Good for nothin’

I don’t really do publicity for free.

Well, I suppose this blog is free (”  “), and on occasion I’ll write a friend’s bio or look at a website for free. And I have lunch with people and brainstorm about PR more than I probably should for free, and sometimes I pitch artists who aren’t mine for the sake of good stories everywhere for, what I guess is technically, “free”. But generally, this is my job; concert/show tickets and clothes must be bought and rent must be paid, usually in that order.

Which is why it’s totally ridiculous that writers on ArtsJournal and beyond are debating whether or not journalists should get paid. Of course they should – there’s no debate about that – but for what, how and by whom? And if everyone is giving it away for free, why should we spend our money on some?

Four ArtsJournal bloggers have brought this topic up recently:

CultureGrrl has directly raised the issue with her readers. Her argument? I write this blog as a labor of love, but could be paid write for other publications which wouldn’t necessarily be available to you, readers. If you like this blog, you should donate. If you don’t donate, I will blog less frequently, if at all. Her fundraising campaign began in mid-February, here,

As you may have noticed, I have now added a “Donate” button
to the blog’s middle column. Payment can be either through your own
PayPal account or by credit card. (For the latter, click the “continue”
link in the lower left corner of the donation page.) It’s a secure
(non-tax deductible) transaction, handled completely by PayPal, not by
me.

I’d like to call this a “voluntary subscription,”
but my webmaster tells me that’s not how things work on the Internet.
I’m not a waiter, so I don’t want to call it a “Tip Jar.” (Tips of the
news variety are, of course, always welcome!) Call it what you will.
Just be sure to vote early and often!

…and continued here,

But my list of financially generous readers now appears to be stuck at
24. My “Donate” button seems to have become vestigial. So, with much
regret (but also some pride in what I created), I’m planning to
repurpose this blog on or about Apr. 23, CultureGrrl‘s third
anniversary. It will become an occasional outlet for my analysis and
commentary, in the manner of some of the less active sites on ArtsJournal.
If the financial recompense for blogging miraculously picks up, so will
the pace of my posts. The button and the ad space remain at your
disposal.

…here,

I have juicy, nourishing morsels to serve up from this 75-minute
brainstorming session, but I was disheartened to discover that no CultureGrrl readers responded, while I was away, to my call
for Donors 25, 26 and 27 to support the blog by clicking the
languishing yellow button on the right. (Okay, I’ll settle for 25 and
26.)

Did no one miss me while I was gone?

Did I mention that one of those who popped in (and spoke) at our high-powered conversation yesterday was Carmine Branagan, director of the National Academy?

See you tomorrow (maybe).

…here, here, here and here.

Newer ArtsJournal blogger Regina Hackett at Another Bouncing Ball disagreed with CultureGrrl’s approach, and said so here:

While not an expert in seeking remuneration, I instinctively feel that begging is not the best strategy for arts writers.

Culture Grrl disagrees here, here, here and most recently here,
the last having the distinction of being not only plaintive  (“Did no
one miss me while I was gone?”) but threatening ( “See you tomorrow
(maybe).”)

Culture Grrl (Lee Rosenbaum) is an industrious reporter, especially on museum administration news. But if she’s that intent on raising a bit of what Bernie Bertie Wooster calls the necessary, she should consult an expert.

…and here:

In suggesting that Culture Grrl’s begging for money might not be the
best way to attract support for an art blog, I tiptoed through the
topic, so as not to cause personal offense. In truth, it drives me
crazy. My masterpiece of understatement here.

Chloe Veltman at Lies Like Truth tried to solve the problem for herself by applying for an arts grant, and detailed her experience here:

I recently applied for a grant to help support my activities as a
performing arts blogger from a Bay Area-based organization that funds
theatre artists and companies. Before I applied for the grant, I asked
the the grant’s leaders if I would be eligible to apply. They told me
that as a theatre critic, I would indeed be eligible to apply under the
“artist” category, which I thought was very forward-thinking of them.
“Yes, you are eligible…You would want to define yourself in terms of
being a “theatre artist” (personally, I feel theatre journalist fits
that bill),” the grant-giving organization’s director wrote to me in an
email. So in the spirit of experimentation, I applied for the grant.

The
experiment, somewhat unsurprisingly, failed. Even though I’d be told I
was eligible to apply, in the end the grant’s panelists decided not to
consider a theatre critic as an artist, so my application was deemed
eligible.

Douglas McLennan, editor of ArtsJournal and blogger at diacritical, recently suggested that organizations hire critics-in-residence:

Lots of arts organizations have blogs on their websites. Most aren’t
very good, and they’re difficult to maintain well. There are many
out-of-work critics. And less and less arts coverage in local press. So
why not critics-in-residence?

So that’s what’s going on in this neck of the woods. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.”

I was on a Chamber Music America panel about two years ago with a classical critic. After listening to my yammering about how I pitch critics’ blogs when I think they are actually better suited for what I’m pitching than the print publications those critics write for are, the moderator asked the critic what he thought about blogging. “Well, you won’t ever see me writing for free!” he said with a smile. “People have paid me to cover classical music for 15 years – why would I start doing it for nothing?” I Googled him this morning, thinking he may have changed his tune, but no – still no blog. More power to him.

He’s absolutely right, of course: why would someone do what they have defined as their job and not get paid for it? The general argument against his stance is that, like with anything, there are levels of investment. If a blog is popular, that blogger’s profile is raised and consequently that writer may become more attractive to the mainstream media (if that is even the end goal) and to advertisers. (See Parterre Box‘s James Jorden’s new gig with the New York Post.) But what if you have a blog and you don’t have time to write it because you’re getting paid for other writing work? Then you enter an annoying cycle: this blog may raise my profile and bring me to other communities, but I have to write this other piece and get paid for it so I don’t have time to blog today. And do we really believe that, in the world of arts blogs, advertisers are going to cover all the costs of living? Finding advertisers is a full-time job and – once potential advertisers have been identified – convincing arts organizations that the Internet Isn’t Scary is time-consuming as well, take it from a girl who knows. Should ArtsJournal hire someone to sell ads on the blogs? Probably, but who pays for that person?

The extremely popular website Gawker, which is among a few of my favorite things, pays its writers by Page Views. See this piece in the – yes, now shut down – Portfolio magazine. Gawker even does its bonuses by Page Views:

Even in the growing editorial teams we need to control costs. And that

means a new look at traffic bonuses. We’ve been spending $50,000 a

month on average on pageview bonuses. The scheme has made writers

hustle for traffic even in teams so large that there was a risk they

become lumbering. It’s helped us hit a record 274m pageviews last

month, up 69% on last September.

Pageview bonuses will continue this quarter. And we are committed to

pageview incentives, and to measuring performance by a writer’s

individual pageviews, in the long term. But a first quarter spike in

traffic — and the resulting bonus payments — could be dangerous if

advertising markets are troubled next year. And we’re assuming that

the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit

more predictability about your own income.

That’s why we’re suspending the pageview bonus for the first quarter

at least, but making up for some of the loss of income by raising pay.

If you haven’t recently agreed to a new rate, your monthly base amount

will automatically be increased by 5% in January.

This may be another post for another time, but how good can journalism be when writers’ salaries directly depend on Page Views? What about that story that needs to be told but may not draw a huge clicking crowd? Two different writers from blogs on print publications’ sites have told me that they would love to post interviews with my clients, but sadly their editors have asked them to focus on more mainstream (and ideally scandalous) celebrities to hopefully attract more user comments. Again, how good could those interviews be if their sole purpose is to spark comments – just comments, regardless of quality?

This blog works for me because I’m writing about what I already get paid to do. I may try something out for one of my clients and then report on it, or put an idea for artists or organizations that present artists here and benefit from the free – yes, free! – advice of intelligent and passionate readers. Should I be finishing the press release for David Lang’s the little match girl passion CD right now instead of looking into how Gawker writers get paid? Why yes, yes I should. But at the proverbial end of the day, thinking about how journalists get paid helps me be a better publicist, so the press release can go out a few hours late. (But I’m doing it as soon as I post this, David – I promise.) I couldn’t write a blog without my job, not just because my job pays the bills, but because the job is the blog content.

I like to think that artists and industry folks with blogs constitute an important aspect of the broader cultural conversation, but I don’t pretend it’s journalism. Where would be be if all of our news came from people with “real”/”day” jobs? Someone has to be an unbiased reporter of the facts. Someone, I guess, with family money?