BY: Stephen Morrill

(with apologies to Bob Dylan. But the lyrics to his song seem to describe today's world still)

A friend wrote elsewhere a few days ago, complaining about mistreatment by a magazine to which she had sent an article. She's a longtime professional writer. She had written the article on assignment (indeed, the idea was actually the editor's, who had called the writer to ask her to write up the idea) and turned in just what the editor had asked for, and on time.

The editor dumped the article because she (the editor) had simply changed her mind about what she wanted to print in that issue. My friend got a "kill fee" of about ten percent.

This is not unusual in the magazine biz. Writers, especially non-full-time-professionals, can make a lot of mistakes in writing magazine articles and in conducting the business of writing for nonfiction outlets. I even teach a course in the nonfiction writing business just to help people avoid all the usual land mines. But my friend had done nothing wrong. And there was no excuse for the editor's behavior other than that she could get away with it.

Maybe not for much longer.

I suspect that in twenty or thirty years any remaining journalists - all three of them - will look back at the second half of the 20th century as the end of the golden age of magazines and books. Time was when one could earn a decent living (I did) writing. Magazines needed our work and felt that good writing would attract readers and readers would attract advertisers. The system worked. For a while.

But it worked, in large part, because writing was hard. It was not easy to do proper research. It took long training to learn to write well. Just the typing and mailing and schmoozing and marketing and all those peripheral things was physically difficult and time-consuming. Phone calls were expensive. Communication required effort.

-more-

Stephen Morrill, when not freelancing magazine articles and running the WritersCollege.com school, teaches five courses for WritersCollege.com:

Nonfiction Freelance Writing Business

Magazine Articles

Magazine Query Letters

Research and Interviewing

Photography for Writers

Essay: Continued

Then along came the computer and all its little friends. We writers hailed the computer because it made "word processing" so easy. (When I started out nobody "processed" words. They did what was called "writing" - on a device called a "typewriter".) I'm not some Luddite who wishes the computer had never been invented, mind you, but it effectively drove a stake through the heart of the professional writing business. It made all those peripheral things that used to discourage the not-very-serious from taking up writing, disappear.

Today anyone can write something and send it to a magazine and (if they do it badly) very little effort is involved. Many do so. Magazine publishers, who used to like to choose among serious writers capable of navigating the hurdles, may now print junk from eager amateurs who don't even expect pay - or photographs from "citizen journalists" who have a cell phone and happen to be standing by the collapsed bridge.

Even the publishers are staring into the abyss. Nobody much wants to buy their printed magazines. Circulations fall. Ad revenue flees. They use free writing even though some few remaining good editors know it's crap, because it's free and they need to reduce costs. More readers, unimpressed by the writing, drop subscriptions. It's a vicious circle.

So magazine publishers go to the Web, like so many boaters whose ship has sunk, they cling to the channel buoy and pray for salvation. It's not coming. The notion of an online version of a printed magazine that is rapidly failing is silly on its face. (I know this from personal experience, having edited both the print and web versions of a business magazine that fell flat after a few years. Indeed, now that I think about it, every magazine I have edited (five) and most of the magazines (dozens) for which I wrote articles (hundreds) have all gone broke. I may just be the Typhoid Mary of the publishing world.)

A few national writing organizations are out there fighting the good fight on behalf of writers of all levels, everywhere. The Writers Guild and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) are among the leaders. They fought the New York Times to a standstill over oppressive freelancer contracts. They're currently fighting Google (can you imagine a bigger Goliath than Google?) over issues revolving around "orphaned" books.

These guys do good work, on behalf of you, and you probably never heard of either organization. I happen to belong to ASJA, in fact I'm their web editor. You can see that at:
http://www.asja.org
That's the old web site. We're working up a spiffy new one that will go online in a few months. If you're interested in joining ASJA there is a web page for that at:
http://www.asja.org/join
Tell them I sent you. I think there's some sort of credit I get for that.

ASJA started as a society of magazine writers. It has evolved over time and continues to do so. And in this day of rapid advances in technology and changing markets (and dying markets) we need to dance even faster, just to keep up. When I went to college and majored in ancient and medieval history (with that degree and a driver's license, you can get a job as a taxi driver) I used to feel sorry for engineering students. "Those guys are going to need to study all the rest of their lives, just to keep up," I told myself. "But what I learned today about Hammurabi and Babylon is going to remain the same forever. The data is carved on rocks, for God's sake."

Boy, was I ever wrong. One writer once commented that being a writer is, "like having homework every night for the rest of your life." He's not wrong, but the writing part, at least, is fun homework. But, today, we writers spend a third of our time writing, a third trying to find anyone to pay for our writing, and a third trying to read the incomprehensible instructions for how to use all the expensive equipment and computer programs we have to buy and learn to use just to stay current.

Publishers of all stripes - magazine, book, and newspaper - have it even tougher. They're in the buggy-whip business and the world no longer needs buggy whips. Books are becoming Nooks and this year, for the first time, eBook sales outpaced printed book sales at some publishing houses. in fact, Penguin, an olde-tyme book publisher from days of yore, announced last week they were going to go into the self-publishing business. Send them $99 and they'll print your book. Book publishers used to regard one another as the only competition. Today it's the guy running the Insta-Print shop on the corne, and that's only if you actually want a printed copy. And why would you?

Newspapers are shrinking, shrinking in size, in number of pages, in advertising, and in news staffs. Weeklies still do fine because they don't spend money on news, and run local shopping ads. But large dailies are all dying, some faster than others. A fellow ASJA member said the newspapers reminded her of the dinosaurs in the LaBrea Tar Pits (in Los Angeles): "They more they struggle, the deeper they sink."

We're in the middle of the biggest shift in journalism since Gutenberg invented the printing press. That's no exaggeration. We all need to sit back and reassess, not what sort of writing we wish to do, but how we plan to do it. New technologies are with us, like it or not. And those who grab hold of the tail of the tiger aren't going to get eaten.

And I think I have mangled enough metaphors for now. Where's that incomprehensible instruction manual?

-end-