Content Farms and Crowdfunded Journalism
What are content farms?
- sites that produce thousands of articles and videos per day, cheaply, to attract keyword advertising
- essentially, journalistic assembly lines
What is outsourcing?
- A combination of computer algorithms and human labour where a company outsources the production of hyperlocal news (news focused on a specific geographical area, such as a neighbourhood or town) to be published in dozens of newspapers across North America
What is the no pay model and where did it start?
- The Huffington Post
- A model of journalism that draws heavily on free content contributed by thousands of writers and bloggers
- A publishing model that purports to provides high-profile exposure for writers and argues that people who make these contributions do not want to be paid
What is performance based pay?
- Where journalists are compensation based in whole or part on web traffic to their stories
- Writers are paid based on how many people read, click on, or share their work
How do individual articles online become a commodity?
- In the digital age, the single journalistic object is fragmented and decontextualized
- Journalistic success is measured in numbers of shares, likes, tweets, and reblogs, by how many people click through, and by whether or not they read the entire article
- The individual article is thus a commodity in and of itself; it must be financially viable from the start
How do content farms work?
- Content farms use algorithms to identify queries people search online, then commission freelancers to produce articles and videos to match keyword searches, optimized to appear at the top of search engines
What is the key to maintaining an outsourcing organization's business model?
- All outsourcing (even in other fields) relies on low pay
- Particularly the ability to take advantage of racialized and globalized divisions of labour
- Depends upon the existence of a large pool of freelancers
Who is able to work for exposure? Who is not able to work for exposure?
- People who are employed or who have other sources of income at the expense
- Those who need to be paid for their writing to earn a living
What fuels performance based pay?
- A market logic
- Fuelled by analytics that supply media companies with precise measures of what a reader reads, how long they stay on a page, where they place their cursor, how an article travels through social media, geographic location, and other data
What is the difference between contents and news articles?
- An article or story called/calls attention to a unique piece of work
- Content refers to a mass of undifferentiated material produced by people who are, essentially, interchangeable
- Content increasingly stands in for what used to be called articles or stories
How do content firms employ freelance journalists?
- Anyone can sign on as a freelancer through companies’ websites by submitting a résumé and writing samples
- Many contributors are un- or under-employed freelance journalists
- Freelancers are paid a small fee (between three and fifteen dollars per article; in recent years some offers increased to twenty-five to thirty dollars per article) and give up all copyrights to their works, which companies own outright
How does outsourcing work?
- They produce tens of thousands of articles per week by scraping data sources for micro-news of appeal to neighborhood-sized audiences, such as Little League scores, house sales, and school lunch menus, then assign articles to low-paid freelancers overseas, or having US-based freelancers add quotes to a press release and file local news from afar
- Essentially, a globalized, Internet-based informational assembly line
What are some critiques about the quality of work produced through the no-pay model?
- No-pay publishing models that turn on unpaid or low-paid labour can be seen as degrading the craft of writing, cutting into professional writers’ livelihoods, lowering entry-level requirements to become a professional writer, and, critically, depressing writers’ fees
How is the Recruits program at Gawker a performance-based business model and how does it operate?
- A program that gave aspiring Gawker writers blog space and a small stipend with “an aggressive bonus structure that will reward the capturing of uniques”
- Recruits were paid five dollars extra for every 1,000 unique visitors to their blog
Beyond taste and artistic or journalistic standards, what does the rise of content (v. articles or stories in the analogue paper) signify?
- It signifies how emergent digital technologies are being used to extend and deepen the commodification of culture, further transforming journalism into a substance valued solely for its ability to link advertisers to consumers
– It is a continuation in journalism’s historical development, but one with deep implications for contemporary media workers
What are some of the positives associated with crowdfunded journalism (name at least 4)?
- They carry the potential to liberate freelancers from media institutions.
- They hold promise for freelancers to independently and directly fund journalism and writing careers
- Promise of crowdfunding is that funders do not expect a return on investment --> many benefactors who want to support a journalist's career
- Crowdfunding sites foster a shared commitment to journalism’s social importance --> enable journalists to cover stories that are generally neglected or under-resourced by mainstream news organizations, particularly advocacy and activist journalism.
- Crowdfunding provides useful technological infrastructure for workers with no institutional support --> the sites make it straightforward to set up a project, post a video, invite friends via social media to donate and promote the project, and, critically, get paid.
- Because crowdfunding sites have accumulated such a large network of donors, there’s a high chance a freelancer’s project will be supported by strangers and people outside of their immediate networks
- Crowdfunding holds promise for enabling journalists to bypass media institutions and self-organize – not to mention decommodify – the work of journalism
Why does Nicole Cohen think that organizations that use outsourcing are an alarming prospect?
- It demonstrates the ease with which it is now possible to separate work from workers who have traditionally been thought resistant to the rationalization of production
- It is a strategy for deskilling workers and cheapening labour
What are arguments in support of the no-pay article?
- Proponents consider it to be part of "journalism’s golden age"
- People, no matter their occupation, experience, or social location, can publish aesthetically pleasing pieces of writing to immediate audiences, who then pick and choose articles they like to circulate and promote (helped along by an algorithm)
- Provides exposure for writers without the constraints of a deadline or specifications on what to write about --> freedom for writers to write about what they like
How do some publications incorporate advertising revenue into the perfomance-based pay model?
- Companies do so by paying writers a portion of the advertising revenue they can generate overall or from a writer’s individual article
- Since advertising revenues fluctuate, so does the amount of money available to pay writers.
- Many web-based publications launch with arrangements to pay writers based on a small set fee and bonuses once they reach certain traffic target
Are the bleak labour practices in contemporary journalism entirely the fault of the Internet? Why or why not?
- No, this is not the Internet's fault per se
- The Internet has been as a tool by media capitalists to strip labour costs to the bone --> Digital journalism is marked by low pay, no pay, and deepening commodification, fuelled by a deep power imbalance between individual writers and the companies for which they work
- However, while media capitalists use the Internet to devalue the work of writing, freelancers use the same tools to publicize, address, and try to improve their conditions
What are some of the the negatives associated with crowdfunded journalism (name at least 4)?
- Crowdfunding benefits journalists who already have connections, wide networks, and a reputation
- It depends on hours of unpaid work: pitching a project, selling oneself and ideas, requesting money, and managing the raising of funds --> engaging in an extended campaign of selling, promoting, and convincing
- Journalists report finding it difficult and uncomfortable to engage in the sell, noting the stress it puts on personal relationships and their limited
- The largest crowdfunding sites are privately owned and use algorithms and their own self-interest in promoting certain projects, which gives some projects visibility over others
- The entrepreneurial imperatives inherent in crowdfunding could put pressure on journalism itself. ---> As Josh McPhee (2012) writes: “Kickstarting a project demands that we transform ourselves from artists into marketers.””
- Ultimately, crowdfunding cannot sustain journalism in the long term, as people are more interested in making one-time donations to specific projects
What is counter publicity and why might it be important for freelance journalists?
- When media workers create media texts and appropriate communicative technologies to use as tools to broadcast messages about their labour conditions
- Counter publicity undercuts freelancers’ sense of individual frustration and isolation
- Plays a vital role in developing a collective response to labour pressures
Why is conflating journalism with content a problem?
- When writing is transformed into content, power inequalities deepen between freelancers and the media corporations that profit from their work, and it becomes increasingly difficult to demand payment
- Media institutions develop means to convert attention (audiences) into revenue through advertising, but writers are deprived of any wages for their labour
What is hope labour?
- Increasingly capitalize on people contributing their labour for free as a future-oriented investment (exposure or experience to be added to resume) in the hope of attaining paid work later on
- Also called un- or under-compensated work
- It is work that is carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow
- Hope labour is core to digital journalism business models, which present unpaid writing as a “moral choice” that individuals must struggle with, rather than a structural feature of digital media publishing
Why are visibility projects like Who Pays Writers and WordRates important?
- Visibility projects such as Who Pays Writers? and WordRates are acts of solidarity and can counter the competitiveness and individualization fostered among freelancers, a form of networked solidarity, or using digital tools for support and solidarity-building among dispersed and isolated workers (
- Unionization and collective bargaining for freelancers is impossible under current labour laws, the only practical option is to organize negotiating potential through making rates visible