Is the gig economy coming for journalism?
The “contributor model” may be the future of digital media. But it’ll come at a price.
In January 2018, the managers of the beleaguered Los Angeles Times had a problem. Earlier that month, the newspaper’s staff overwhelming voted to unionize after months of conflict with upper management and the paper’s Chicago-based corporate owner, Tronc. The Times, the fifth-largest newspaper in the country by circulation, remained profitable, but print advertising revenue at Tronc papers nationwide fell almost 17 percent over the previous year, and digital ad revenue was down almost 6 percent.
Among the issues raised by L.A. Times Guild, which included years of layoffs and multiple sexual harassment lawsuits involving the Times’ Tronc-appointed publisher, was a vague digital publishing strategy meant to push the Times into a future. That was the official line from Lewis D’Vorkin, the editor in chief of the Times. In reality, the strategy looked more like a plan to turn the storied newspaper into a digital content farm based on a network of “contributors” who would work for little or no pay.
D’Vorkin’s plan would never come to fruition in Los Angeles. Later that summer, billionaire philanthropist Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Times from Tronc and promised to rebuild the paper to compete with The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the contributor model — a sort of gig economy for the digital media world — is already a growing trend among outlets looking for content on the cheap. It could be coming for more publications as their ad revenue shrinks.
There are slight variations on the contributor model, but generally, here’s how it works: Publications pick contributors — often CEOs, influencers or thought leaders — to write and post articles for a publication such as CNBC or Forbes. Often the posts don’t go through the same editorial scrutiny as posts written by the publications’ journalists, which may go through fact checks and edits for grammar and style. Some contributors don’t get paid, but enjoy the publicity that comes with the title of being a “contributor” to a trusted publication. Contributors for other websites are paid by the post or by the amount of clicks they drive to the website, just as Uber drivers are paid per ride. And, like Uber drivers, contributors rarely make a living off the income from their posts, which can be as low as $10 per thousand page views.
It’s not new for publications to pay writers per article. Freelance journalism has been around for decades. Even Mark Twain was a freelance journalist. Writers can and continue to make careers out of freelancing, which for certain publications can be upwards of $1 per word.
Most publications rely on an in-house staff of journalists to write content for their publications. Newspapers with this sort of business model in America gained prominence in the 1700s, where they were used to advocate for a certain political party or policy issue. Classic journalism as most knows it — neutral documentation of events as they unfold — began to emerge during the mid-1800s as the demand grew for coverage of Civil War battles. Journalists received a livable salary for their work, as did the copy editors who fact checked their articles, the typesetters who constructed the physical print paper and the photographers who shot photos. And at the end of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for papers in small or mid-level cities like Buffalo or Richmond to have a staff of salaried journalists that numbered in the dozens or hundreds of people.
What supported all those salaries? Revenue from print advertisements, classifieds and job postings. Even into the 2000s, newspapers had profit margins north of 20 percent. With newspapers printing money for their owners, there was little incentive for newsrooms to innovate or shift to a digital-first focus. What worked in the past continued to work into the 2000s. In terms of the Kondratiev wave, the theory that the economy rises and falls in waves, journalism was just over the top of the K-wave.
It was about to come to come crashing to the bottom.
Newspapers have always been beholden to advertisers to support their services, not subscribers. As consumers tightened their wallets, advertisers cut advertising spending or slowly began moving to growing social media companies like Facebook. At the same time, consumers began reaching content on new technology — smartphones, which began appearing on the market in 2007. While newspapers scrambled to get online, news aggregators such as the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Yahoo News gobbled up web traffic by repackaging original reporting to create their own posts, which was cheaper than the original reporting done by established newspapers. There was little need for content creators to have much reporting training themselves, and consumers didn’t care.
Today, most newspapers are struggling. Even digital media outlets like Buzzfeed, Vice and Vox, which many believed could represent the future of journalism, are also seeing circulation declines and are trimming their newsrooms.
Technological progress is forcing media companies adapt to survive. Is content creation the next cog in the journalism wheel that will need to change? So far, cutting jobs and forgoing pay raises have been the main ways publications have worked to cut costs on their editorial teams. For better or for worse, the gig economy could provide the groundwork for a cheaper alternative to content creation that struggling digital media companies might be forced to turn to as they try to survive with floundering ad revenue.
The industries turned on their heads by the gig economy do not necessarily bear resemblance to the state of the media industry. The gig economy is perhaps most known for disrupting the taxi industry with companies such as Uber and Lyft. Unlike the digital media industry, the taxi industry was doing fine financially before Uber and Lyft began giving people a cheaper travel option. Likewise, the hotel industry was and continues to remain financially stable despite the rise of Airbnb, which has allowed people to rent out rooms or beds in their apartments and homes for short periods.
Most gig economy companies began specifically to capitalize on temporary gig work, and there are none that I know of that have transformed from having full-time staff to temporary workers. I predict that struggling digital media companies that produce easily replicable content like aggregated stories, sports coverages and financial advice will be the first to shift completely to gig-based or user-generated content. Publications that have successfully navigated the digital transition and can continue to finance professional journalism through paid subscriptions, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, will continue to maintain large staffs of full-time journalists to produce stories. The relationship between gig-based sites and professional outlets will be similar to the relationship between Airbnbs and hotels. Gig-based media outlets will not displace subscription-based outlets, but people who want high-quality, trustworthy journalism will have to continue to pay for it.
Forbes’ digital transformation, which was led by Lewis D’Vorkin before he arrived at the Los Angeles Times, is a good example of a publication turning to a pay-per-article contributor model similar to gig work. Forbes has an army of about 1,500 contributors, some of whom get paid a minimum of $250 a month to post about once per week. The contributor can also make additional cash based on the web traffic to the post. The contributors themselves are not necessarily journalists, but can be CEOs and other business experts. Their posts are rarely vetted by editors before they go live on Forbes.com, and it’s only when an article has major factual inaccuracies that a Forbes editors might go in and make changes. Forbes continues to employ full-time journalists whose stories are reported and edited, but most people interacting with the Forbes website would not be able to tell the difference between a story written by a Forbes journalist and a Forbes contributor. The contributor model has worked out well for Forbes, which says it has shattered audience records on its editorial platforms.
Why would anyone write content for as little as $250 a month, or in some cases, for free? Because brand names like Forbes, BuzzFeed and CNBC carry a lot of weight. CEOs, marketing gurus and tech analysts would kill to have a title like “Forbes contributor” on their resumes, even if it means working for little pay. A similar concept worked for the sports website SB Nation, which primarily recruits college students to run its sports blogs for as little as $3 per post. What do they get for the free labor? A cool title.
Like Forbes, digital media companies may slowly adopt this trend by introducing contributor verticals on their websites, similar to D’Vorkin’s original plan for the Los Angeles Times’ digital overhaul before it was shelved. Just as Forbes posts content created by its journalists side by side with content created by its contributors, I would expect to see digital media companies slowly integrate contributor content without completely eliminating their editorial staff. The content best suited for this type of shift would be stories that are easily replicable, like sports coverages. Publications I would predict to adopt this type of model would be: Sports Illustrated, which could outsource its sports coverage to contributors a la SB Nation; The Daily Beast, which could outsource its aggregated news stories to contributors; and the Hollywood Reporter, which could outsource movie reviews and recaps to contributing bloggers. If it were to happen, it would be a slow transition, and audiences probably would not notice that in-house staffers were being replaced by a network of contributors unless the publication voluntarily acknowledged the transition.
The contributor model’s major problem is that it turns publications that are trusted news sources into a sort of glorified Facebook feed, where people can post whatever they want, whether it’s accurate or not. Aside from media watchdogs and journalism insiders, few people would have any idea that the publications were turning into cheap content farms. Forbes, for example, remains an esteemed media brand by most despite being deemed a “journalistic laughingstock” and “sharecropper journalism” by media insiders. The danger in this, of course, is that normal people won’t be able to tell the difference between a contributor story — which could be pushed by a PR agency and may or may not be accurate — and a story ethically constructed by journalists and editors. If misinformation published on Facebook by your aunt or high school friend is causing problems for democracy, the issue will be amplified if misinformation is published by trusted media brands.
The contributor model is cheap, but brand dilution is a blocking force that would prevent the model from taking over all of journalism. Brands like The New York Times and The Washington Post have pitched themselves to subscribers as trustworthy sources of information worthy of the subscription price. It has worked for both of those newspapers, which have remained profitable by growing their digital subscriptions despite instability in the print and digital media industries. In a scenario where The Washington Post began integrating contributor content with its journalism, I would imagine subscribers would flock to another publication where they can trust that all content they read is fully vetted and reported.
Journalism is better when it is done reported ethically, written thoughtful and published accurately. The great problem for publishers, however, is that good journalism is expensive. A contributor model saves publishers money, but the savings come at the expense of the brand name and, potentially, public trust. Is it better to have a low-quality publication that can survive than no publication at all? That is the question that digital media owners will have to answer moving forward into an increasingly unstable future for journalism.
