TJ DeGroat
Not too long ago, he was a full-time freelancer writing for national publications. And he still has writing projects on the side, but reporting isn’t his fulltime focus anymore. These days, he engages with online social news communities, representing users’ needs and keeping them excited about sharing and responding to new content.
Engaging with a community is something that news outlets used to do, back when people used news outlets in significant, reliable numbers. But when the Internet came along, communities broke into little pieces and started spending more time online, and the news was too slow to follow. As a result, TJ says, they’re playing catchup. Newspapers are straining to get into the business of social news, “but they just don’t have the numbers and the dedicated following to create hundreds and hundreds of comments every day on every single story.”
So is social news responsible for upsetting the apple cart? Do news-aggregators and bloggers steal audience from professional journalists?
TJ pauses for a bit when I ask him this. “I don’t think so,” he finally answers, choosing his words carefully. “Without the newspaper industry there would be no [social news]. Without that content off the site, there would be no content on the site. Without newspapers there would be no blogs that discuss what is happening in the news.”
So the Internet needs paid content-creators — after all, even if everyone’s a pirate, someone has to be “Author Zero,” the person who creates the content to be stolen.
But are social news sites and journalists in a parasitic relationship? TJ hopes not.
“Any site that has a a business development team is going to be targeting those big names” — big names like the NY Times or Wall Street Journal — “they all have integrations and share widgets. … Huffington Post is a good example,” since it’s plastered with sharing buttons on just about every surface.
“Those big names … probably have an easier time in some respects since they have people they can talk to to develop partnerships with, whereas a smaller little blog isn’t going to have the same access.”
That’s an interesting point: in some respects, social news stands as an obstacle to small blogs and independent writers.
But in other respects, it’s a boon. “I don’t know how it was in the 70s or 80s,” says TJ, but a lot of the stuff that hurts us also helps us. The Internet is great because it creates sites like MediaBistro. … So I guess you gotta take the good with the bad.”
Networking opportuntities aren’t the only advantage afforded by new media: there are also new ways to market and self-promote. “Any activity on a social network will improve your online footprint. … The more real estate you have online, the better your Google Rank is, that all helps. … If you’re trying to market yourself as somebody with a lot of experience in XYZ and you’re not showing up on Google or on social networking sites with stuff to back that up, nobody’s going to respond to that.”
So of course, it all comes back to a marketing strategy. TJ takes a sort of scorched-Earth approach, rather than being choosy: “Just put your shit everywhere. Why not? … It’s not really extra work … especially if tweeting a link to my latest blog entry automatically goes to my Facebook and goes to certain other sites.”
At the end of the day, he says, “you’re spending less time being creative and more time doing busywork — whether that’s marketing at the beginning of the process or SEO and pleading for readers at the end of the process.” That certainly backs up what Ted Weinstein had to say about splitting your time 50/50 between being a writer and being a businessperson.
The businessman angle is hard for writers to grasp — largely because they don’t want to grasp it. Hence the allure of sites like Demand, says TJ: “Maybe it’s better for you to just do super easy articles that you can crank out, and maybe you’re writing 10 articles a day but you’re not pitching, you’re not marketing, when you’re done you’re done, you’re not coming up with videos to go along with it. You’re not being challenged creatively, but you know you’re making enough money to live the way you want to live.”
The temptation is strong. Having someone do all the business-work for you is awfully attractive. But is it worthwhile? It depends on what you’re willing to put up with as a writer. When you work for a business like Demand, you’re sacrificing a lot: the freedom to write what you want to write.
“Do you want to be working 10 hours a day to make $30,000 a year and have all of your shit on eHow.com, or do you want to build some clips at some names? … It’s sort of like a ghetto — you get stuck in that blogpost ghetto,” says TJ, “and then you rise above it.”
That’s the plan, at least, for most writers. Invest some time giving your writing away for free, then make the jump over to paid gigs, and all the self-employment busywork that that entails.
That jump sounds vague and impossible, but TJ offers reassurance: “Quality still wins,” he says. “If you’re good, you can still attract more opportunities than the random 22-year-old who is just cranking out $20 blog posts.”
“If you’re good, there’s just no way that it’s not going to happen, right?” he adds. “If you’re good any you know how it works, there’s just no way that it’s not going to happen.“
Related posts:
- How Blogs Forced a Rethinking of the News Industry — and its (temporary) Death
- Why CBS5′s Brittney Gilbert Loves the Newsroom
- Lit Agent Ted Weinstein: Successful Authors do More Than Just Write
- SFist Editor Brock Keeling Can’t Wait for the Future, is Full of Surprises
- NewsTilt: A Brand New Market for Journalism
I'm a writer and photographer in San Francisco, curious about how people can get away with writing all day while also being able to afford to buy groceries. 