How my sister stole her friend’s job
March 10th, 2009My sister Flora recently started a garden blog and I’ve been talking her through the process. Flora has a lot to say about gardening, and she has thousands of high-quality photos of her work, her store, and the various projects she’s been associated with. Her biggest question was how the blog would sustain itself financially. She wasn’t interested in making piles of money, just getting enough cash flowing in to pay for hosting, design, and the time it would take her (and her staff) to maintain it. I offered two-sided responses: your blog is not going to make any money, but you’ll make a lot of money through your blog.
You’re probably familiar with the reasons a blog doesn’t often make money. Blogs usually depend on advertising, which is fine when the ad rates are high but stops working pretty quickly when prices drop. With Flora there’s an additional issue: she’s a garden designer and gets paid top dollar to do things like select plants for other people’s gardens. (This is something she does from a desk. The output is just a list of plants that someone else finds, buys, and puts in the ground. Good gig.) In the time it takes to write a blog post she could design some serious shit. Like a lot of expert bloggers the straight financials don’t make sense. But there’s another piece.
Flora has a giant garden store where you can buy a $10,000 palm tree. People regularly drop $20,000 on plants for a new garden. If she gets one new client per year her blog easily pays for itself. These economics are familiar to any tech consultant who blogs to build web-fame and meet clients. It really works, and it makes way more money than advertising.
We’ve also been talking about a whole set of her friends who write about gardens for a living. Some of them have been at it for 25 years and write for the most prestigious home & garden magazines, or at least they used to. Nearly all the prestigious garden magazines are out of business, and the home magazines are laying off their garden writers. If things continue as expected the garden journalist will no longer exist as a profession.
This brings up some hard questions.
The first question: did my sister steal her friends’ job? They used to get paid to write, and now she writes for free to gain paying customers. Of course, they went to journalism school and are professional reporters, while she’s a professional gardener who happens to write sometimes. The debate about this has been raging for years, and since moving to Los Angeles I’ve been feeling more conflicted then I did in San Francisco. My good friends Thor and Lane are pushing one side over at Deprecated, and the people I’ve been working with at big media companies are pushing the other side.
The second question: how do the professional writers make money in the new world? If everyone is doing their job for free the market is poisoned. They need to come up with a way to get paid for their time. The most obvious methods are selling books and speaking at events, though these areas are also in decline as more people are happy to do the work for free. Another option is to become curators of other people’s free writing, which may lower the quality of their output but greatly increases its volume, making advertising/sponsorship a little more viable. (This is part of the pitch behind Loud3r.) A third option is to write for Flora’s blog in exchange for a cut of sales, but to a real journalist this seems like the exact opposite of their profession. It’s marketing copy.
Either way, the job of writing in exchange for cash seems to be going away. Having recently watched All The President’s Men this makes me a little sad and a little scared. I ultimately believe that lots volunteers can find the truth better than one person on their own, and the group is better at self-correcting when personal biases arise.
However, the opposite applies to art. When we all try to agree we get some sorry art. My favorite example is a 1996 project that produced paintings and music based popular surveys. The”most wanted song” sounds like the worst top-40 soul song eve, while the “most unwanted song” is hilarious and loveable.
If we let garden journalism fall by the wayside will a thousand flowers blossom in the blog world, or will we end up with a little more populism and a little less art?
Jonathan Grubb


