  This
should be transparent to me -- no using access tokens that I have to
enter each time I want to read articles.  Perhaps a digital "coin"
(crypto) in a PC cookie that the content-providing sites can use to
validatate a reader.

Make it hard for a reader, and you won't have a reader for long, paying
or not.  Make is easier, and people used to "free stuff" on the Internet
can be eased into paying for what they get.  Assuming that you have
quality editorial, with "quality" defined by the reader.

Done right, this new model also provides different pieces of analytics
for the publication:  short term in terms of page views and
paying-reader responses, long term in subscription bumps and
cancellations.  This is a problem with the current dead-tree papers:
giving feedback can be hard, and pruning your readership is counter to
success in the old business model.

OK, time to test my flame-proof suit.