Pay The Writer?
Here’s a delightful rant from Harlan Ellison:
Interesting…
The undercutting of the professional by the amateur is a fascinating area and one that I, as a blogger, am fully involved in.
I think in Harlan’s case is a very different situation: he isn’t just a professional; he is a fucking good and well paid professional. He really doesn’t need someone to throw him a little PR bone in return for working for free, so he is within his rights to turn them down and rant at the indignity of it all.
But we now have a bunch of awesome amateurs who will give the professionals a run for their money. For example, I would hold The Sartorialist above any copy of GQ or Esquire (I think the guy behind it has a book out, so he is now a professional, but that’s not how he made his reputation), I consider the Arsenal coverage of Arseblog, 7amkickoff and the Goonerholic to be far better than anything I can get in the papers and there are many advertising bloggers who make the canine semen-level coverage of Campaign look like the milquetoast bullshit it truly is.
Those are cases where the impassioned, intelligent amateur outpaces the fattened, hammock-dwelling professional (I exaggerate to make a point), the flipside of Harlan’s argument, demonstrating that just because you do something for money doesn’t mean you’re the best at it, or even any good. It just means someone pays you for it. And there’s a big difference.
We could now discuss crowdsourced ads and how they stand up against the stuff that real advertising agencies produce, but that’s a complicated area where the PR halo of asking ten-year-old kids to do the job of overpaid Madison Avenue wankers is a big part of the argument. Are they better? Well, the job isn’t just coming up with ads; it’s doing it to order, hitting deadlines and suppressing yawns in client meetings, to name just three things that people don’t always discuss when they describe what we do.
Can a ten-year-old kid do the other stuff? Maybe, but it’d be pretty boring to find out, and what does that say about us?
i agree with what he’s saying.
ps. (that’ll be £10, Ben)
The job description of a creative these days, of course should include your suggestions, but also these ones:-
a) Being capable of appearing to give a shit.
b) Delivering ideas by the pound.
c) Mastering the talking of social media bullshit (which simply translates as being able to say ‘meme’ and ‘share.’
d) being able to keep a straight face in the presence of thickos.
e) The ability to abandon principles and self respect at the drop of a hat.
Harlan’s one of those guys to whom I’m willing to give a free pass. Let him rant. Creative people rant better than anyone else, so it’s usually worth a listen whether you agree or not.
It struck me the other day while noticing the ‘Les Miserables’ logo at the BAFTAs that many people in tangential industries (film/music mainly) get continuing royalties from their output after they’ve finished and signed-off their work, but being a lowly designer there is no comparable mechanism for our efforts.
The only relevant example to design that I can think of is when Nike caught up with their original logo designer and gave her shares in the company by way of retroactive payment.
Then I remembered the writers’ strike and realised we have no union or any kind of solidarity as an industry.
I wondered if you had any thoughts?
Maybe some solidarity would be good.
I can’t see how it would do any harm.
And I’m not sure why it doesn’t happen.
Perhaps you’d like to start a union, and if not, you might understand why no one else has.
what a great rant. he’s dead right. “it’ll be good publicity!” = you’re not getting paid shit.
Hate to say it, but I think Harlan is wrong on this point.
Or rather, he’s right to be cross when writers are asked (and agree) to write things for free.
But this wasn’t a writing gig, this was an interview, and no one gets paid for interviews, do they? Like, when Tom Cruise gets paid a fee for acting in a film, it’s understood that doing lots of interviews afterwards to promote it (including for the DVD) are just part of that fee.
But anyway, his general point is still right.