Hollywood’s impact on magazine journalism
In 2020, Netflix is projected to spend $17 billion on content. Disney will spend $24 billion and AT&T will shell out over $14 billion.
With all that money on the line, there’s an enormous amount of demand for new intellectual property that can be adapted into movies and TV shows, and a lot of that IP is being drawn directly from magazines. The Oscar-winning film Argo, for instance, is based on a 2007 Wired article, and the critically-acclaimed Netflix miniseries Unbelievable was sourced from a longform Propublica article published in 2015.
This rising demand means that Hollywood is throwing larger and larger sums of money at journalists just to option their articles for potential adaptation. All that money has had a distorting effect on the entire magazine industry, with writers increasingly pitching more narrative articles in the hopes of luring a Hollywood agent.
At least that’s according to journalist James Pogue, who recently wrote a piece for the Baffler about what he sees as the negative impact of the streaming wars on magazine journalism. I recently interviewed Pogue about this phenomenon and why he thinks it’s changing longform reporting for the worse.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player, or you can play the YouTube video below. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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The transcript has been edited for clarity
Why Hollywood is so in love with magazine journalism right now
Pogue’s Baffler piece posits that competition among streaming services for IP is creating bidding wars for magazine stories. I asked him why Hollywood is so hungry for this type of storytelling.
Well, the biggest reason is the entry of streaming services in the marketplace. A more philosophical way of looking at that is that there’s a bigger shift in terms of what Americans will do with their time and attention. Fundamentally speaking, Americans will spend huge portions of their time and attention staring at a laptop in bed. They will watch tons and tons of television and it turns out that that television doesn’t need to be that good because it’s easy to watch. It’s easy to consume, it’s easy to deliver, and it’s easy to sort of pick out who’s going to watch what based on an algorithm. And so in the last few years with the entry of Amazon and Netflix, you have seen this massive boost in the market for what are called options
People get really confused about what an option is. An option is when somebody says, ‘Hey, I’m going to pay you anywhere from 1,200 bucks to hundreds of thousands of dollars to have an option over a period of time to make something out of your IP, your intellectual property that I’m buying. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m actually making a movie out of it, just that I have the option of doing so. But what’s insane right now is that the option market has heated up so much that, whereas once upon a time, most options for magazine stories would have been five grand or something — it’s nice, but it’s not going to change your life one way or the other — those numbers are inching up to the degree that on the higher end option sales are now approaching what you would get paid to have a movie actually made. Those numbers are starting to converge and that is the best indication of how overheated this market could be.
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Ok, back to our scheduled programming…
How Hollywood agents find magazine stories to option
Pogue explained the farming system that connects the narrative nonfiction world to Hollywood.
There’s a whole sub economy of book scouts in Hollywood that are mostly people who are refugees from either literary publishing or magazines and now primarily use those skills to hunt down books. They go to book fairs and swap drafts with each other and they’re all on G-chat together. So a writer’s agent will tip off the scout and they may even sneak the scout a draft of the article before it appears in the magazine.
How declining pay rates for magazine writers is fueling the problem
One of the themes of Pogue’s Baffler piece is about the economic decline of the magazine industry and how Hollywood options are essentially subsidizing journalism.
I’m getting $2 a word for my articles, which doesn’t sound bad, but if I’m working three, four, or five months on a piece that runs at 5,000 words, I come away with anywhere between $7,000 to $12,000. You can maybe do three, four of those a year. The most I could possibly really make is like $45,000. The magazine is making a choice. They are saying that this product that they put out is not worth the money that it would take to provide a sustainable income.
Is it bad for writers?
You might be wondering why Hollywood’s embrace of magazine journalism is necessarily a bad thing. Isn’t it a good thing that writers are getting paid lots of money and getting their work exposed to a wider audience?
I think it really does impact people’s careers. It makes people do worse work. It makes people feel bad about themselves. It affects your mental health. I think it’s really important for writers to feel like they’re actually doing meaningful stuff.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
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