Nowhere is this more true than in the world of mainstream print media, where legacy organizations are collapsing much more quickly than many of us would have expected, raising the question of—what’s a writer to do? How can a writer make a living?
Especially, how can a student with real writing talent, who aspires to be a non-fiction writer, fulfil the dream? It’s possible, but it requires clear and creative thinking.
First, many who rail against the media get the cause of their problems all wrong: That is, we hear that the media are too left-wing or too right-wing or too shallow or too whatever. Nope.
Well, maybe true, depending on your perspective, but irrelevant.
Historically, media marketed information as well as opinion, and the Internet has now made most information free. As a result, advertisers, who were always the major financial support of most media, are dropping in numbers and willingness to pay, and subscribers are simply going online to find information—including the information from advertisers.
Even oldsters like me are onto this now: If I would like to buy an oil-filled space heater from the local hardware chain, why should I scan the papers, hoping to find it in one of their ads when I can just go to their site and search on “space heaters”?
When I started working on this post, I had one example of mainstream media decline, and then suddenly, two, then three, then four. But first, from Hanson:
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1 comment:
Denyse, the train of the publishing industry is evidently hurtling way faster down the track of massive change than I and many of us would have realized. You've shown us that reality, and that is a heads up.
Thank you.
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