NYT op-ed writer is so mad publications won't pay for his awesomeness

I think that what a lot of young writers don't understand is that if there is a market for anything, it is expertise. Not your brilliant words and flowing sentences and sharp insights honed over 25 years of rough-and-tumble life experience, watching "Breaking Bad" and reading "Talk of the Town" each week religiously. Look at the op-eds in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal - or your local paper, for that matter. They are by experts in their field. Professors. Former federal or state cabinet members. Research scientists. That often goes for the regulars, as well. Paul Krugman was a professor of economics long before he was a celebrity columnist. Peggy Noonan was a speech writer.

Expertise is tough, though. It takes time. Years sometimes. Is it worth spending 20 years litigating antitrust cases as a corporate attorney so that you have the credentials to pitch an op-ed to the L.A. Times about Amazon? Or to grind through medical school so you can latch onto the New Yorker like Atul Gawande? Depends on the person, I suppose. The other route is what the New Republic piece suggests: Getting your work out there and proving that expertise, pro bono. Bill Simmons did it. A lot of people, in fact, have done the same thing at start-ups like Baseball Prospectus or Fangraphs. But as it is, no one much gives a darn about what you think about the Supreme Court or climate change or how J.J. Redick will mesh with Chris Paul in the Clippers' backcourt. Not until you give them a reason to believe that you have some expertise in these matters.

Oh, yeah. The other option is to be really fucking good. Preferably at reporting rather than bloviating. And proving it, perhaps on spec. A lot of the big guns at places like the New Yorker - I know this is how Sarah Stillman got in there, for one - didn't sell their piece for free. But they sure as hell wrote it for free, then sent it around.

I'm no Sarah Stillman. Not by the longest of long shots. But I did get a book deal a few years back. I wrote on a topic for which I had some expertise - my beat. And I wrote a 70-page proposal, around 20,000 words, without knowing whether someone would actually bite or not.

 

100%.

I think it's more true now than ever. It's hard to be a generalist, writing about a number of topics, when there are so many experts, qualified to write about their area of expertise, who can now find an audience -- and an audience can find them.

 

I try to make that point to frustrated writers all the time. Find a niche. Develop expertise in a narrow area.

 

One thing that I think has been tough to come to terms with is that sports writing, just to keep it in everyone's wheel house, has been de-valued by the fragmentation of fandom in the information age. It's not different than, say, popular music. Miley Cyrus is perhaps the most popular act in the world right now. On her very best day, Miley Cyruswill sell a fraction of the number of albums that Fleetwood Mac sold. The Black Keys, god love them, will sell a fraction of the number of albums that Boston sold.

There are no longer just sports fans. Or even just baseball fans or basketball fans or Patriots fans. There are recruiting fans and advanced stat fans and human interest fans who love to read Chris Ballard and roster junkies who don't care what Bison Dele is up to these days - someone please just explain to me the Bobcats' options under the cap, moving forward. Frequently, these interests and readers overlap. But time is a scarce resource, and Tony's locker room report, though still valuable, as not as valuable as it once was. With Rivals in the picture, there recruiting portion of my coverage wasn't as valuable as it would have been before Rivals.

Fans are savvy. Last night, I had to listen to Reggie Miller, a guy with all the access in the world, tell me things like Matt Barnes is the key to the Clippers' season. Except, of course, Blake Griffin is. And, like Doc Rivers told him, Jamal Crawford is. There are a dozen bloggers who can give me much more cogent analysis just from watching on their couches and paying close attention, game after game. Access has been de-valued. Access has certainly been de-valued when it leads to fluff stenography. But even well-utilized access has been de-valued, for the most part. Because there is just too much out there now, too much fragmentation in the market for sports information. It makes sense that this de-valuation would inevitably hit us in the wallet.

 

The "access market" in entertainment, sports included, is being taken over by the entertainers themselves.

 

That's another thing that devalues our work: Twitter. Why does a fan want to read what Derrick Rose told YOU when the fan can get on Twitter, hear it from Rose himself - banal as that shit often is - and at the same time enter the Derrick-Rose-may-acknowledge-me lottery?

 

I think the point the original writer was trying to make was he had done the work. That he had found a niche and developed expertise and people were still asking him to write for free.

Some of the people asking were people who could afford to pay but they just didn't want to. Not paying is better for their bottom line.

Those struggling magazines, who say they can't pay, want to latch on to the halo of your brand, so to speak, and make their publication more credible. I think that's what causes the frustration for writers.

I mean, I assign freelance work for my job. I don't ask people to write for free, but I pay my market's going rate, which is on the low end but that's besides the point.

 

100% agreed.

Then he needs to learn how to say no. In a way that doesn't frustrate him so much that he feels compelled to write a whiny guest column for the NYT.

He is — we are — surrounded by tens of thousands of writers who are saying yes every day to those struggling (or "struggling") outlets. They're working for free — and hey, I've done it too — but it devalues the market so much that few outlets feel the need to pay.

Until that changes ...