Have Keyboard, Will Travel
YOU can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging, transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”
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Dozens of Web sites have correspondingly sprouted up, posting articles written for free or for a fraction of what a traditional magazine would have paid. Into this gaping maw have rushed enough authors to fill a hundred Roman Colosseums, all eager to write in exchange for “exposure.” Paul Smalera, a 29-year-old who was laid off from a magazine job in November 2008, is now competing with every one of them. And after months of furious blogging, tweeting and writing for Web sites, Paul has made a career of Internet journalism, sort of.
In the process, he’s had to redefine success. While he is doing work that he finds satisfying, he is earning around half of the $63,000 he made as a full-time employee, and he doesn’t have health insurance — or prospects for getting any. He has very little in savings and a mountain of credit-card and student-loan debt. “I think the economics are bleak right now, but in the long run, the opportunities are going to be online, and that’s why I’m willing to make the investment,” he told me over coffee.
Paul is tall with shaggy brown hair and a round, stubbled face that supports a pair of hipster eyeglasses. The one-bedroom apartment that he shares with his girlfriend — and where he now works — is improbably tidy, with throw cushions, bowls of fruit and potted plants. Like more than a few idealistic young people, he packed up a U-Haul and moved to New York with fuzzy ideas about becoming a writer and little sense of how to go about doing it or what it entailed.
After a year of networking and rejection, he sweated his way into a job at a big magazine, the short-lived Condé Nast Portfolio, where he was a colleague of mine. What was he working toward? “It wasn’t well formed,” he said. “I wanted to be a ‘writer,’ writing features in magazines — which meant a lot more then, I suppose.”
When the economy began to crumble, Portfolio crumbled, too; there were layoffs, and Paul found himself out the door. He then faced one of the most delicate questions of the digital age: how public should one go when mourning one’s embarrassing, tragic loss of job? The Internet seems to run on Schadenfreude and hysteria; blogs keep gleeful track of who has been laid off in the media world, treating the names as if they were leaked from the Pentagon.
Paul was so bitter about what had happened to him that rather than wait for the bloggers to come for him, he did one better: he wrote a rant about his former employer and sent it to Gawker, which posted it in its entirety (“Inside Fort Polio: A Former Staffer on What Went Wrong,” the headline read).
Assessing his next move, he knew that magazines and newspapers were not options — they were almost all shedding staff, and people with far more experience than he had were looking for work. “The Web was the only place I was going to go,” he said. “I decided that without the heft of a big print magazine pushing my work out there that I needed to push it out there myself, and make sure that people who might be interested saw it.” He entered the sea of tiny cutout heads broadcasting thoughts and opinions all day online. He tweets; he has an e-mail list; he posts links to his articles.
And he scratches out his living through piecework, mostly by writing for an online business magazine that pays him $500 per article around once a week, and $50 each for a handful of shorter postings. He also writes a blog for a Web outfit that pays him $250 a month to try to generate traffic for its site. He is making progress; some larger Web sites and even print publications have asked him to contribute. “What are the goals now?” he said. “I don’t even think about it in those terms right now. I’m just happy to be writing regularly. I’m treating it as a month-to-month thing.”
While most people are worried about getting paid for their work, I’m more concerned that journalists might be the digital-age equivalent of monks illuminating manuscripts, a group whose skills will soon disappear. Still, Paul and many like him press on, hoping that things will get better. And maybe they will.
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