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Which Content Site Will Be
the First to Win a Pulitzer?
-Andrew
Grossman
May 18, 2009
Content sites that generate and house articles will be where
journalists end up. The ones that last will make exclusive
deals with e-readers to license their online content. The
collapse of hard copy newspapers, which had looked like the
end of the line for professional journalism, may only have
forced a transition that had to occur eventually: the
establishment of online journalism with its own set of
standards and practices, based on and possibly at a higher
level than offline standards. A reader cannot easily compare
the quality of writing among journalists offline-who wants
to subscribe to multiple newspapers?-but online a quality
comparison is only a click away. What may seem ironic now is
that the internet will prove to be a forum that takes
literary and journalistic standards to their zenith. Readers
will only want to pay for the best, and no writer wants to
work at Wal-Mart.
Online journalism, rather than be rendered irrelevant as a
paying model by the blogging world, now appears to be the
main driver for the fee based content model. Although the
attitude that all writing and art online should be free
remains strong, there has been a major shift recently. What
is driving us toward the acceptance of fees for content is
the desire for quality. Internet users are discerning
readers and viewers; in many ways they are the most literate
audience possible, because surfing the internet is the
equivalent of reading several newspapers and books each day.
What this top quality audience is getting in the online
writing realm is a whole bunch of suckiness. The lack of
quality writing online is not an indictment of bloggers-some
bloggers are exceptional writers-but is because the online
writing world is still being populated by the best writers
in the country. They are coming on board faster and faster.
They have no choice. Then the competition for eyeballs will
begin in earnest. In the meantime, as bloggers realize that
there is money to be made online, the most ambitious will
stop thinking of themselves as diarists and realize that
they are already on the cusp of having a paying writing
career. At that point, their writing will become tighter.
Money makes writing matter.
This column is
part of a larger article. To receive the full article,
contact:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net
Category:
Newspaper Industry,
Fiction Income
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