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Thursday 4 December 2008

Can just anyone be a writer?

If a rat can cook, can anyone be a writer now?

And now everyone is a hack, what hope for the professionals?

Now I understand why James Whittaker, the former royal correspondent of the Mirror, would snap ‘Am I talking in my own time?’ if taking a call from a production company/another journalist/researcher. The opportunities for providing content for nothing are apparently limitless, and at the same time the market has been saturated by a similar oversupply in content-providers. As Professor Roy Greenslade says, ‘In effect, every citizen is now a journalist. Journalistic skills are not entirely wiped out in an online world, but they are eroded and, most importantly, they cannot be confined any longer to an exclusive elite group.’ Aaagh! The joyful message of the cartoon movie Ratatouille is that anyone can cook, even a rat. And the sinister message of the age of Prof. Greenslade, the free newspapers and the blogosphere is that anyone can be a journalist, as well as all the rats who already are.

So this is where we are. Everyone is writing, everywhere, all the time. Which is bad news, no? If market economics suggest that four million bloggers are willing to file for free, and if commuters read pappy freesheets rather than hand out 50p for the crunchier fare of the Standard, then newspapers will be less keen to pay their staff or freelancers a living wage, and ‘free speech’ will come to be a euphemism for ‘unpaid writers’ in the New Media Age of Change.

In the hierarchy of things people don’t care about â” the Lib Dem leadership contest, the new Britney album, the Diana inquest â” the pay-rate per word of the freelance journalist wins hands down, I know. But still, the writers’ strike in Hollywood seems to signal that those who make words for a living are feeling hard done by.

There, the row is mainly over residuals â” the tiny crumbs in fees that writers are paid when their work is shown again in other formats and media. The TV networks and film studios won’t can their existing DVD deal, which pays the writer four cents on each $15 DVD. In fact, they want to extend this terrific deal on the same minimal terms to internet downloads and mobile phone viewing. The writers, meanwhile, want eight cents per DVD, which doesn’t seem an awful lot.

Now I know that Hollywood is different and journalists don’t make fortunes for their companies in the same way as, say, the writers of the Sopranos do, but publishers and distributors are under the same pressure here to push down the cost of the raw materials, which are words. According to the NUJ, ‘newspaper rates haven’t gone up for 20 years’. Indeed, if you want to put in a day’s work at the Guardian as a sub (£160 and sinking), I would steer you to the offices of the Turkish daily Hürriyet, where the day-rate is £200.

More articles from: Rachel Johnson | this section

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