Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum: three cheers for Crikey

Dear Crikey,

First, I’m sorry for all this fuss. I wasn’t talking about a revolution; I just wanted to get paid, and you picked the wrong guy at the wrong time to ask for a charity donation. I’ve had one foot in and the other foot out of journalism all year, partially as a result of the prevalence of this kind of malarkey. People who don’t feel they’ve got a lot to lose are dangerous. And what am I losing? The opportunity to write for you for nix? Woe!

I couldn’t have anticipated, though, that my screed on The Daily Review asking me to write for free would attract such attention. All it took was an entry on a blog that hadn’t seen much action lately, a reprint on mUmBRELLA and a mere 380 Twitter followers. It hasn’t resulted in any more food on the table, or enabled me to quit my night job, but it did start a conversation about for-profit media organisations exploiting writers – especially arts writers – desperate to get their names out there any way they can.

That’s a conversation writers and editors have needed to have for a bloody long time, so props to you for eventually responding to the fracas in your editorial on Friday. It’s good to hear you “highly value all [your] writers’ work”, that you’re “talking to people about the conditions under which they contribute” and especially your admission that you would, in fact, be nothing without them.

But there’s no need to apologise for not being open and honest enough about payment and copy-sharing – at least, not to me. Ray Gill could hardly have been more up-front about the payment on offer (zero) for the privilege of writing for The Daily Review. I know your CEO doesn’t actually believe I had this conversation, but the emails say I tried my best to negotiate with him. Sadly for me, no matter what tack I tried, the answer remained the same.

With that in mind, I admit to being flummoxed by the following statement: “Daily Review has a limited contributors’ budget at the moment, and that’s directed towards pieces we think are core to the site’s mission. We prioritise payment for commissioning stories from professional writers.” Does this mean the budget has suddenly gone from zero to “limited”? Or is music coverage not part of the mission of a new digital arts weekly? That’s an odd strategy.

And I’m frankly a bit miffed to hear you say that you “prioritise payments for professional writers”. I’d really like to know how you define professional, because after 20 years in the business, during which time I’ve produced an award-shortlisted book and written for most of our major mastheads, I’m not sure what that makes me in your eyes.

You give three cheers to your “talented” and “generous” and “phenomenally dedicated” bloggers. For those who have been writing for you for years, unpaid, and who now find themselves seemingly entirely unrewarded by this new venture, those three cheers might translate more ruefully: yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. The invocation of piracy is deliberate.

The especially galling thing is your surely indefensible admission, in your response to my original blog on mUmBRELLA, that you are indeed trying to grow your enterprise on the back of free labour, taking on no financial risk yourself, secure in the knowledge that there are reserves of talented, generous and phenomenally dedicated writers out there for you to call on, all the while crowing: “We reckon this is fertile advertising ground.”

How fertile, exactly? Because it seems pretty obvious that Crikey writers (without whom, remember, you’d be nothing) are entitled to a more equitable share of the revenues they generate – via advertising, subscriptions and merchandise – that contribute to Private Media’s bottom line.

Crikey’s advertising portal appears to be down at the moment, so unfortunately we don’t have any immediate way of knowing. But Googling “Crikey advertising rates” produced this cute little First Dog-illustrated rate card from 2009 which, despite being four years old, at least gives us some clues about what kind of readers you attract – and what sort of cashola (as opposed to exposure), it takes to reach them.

First, we know your readership boasts a high proportion of those elusive As and Bs that advertisers adore. As of 2009, 18 percent were CEOs, CFOs, senior executives or owner/proprietor types. You also seem to appeal to a high number of retirees, general, departmental or divisional managers, and media professionals (sorta sad to realise I’m not one of them). Forty-one percent had postgraduate tertiary qualifications.

Not surprisingly, the card goes on to tell prospective advertisers that they have the opportunity to “market to an audience with real wealth”: 55 percent of survey respondents reported an income above $80,000 per annum, with 39 percent exceeding $100,000. Sixty percent owned shares in a publicly listed company, with 38 percent of those holding portfolios worth a whopping $100,000 or more.

Your website scored 1.5 million hits a month from 175,000 unique browsers, including a subscriber base of 15,000, 95 percent of whom read the daily email circular either every day or most days. Again, I have to acknowledge this information is four years old. But given you brag of hiring journalists while the rest of the industry is laying them off, I’m guessing things at least aren’t going too terribly for you.

Finally, there are the ads themselves. The weekly rate for a 300 x 250 pixel ad was $4900. A 160 x 90 ad, $1900. And the best bit; a 100 word advertorial was $900, when 900 words would be lucky to net a contributor much more than $100 now. It reminds me of the cynical journalistic aphorism about the words existing to fit around the ads, rather than the other way around.

So, let’s call a spade a shovel here. You guys sat around in a room and cooked up the idea for a fancy new way to sell advertising, without budgeting for the contributors who would provide the bulk of the content, because you assumed that there would be no shortage of desperadoes and fools all too willing to provide it for nothing.

Finally, it seems to me that a big part of the backlash you’ve suffered this week comes from those who thought better of you. Crikey derives a fair bit of its reputation from its iconoclasm, its scepticism, and for not running with the mainstream media herd. But, as a friend of mine put it to me last week, you can’t be the edgy new guy on the block and expect to remain above the fray when you pull this sort of shit.

I’m as disappointed as anybody.

Andrew