Continuing our discussion on crowdfunding for writers, here are some thoughts by Matthew Clayfield.
A couple of years ago, I was heavily reprimanded by the managing editor of The Australian for using Twitter to comment on the stories I was covering. We had a fundamental disagreement about the value of the social networking service. I genuinely thought that my tweets from press conferences and disaster zones were supplementing the experience of reading the newspaper in print, and she genuinely thought they were giving readers an excuse to avoid doing exactly that. Among other things, she said, I was acting selfishly, putting my own interests before that of the masthead, and that in acting selfishly I was also acting against my own best interests.
“Do you really think that ‘Matthew Franklin’ means as much to readers as ‘Matthew Franklin of The Australian‘?” she asked.
Her use of Matthew Franklin’s name seemed strange, given that the paper’s chief political correspondent was not the one being reprimanded, though the fact that she didn’t quite know who she was talking to didn’t necessarily render her question invalid.
I don’t think she would have liked my answer, though, had she given me time to give it.
I think any journalist who puts his masthead’s brand before his own is a company man on a hiding to nothing. Any journalist who is not actively cultivating his own brand—and that is what the warning in the managing editor’s office was really against—is playing chamber music on the deck of the Titanic. With the state of newspapers as it currently is, any violinist that’s worth his salt is making plans to drop a solo album.
In a recent Crikey series on quality journalism, interviewees were asked where they go for their daily news fix. It was striking how many of the interviewees, instead of naming specific newspapers or broadcasts, mentioned individual journalists. One of these interviewees, Leigh Sales, mentioned her ABC colleague Mark Colvin. She didn’t mention him for PM, his daily radio program, however, but rather for his Twitter feed.
This didn’t come as a surprise to me. Sales and Colvin are among the group of well-established career journalists who have seen their personal brands overtake those of the organisations they work for since Twitter found its way into Australian newsrooms in early 2009, where it took off at around the time of the Black Saturday bushfires. The Australian‘s Caroline Overington, who started tweeting as a part of her coverage of those fires, is another example.
Did my managing editor really think that “Caroline Overington of The Australian” or “Leigh Sales of the ABC” meant as much as “@overingtonc” or “@leighsales“? Did she know Colvin’s Twitter feed, @colvinius, has over seventeen thousand followers, nearly half The Australian‘s daily circulation?
The idea that these journalists are liked and trusted because of the legitimacy imbued on them by their organisations is, I think, a flawed one. That may be true within the industry itself, or at least the cliquish triangle constituted by Sydney, Melbourne and the Canberra Press Gallery. But I would argue that all these organisations really give such journalists is exposure. Which is great, of course, but not impossible to generate on one’s own. Readers like and trust these journalists, not because they work for News Ltd. or the ABC, but because of the content they provide, the personality with which they provide it, and the direct, personal connections they make with their readers as they do so. What news organisations fail to realise, as they stumble about putting up paywalls and the like, is that this connection, in particular, is what readers are willing to pay for. Sales’ comment about Colvin was telling. “I probably should pay him for doing so much work for me every day,” she wrote, “by reading the world’s media and tweeting the best of it.”
Because people are willing to pay for the news. They just want to have a greater say over what news they pay for and which reporters they pay to provide it.
How else to explain someone like Michael J. Totten, the freelance foreign correspondent who funds his trips to the Middle East in large part through reader contributions, and who built his brand and following, not by working for an established publication, but rather by starting a blog?
Totten publishes pieces in established publications whenever he can do so, of course. Each one of his trips to the Middle East costs more than he is able to raise through reader donations and subscriptions alone. As if to thank his readers, however, he also publishes long, exclusive dispatches on his blog and takes part in the debates that follow in the comments. Before he goes on a trip he asks his readers what they feel the mainstream media has missed and what sort of things they would like him to look into. When I donated twenty-five dollars to Michael’s recent trip to post-Mubarak Egypt, I didn’t feel that I was paying for him to take a holiday, even if my money would most likely be going towards his airfares and accommodation costs. I felt like I was paying for reportage—not comment and non-analytical analysis, of the kind that so clogs our newspapers and magazines—that would expose me to voices I hadn’t yet heard, go deeper than salaried correspondents had been given time to, and be well-written enough that I wouldn’t have to grate my teeth when I sat down to read the results of my investment. Those results included first-hand interviews with dissidents in Tahrir Square, representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Egyptian public intellectuals. For the price of fifteen copies of The Australian, I got coverage unlikely to ever appear in it.
Totten’s reader-funded correspondence has already resulted in two books. The Road to Fatima Gate, about Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and its aftermath, was released in April this year. In the Wake of the Surge, based on Totten’s experiences as an embedded reporter in Iraq, was published four months later.
It has also resulted in at least one copycat correspondent: me. While I do accept reader donations, however, I have ultimately chosen crowdsourcing as my fundraising method of choice. In 2010, I visited Mexico between the country’s Bicentenary of Independence in September and its Centenary of Revolution in November. Travelling with Canadian photojournalist Austin Andrews, I visited a number of the towns and sites relevant to those two events, including Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of the world and the epicentre of the drug war. We also spent a remarkable week in Arriaga, a couple of hundred kilometres north of the country’s southernmost border, where we befriended a group of illegal Central American migrants who were attempting to hop a freight train north to United States. I also spent ten days in Cuba, where I reported on the country’s proposed economic reforms.
That trip resulted in nearly twenty blog posts, hundreds ofphotographs and tens of thousands of words. It will also hopefully result in a book, Blood Still Drips: A Mexican Journal, which I am currently in the process of writing. It was funded in part by twenty-two contributors, who raised a little over ten per cent of our overall budget, and who did so for the same reason I donated to Michael Totten’s most recent trip to the Middle East. Paying journalists directly allows readers to exert a degree of control, either by telling the journalist what stories to go after, as in Totten’s case, or by voting with their PayPal account for the sort of stories they want to read.
Crowdsourcing through sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter also allows them to feel a sense of ownership. When we were in Mexico, we sent a single postcard to everyone who gave us over ten dollars, multiple postcards to everyone who gave us over fifty, and so on. Where most news organisations tend to look down on their readers, reader-funded journalists are forced afford them the respect they deserve: as key shareholders in the endeavour, the people we have a duty towards and are ultimately answerable to, they remain front and centre throughout the whole process.
It is a process I am currently in the process of going through for a second time. My next foreign correspondence project will see me travel through Russia early next year to cover the country’s presidential election. I will be spending time in Moscow, St Petersburg, Siberia and the Northern Caucasus, with side trips to Belarus and Ukraine, filing dispatches to various publications, uploading photo essays to the foreign affairs website I co-edit, and blogging regularly. Over the next five years, I hope to visit all fifteen of the post-Soviet states, with the intention to write a book about them in time for their twenty-fifth anniversary, and this trip is to be the first of an estimated five. On the back of my work in Mexico, I am hoping that this time I will be able to raise close to twenty-five per cent of my overall budget. You can read more about the project here.
Obviously, I am no Leigh Sales or Mark Colvin, or even much of a Michael J. Totten. But I do believe that reader-funded journalism is a future business model of the form. As I wrote in a recent blog post: “A journalist’s by-line is his brand, and it is increasingly more important to readers than that of the masthead that publishes him.”
Which is why I wasn’t particularly fussed when taken to task for tweeting the news.
