Back in my day...

People always say that kids these days have it so easy. Maybe today's
youth can make an entire meal in six minutes with a microwave or write
a 20-page research paper without leaving their computer chair, but I
think advances like these never come without balancing challenges.
Maybe kids don't have to get up at 4:30 a.m. and walk 20 miles
barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, to get to the library, but we
certainly haven't reached information dissemination nirvana yet.

The advantage of an arduous journey to the local library was and still
is that you're as close to guaranteed as you can usually get of
finding reliable information – and if not 100 percent correct, you get
at least the conventional wisdom that passes as fact. Information in
print has usually withstood the scrutiny of fact checkers, editors,
copy editors, publishers or at least the guy who feeds it through the
copy machine. In any case, there is some accountability there,
whereas the Internet's wealth and speed depends largely on the absence
of accountability.

I think that a writer, particularly a journalist, earns his or her
money by being able to write for publication. I mean, I'm going to
school, emptying my pockets year after year to learn the rules of
journalistic writing so that print publications will put my words on a
page. Much of a journalist's skill is in writing a piece that can
pass through a line of editors without having to be completely
rewritten. So when this gauntlet of critics is absent, what
motivation is there to write factually and coherently? Sure, people
don't want to read false, ungrammatical garbage, but that doesn't mean
that some writers won't try to pass it off as news.

While I don't think that Arianna Huffington should be soaking up the
limelight for other writers' efforts, she doesn't necessarily have to
feel guilty about not paying her contributors. Her content consists
largely of the rejected ideas and material of print writers, so it's
not like she's giving assignments and setting deadlines. In a
follow-up to the Poynter story, Blake Fleetwood wrote, "paying writers
inevitably leads to controlling writers in what they say, and how they
say it." The degree of truth to this is debatable, but it's difficult
to say that it's not at least a little bit true in every case. An
editor's role is to censor (mostly mistakes, but it can and often does
go further), and the only way to be censor-free is to be editor-free.

Most of HuffPo's contributors are real journalists, but the fact that
they don't have to be puts the publication into the same category as
blogs, fansites and other potentially unreliable sources. The problem
here is that you can't really have an outlet for real journalists with
creative freedom without also leaving the door open for frauds. And
nobody wants to pay a fraud, or fork over money for a piece of writing
that may or may not be full of errors.

This takes me back to the give-and-take of the Internet. I think that
in an online world, true creative freedom – content coming unfiltered
from the writer to the screen – will always go unpaid. Otherwise
every hack and 14-year-old wanting a new pair of sneakers will pound
out stories for online publication. It's not fool-proof, but the
current system helps to keep the contributing population limited to
journalists who really care about what they're writing. But even this
writing is going to be subjective and less reliable than what you'd
find in print (as it hasn't passed through the usual channels).

So while contemporary students don't have to trudge through snow and
sleet to make it to the library, we do have to trudge through pages of
blogs and decipher opinion from fact and wonder whether or not a site
has an editor or even multiple contributors. We have information at
our fingertips, but we also have to be expert fact-checkers and
fact-collaborators. We can take nothing at face value. And I think
that this is the way of the Internet – and culture in general. You
pay for objectivity. You pay for hard facts. You pay for reliability
(or you get a library card). And this goes for both readers and
editors.

Information is everywhere. It's today's reader's job to be
discerning. Writers need to be discerning too, though. Asking to be
paid for a piece that must pass no tests for publication is like
asking to be paid overtime without an hourly log. Blogging in general
is an indicator that writers desire an audience more than they desire
money, and until this attitude changes, online publication is going to
be a low to zero paying industry. Huffington just happens to have
tapped that writerly weakness. She may not be a saint, but she's not
doing anything that defies Internet civility rules. She's just
further staking out the roles of readers, writers and editors on the
Web.