Last week, Entertainment
Weekly announced that it was launching a new web presence, The Community,
that would feature writing by “people formerly known as the audience”
or, in other words, unpaid writers. EW is leveraging the power of the
blogosphere to create a site filled with young writers who want to launch their
careers, but aren't sure where else they can be published. This has, understandably, sparked a great
deal of sturm und drang among the
professional media collective, especially given that it was followed by the firing
of one of EW’s finest film critics,
Owen Gleiberman.
It’s easy to understand the initial criticism towards Entertainment Weekly. Here is a prominent, for-profit entertainment
publication that is apparently outsourcing its critical work to unpaid laborers,
a practice many media outlets have been exploiting for years, even as others fought against it. I agree with where the critics are coming
from. For-profit media outfits should
pay for content. If you’re making money
off of something, you should be paying for it.
On Thursday, however, attention shifted from EW itself to the writers who would deign
to work for free for it. The result was
a lot of critics, who have been paid for their content for most of their
careers, criticizing unpaid writers, who have never been paid for their
content, taking positions in which they continue to not be paid for their
content, but now for a prominent entertainment outlet. NPR’s Linda Holmes tweeted “Before you write
for free, consider what the path is. Consider where you're trying to go. Look
what happened to those who were once there.”
The Week’s Scott Meslow called it “a trap”. Some unpaid internet commenters even went
so far as to call such contributors “scabs.”
Here’s the thing: Not everybody writes to get paid. Sure, those who have been paid for writing
all their lives will expect to get paid for writing,
but people who came to the whole “writing about television” thing later - people
like me - tend to write because they enjoy it.
Most importantly, they don’t want to write about television to get paid,
they want to write about television as a means to engage in cultural
conversation.
To be clear, I have no intention of engaging in EW’s Community even if I were
invited because I write for my own enjoyment.
I like being able to write about Hannibal,
or Cosmos, or Television Without Pity, or How
I Met Your Mother, or writing itself.
But if you’re going to tell me what I have to write about and when I
have to write it, you’d better be willing to pay me for that privilege.
I’ve read a lot of what the EW Community has to offer and I’ve looked at the sites of some of
the people they’ve tagged as contributors and, for the most part, these aren’t
people who have been aspiring professional writers their whole lives. They are people who have day jobs and who write about television in their free time because it’s what they enjoy. They write because they enjoy the cultural
conversation and being a part of it.
They don’t want money, they want an audience. And EW
is ready to give it to them when other outlets are not.
The thing that most critics don’t understand is that there
is a large segment of the population that doesn’t want to read. They want to talk. NPR proved this in a
rather hilarious April Fool’s Day prank a few days ago. They posted an article titled “Why Doesn’t
America Read Anymore” with instructions within the text of the article not to
comment on the article, but just to “like” it.
The response, obviously, was a veritable deluge of comments responding
only to the headline and not to the article.
The takeaway from this article for some people might be that
others are just dumb, unwilling to read the plain text that is put before
them. My takeaway is that the internet
has spawned a culture of people who don’t really care about the content of
criticism, they just want to talk about the piece. Some sites are able to bridge this gap. The AV Club’s television section, for
example, manages to combine both insightful criticism and intelligent commenters willing to discuss it. But even the best of these sites generally
cover a limited span of television series.
What Entertainment
Weekly seems to be trying to do is to create a community where people can
come to talk about any show they want.
Television Without Pity served this function for readers for many years
(I myself contributed a lot of “free” content to its forums for a while) but it
will be shutting down in May. There are
several multi-show sites out there, but I’ve yet to find one that regularly
covers Castle or Hawaii Five-0 or a number of other shows that I watch
regularly. Granted, these aren’t the
shows I care to discuss regularly, but some people out there do, along with The Bachelor, The Voice, and pretty much
every show on television.
If EW is finding a hole in the current coverage of television and filling it, that’s not their
fault, it’s the fault of media critics who haven’t yet realized that there is a
large segment of the population who doesn’t actually care what they have to
say, they just want to have their own say.
Reading the current content of the EW
Community, that’s the only conclusion I can come to. The recaps there are largely free of deeper
consideration, content with merely regurgitating the stories and plots of the
episodes covered. But, again, the audience
here is not people looking for careful insight into television. It’s people who want to talk – people who are ready to skip from the headline to the
comments just to have their voices heard.
There is apparently an audience for a website that will only shallowly cover
everything but will provide a discussion venue for everything as well. That EW
is employing unpaid writers to fill this niche is disappointing, but I don’t
blame them for finding it.
I can understand the immediate hesitation by people who see
unpaid alternatives usurping their current roles. I, too, work in a profession that’s
constantly being told it’s irrelevant in the twenty-first century. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard
or read that libraries aren’t necessary because “everything is on the internet”
or “you can just use Google to find it,” well then I wouldn’t need to be a
librarian anymore. But libraries are still relevant today because we’ve
kept them relevant. We may no longer
principally be warehouses for books, but we provide access to computers and the
internet and to teachers trained in technology.
We do still have books, but we’ve adapted with the changing needs of our
users to provide the content and services they want.
I’ll admit it’s not a fair comparison. Writers are content creators while I am
merely a content facilitator. But, at
the same time, the entire function of the Web 2.0 movement has been to
significantly blur the line between content creators and content
consumers. How many YouTube musicians
have we seen become paid music stars? How
many bloggers have we seen turn their content into books or other paid
material? And the fact is, many writers,
even those of the “Fuck you, pay me”
variety write for free all the time.
It’s called Twitter. Sure, there
are the lucky few who can count Twitter as “work,” but many writers put their
thoughts out there completely for free.
Why? Because they want to be a
part of the cultural conversation and to increase their audience, the exact
same reasons why many bloggers are writing as well.
What the television criticism world is going through right
now reminds me a great deal of what the sports writing world went through about
a decade or two ago. Amateur writers
from across the country started up their blogs and began cranking out content that
could rival the work of the traditional sports media. While many professional writers and athletes
derided sports bloggers as working “in [their] mother’s basement on [their]
mother’s computer,” as it turned out, a baseball game or a
football game is, like a film or a television show, a text that can be analyzed
from myriad perspectives by intelligent people whether or not they have formal training in
the medium. More and more writers
joined the medium and it turned out that a lot of them, despite writing and
working only for themselves (and what little ad revenue they could get from
their blogs) were really good writers and thinkers. They helped to launch the popularity of
advanced statistics in sports – now fundamental in any discussion – and many
moved on to either working for prominent media outlets or forming their own.
Television writing has reached a similar crossroads. There are a lot of writers doing good work
(and some doing bad work) for free because it’s something they enjoy
doing. They’re not writing in hopes of a
future in the industry.* They’re writing
to have their voices heard above the rabble and, thus far, they haven’t had a
venue to do so.
* Have you seen the
state of the media criticism industry?
Good writers are getting laid off left and right. Who would want to leave a good day job for that?
If Entertainment
Weekly is using The Community to rid itself of paid television critics, I
think that’s a foolish decision. In the
long-run I believe it’s bound to fail because writing is hard, especially
churning out the kind of weekly recaps that EW
trades in. And the downside of employing
free labor is that, since you have no loyalty to them (in the form of payment)
they likewise have no strong loyalty to you.
I’ll be interested to see what kind of turnover in writers the site has
because I have the feeling it will be too high to effectively manage. But let’s ease off the writers, shall we? Just because they write
for different reasons doesn’t make their contributions less valuable and it
doesn’t make them scabs. That Entertainment Weekly has found a way to
exploit them to fill a niche that hasn’t yet been met only serves to
show that nobody else has met that need with paid writers. What the future holds for media criticism, I
don’t know. But I do know that unpaid
writers aren’t going away anytime soon.
It’s only becoming easier for the average television viewer to make his
or her voice heard. The traditional media criticism environment can find a way to fill the gaps in the entertainment world with paid writers or it can resign itself to hoping that the "scabs" will eventually get bored and go away. For now, I know which side I'll be betting on.
Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and amateur television critic. You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
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