Andrew Rice’s article in the Sunday Times magazine is admirable both for its scope and for its narrow focus. The piece profiles a handful of editors of online news and feature magazine start-ups. Many of them are refugees of paying jobs at now-defunct print magazines who have found that existing technology allows them to start up handsome ventures online on a small investment of time and capital; in the process they have also found making money is a separate matter, altogether.
What each of the editors—including Sam Apple of the Faster Times and Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant—have in common is that they had developed a new business model in hopes of circumventing the most pressing obstacles of making a profit writing online, one being that ad revenues are small and hit driven and the other being that no one will pay for news and features online. Implicit in the article is a new normal in which the energy, creativity, and innovation that used to be channeled into content is being channeled into a quest to find the means to earn a living online. A corollary to this new reality is that the content suffers in the process.
Rice quotes a passage from the Faster Time’s mission statement that proclaims: “The crisis of American journalism is a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.” Perhaps so, but each of these editors is aware that it is the tawdry and the profane that generates hits, and “great” journalism may be the very definition of an expense few online reader are willing to pay for.
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