Ta-Nehisi Coates effects another defense of The Atlantic internal to its machinery:
Over the years I've had writers come here and "work for exposure" with some regularity. My friend the historian Jelani Cobb has done yeoman's work, some of it based on actual reporting. Judah Grunsteinwas nice enough to allow me to publish an e-mail, which I thought had a lot of substance, as a piece.Aaron Schatz from Football Outsiders has been here. The great historian Thomas Sugrue has come into this space and done awesome work. So has Adam Serwer. So has Brendan Koerner. So has Ayelet Waldman. So has Mark Kleiman. So has Michael Chabon. So has Shani Hilton.Last year we brought historian Kate Masur, film critic A.O. Scott and writer Tony Horwitz together to discuss Lincoln. None of them were paid.But, of course, all of them are now paid, and as far as I can tell, all of them were paid in other capacities when they worked for free. Again: this is not about where you came from. It is about where the people who have no money are right now. Everybody in this country has a "I came from nowhere" story. Some are facile and distorting. Others are poignant and constructive. But while I read and evaluate them all with interest, for this conversation, each is ultimately irrelevant to the person who needs to pay the rent.
Let's be clear, here: the Internet is absolutely full of people who work for exposure thinking that it will someday lead to dollars, only to find that it never does. And many of them are just as talented and dedicated as the people who make it professionally. You don't have to have as low of an opinion of our professional writing class as I do to admit that many of the people who write for the most prominent, well-paying places are inferior or indifferent prose stylists. Meanwhile, people work for exposure and work for exposure and work for exposure and they end up looking around at an empty apartment. I don't blame anyone on salary for failing to grok that, but it's reality.
One of the dynamics that's played out here is how hard it is to maintain a belief in the randomness and luck involved in success when you're talking about your own job. I know, from reading his work, that Coates doesn't believe that talent and drive lead unerringly to success. Far from it; in fact it's hard to think of someone who has done a better job of voicing the importance of chance in success. But some nontrivial portion of his readers are going to see him as saying exactly that he and the financially secure, celebrated people he mentions above are successful because of the quality of their work, their intelligence, their drive. Certainly, Alexis Madrigal's piece was pregnant with such pride. The bare calculus of winners and losers has attended this conversation at every step, and people who ordinarily know better have risked falling into a banal narrative about talent and work ethic. I have been reminded, in this conversation, by nothing as much as that tech writer who lectured Jamelle Bouie for "underestimating the hustle."
The flat reality is that the simplistic "exposure leads to dollars" formula is far less certain than we all might want, especially when the publications at the top of the chain, like The Atlantic, are looking to get people to do it for free. (Again: if The Atlantics of the world don't pay, in time, who will?) Exposure doesn't pay the rent. Look at Jacobin. They got a positive, buzzy write up in the most prominent newspaper of all. I'm so glad they did. But I'm also sure that they're still struggling. And unless you put actual money in their hands, the exposure is useless.
I'm not talking about the value of writing for no pay, or people who do it for love. It's not unusual for me to write 12,000 words in a given week, precisely none of which I'll be paid for. But I'm a full amateur, at least in the world of writing that we're talking about here, so that's irrelevant to the discussion. We're talking about the conditions for people who want to value and respect writing in part by doing it for a living. And we're talking about the importance of professional commentary and journalism. We're drenched in empty optimism about the world of arts and media in the digital age; people talk endlessly about some new golden age of media made for free and distributed for free. But the quality of this free culture is frequently avoided. There's a million short films on Vimeo which were painstakingly, lovingly crafted by dedicated people, and the vast majority of them are fucking awful. Lawrence of Arabia could never have been made by dedicated amateurs, nor could The Secret of Monkey Island, nor could Rubber Soul. And neither can the kind of journalism we deeply need.
I dunno. Predictions are bad business for an enterprise like this. It's hard not to worry for the future, and at times it's hard not to feel a little satisfaction. For awhile now, there's been a trope in paid commentary of "If you do X, you're a chump." With the financial crisis and the collapse of many job markets, it became a commonplace for bloggers to write mocking pieces about how people who have dedicated themselves to certain professions or fields were ensuring their own failure. (I guess there's clicks to be had in making people feel better about their own shitty deal.) As a PhD student, I've read more of those targeted towards me and people like me than I can count. Well, I think we're probably all chumps, now, and those same bloggers should keep their bags packed.
I thought that this conversation was about as good as it possibly could be, given the format and the culture of the people within. (Branch.com essentially exists for people to say "I AND THE OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS CHAT ARE VERY VERY IMPORTANT.") There's a lot of fear in there, and a lot of effort to not show that fear to the other people involved, which is certainly understandable. I doubt any of them individually thinks that they will be the one to end up on the outside, though. My useless prediction is that some large majority of them will not be writing or editing professionally ten years from now, and not by choice.
I can't feel anything but unhappiness about that. I don't want the world where most every piece from a professional publication is either clickbait garbage or "sponsored content." I don't need any more "The Fourteen Hottest Raccoon Twinks" or "Experts Say 7-11 Leads in Snacktacular Savings" in my life. But I fear I'm going to get it; I fear that's the future.
I think everybody in this conversation might just be whistling past the graveyard. But then, is that any different for the rest of us? I keep posting these charts and graphs, that show how deeply broken our basic deal is. Our system says that you must work and that work is central to who you are; meanwhile, work for the vast majority of us gets worse and worse and worse. So maybe we're all just fucked, not as writers, but as workers, as regular people.
Update: Two additional points, both from that Branch.com deal. First, several people tell stories about how some piece that they thought would get them know money got republished somewhere and ended up getting them money.... But anecdotes are memorable because they are rare, and none of these suggests anything like a sustainable model.
Second, somebody writes, "Agreed with Sara and Max w/r/t the troubling, self-perpetuating ubiquity and dominance of the shitty and slipshod. It's bleak to see insultingly artless, lame-unto-awful stuff -- in sports, where I spend most of my time, that's Bleacher Report -- dominate through sheer Google-gigging volume (and, now, adoptive corporate parentage), despite being widely unloved/loathed and mostly unlovable/loathsome."
Unloved by whom? By the people in that chat? For sure. By the people who click and generate the ad revenue? Seems not to be the case. And that's a deep problem here, conflicting notions of what is quality and what is valuable. That tension contributes to the sense I already identified in which these are people who know better than to claim that they are responsible for their own success and yet want to anyway. (As I sometimes do, as many of us sometimes do.) The sad fact is that the public may want "15 Gayest Pictures of the Pope" more than "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."
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