My colleague Jim Poniewozik blogs today about the impending Hollywood writers’ strike–and how it relates to the sitch faced by us right-coast writers. Seeing as he’s totally invading my turf and writing more eloquently than I could about labor, damn him, I’ll simply reprint his argument here and agree with it. [Jim, I expect the same courtesy later when I review the new Gossip Girl.] He writes:
As somebody who gets paid to produce content, i.e., write, I can’t pretend to be unbiased. If content is platform-agnostic in this brave new media world, then money should be platform-agnostic too.
Here’s how all this affects me and Jim (bolds mine):
This kind of argument is playing out in many workplaces–mine, for instance. You may notice that you are reading this article not in a print magazine but on an electronic computing box, serviced by an Internet hose. Writers and production staff at Time Inc. are covered by a union, which just finished a drawn-out contract renegotiation. …A big point of contention between the union and management has been the fact the website’s editors and production staffs are not covered by the union–although union-covered magazine staff, like me, do work for the websites as well. The deal the company and union reached: magazine staff (like me) can’t be compelled to work for the websites, and the company will not extend union coverage to the website staff.
Okay. So let me back up here. This is probably inside baseball for many of you, but stick around anyway; web-vs.-mortar issues affect all workers in some way. The Time Inc./union deal came about as a result of a kerfuffle kicked up by a certain memo sent out by my boss, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel. It’s been widely disseminated already in the press, so I’m not spilling company secrets by reprinting some of it here. Here it is on Gawker:
As good as TIME.com is, it still needs to be better. And it still needs more content, much more. …I sent out a memo last week about evaluations. Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com. TIME.com is a daily responsibility; Time magazine is a weekly responsibility. TIME is made up of both.
Pretty explicit, right? If you got that memo in your inbox, you’d think, hot damn, I need to get me some TIME.com writing assignments or my ass is on the block, right? Furthermore, this came not long after a series of brutal layoffs, the latest one in January 2007–layoffs whose central message was that Time Inc. was now focusing on the web, and it would need to cut resources from its traditional print publications in order to do so. The headlines announcing the layoffs in The New York Times were almost identical in both 2006 (“Time Inc. to Cut 100 More Jobs as It Focuses on Web Business“) and 2007 (“Time Inc. Cutting Almost 300 Magazine Jobs to Focus More on Web Sites“).
So. How confused do you think we were when we received another memo from our editorial leaders this year telling us we were not obligated to contribute to the web? Said the e-mail from Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey (reconstructed from WWD, so again, boss, I’m not spilling insider blood here):
As we are all aware, Time Inc.’s Web sites have become a critical part of the company’s plans for the future….Many of our best journalists are writing stories and covering beats for the magazine and the dot-com simultaneously, and, your managing editors and I strongly encourage each of you to consider how you can best contribute to Fortune and Time to ensure their success.
However,
Guild-covered employees of Time Inc. are not required to contribute to the Web sites as part of their jobs; and will not suffer any negative impact as a result of not contributing.
Huh?! On the one hand, we’re told, in so many words, that our futures as content creators depend upon our ability to master the digital realm. On the other, corporate claims our digital future is still made of ether, and therefore our digital contribution can’t be quantified (and compensated).
Here’s a simple start to what’s likely to become a complicated solution. Why not write up new job descriptions for us? When I was hired as a staff writer at this company 10 years ago, the web was not even mentioned. Today, it’s a large part of my job, mainly by dint of my blog. I embrace my web duties; it’s unquestionably more work than just churning out for the magazine, but I recognize my own and my industry’s future lies here, on this blinking, electronic page. Yet I’m still getting mixed messages. One editor told me I shouldn’t “waste” more than 10 minutes a day on the blog. “The magazine comes first,” the editor told me. “It’s what pays you.”
Fine. So quantifying our web contributions remains a management puzzle, perhaps one for those high-priced McKinsey drones to figure out. But legitimize our work online by redefining our jobs. We’re all web writers now.