Credit Where Credit Is Due
An increasing number of magazines, and media services are robbing their writers of due credit and recognition. Pick your favourite online media service, and chances are, except for the top few writers who are the face of that brand, every other article will conveniently be missing any kind of attributions. The print media are guilty of this at times, but digital media services have turned this into an epidemic. For every popular brand that gives credit to its writers, you can find a dozen who simply put the name of the brand in the byline instead of the writer’s.
The intern culture has taken over, and most of these interns spend hours each day coming up with spontaneous articles on the latest news unfolding on the internet. The nameless, faceless writers who work for these companies not only get paid peanuts, but once they switch jobs, they have next to nothing which they can use to leverage a better job offer. Brand have, of course, countered with a succinct “It is not about individual performers, but about the company as a whole” dialogue that is rephrased and reworded every couple of months by the same interns that these companies refuse to give any credit.
As if this habit that the new age “journalists” have acquired, of picking random tweets and embedding them together to produce a “news” article, was not irritating enough, those who actually write somewhat meaningful content are not even getting due recognition. The problem is systemic and found not just in the startups and the scrawny agencies that put a spin on existing content and pass it off as their own, but in leading and highly reputed organization as well.
Part of the problem perhaps is that while every news and media agency wants to “take advantage of the World Wide Web” and “benefit from improved visibility”, they have still not figured out how to get this visibility and what exactly to do with it once they have it. The same content, which features in the print version of their magazines is also uploaded to their website, and shared by their social media accounts. To make the website somewhat different from the magazine, keywords like “Live” and “Buzz” are appended to certain sections, and the task of creating content that can fill up this space is offloaded to interns.
Itemized lists, and Storified tweets have replaced long form. No one has the time to read a wall of text, let alone write it. Why would anyone bother with regular old paragraphs, when a list of 19 most exciting things to do when you are single followed by funny GIFs is so much simpler to create?
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the list format. It can be used very effectively, for humour, as well as serious pieces, but does the world really need to know 34 reasons Why Rust Cohle is the coolest person ever? But at the end of the day, it’s a job, and the writers will write what they are asked to write about, and they will do so using the style that they are told to follow.
Ghosts; that is what the industry has reduced its newcomers to. Everyone is a ghost writer, and the brand name comes above all. In the spirit of equality and team spirit, these companies take away the due credit of the guy who spent hours on the task. Because, the only name that needs to be popular and given due credit is the name of the brand.
If you were expecting some sort of magical solution that would cure this disease and get the thousands of interns and junior writers all over the world a shot to see their names next to what they had written, you are going to be disappointed. Sadly, I have no resolution to this problem, and suffer from it myself. There are no organized unions for interns, no organization willing to take up their cause. No one in their right mind will speak up against the media in general. Not you, and certainly not me. Because at the end of the day, everyone knows not to mess with the guy who buys ink by the barrels.
Image credit: Rikki Meloche
