The Decline of Poker Writing
Change100 and PokerNews "parted ways" this week. As Change100 noted in a blog post about the separation, "PokerNews let me go for reasons that had a lot more to do with dollars and cents than anything else... in the New World Order of cost-cutting and downsizing, it is now more valuable for outlets to hire younger, more inexperienced people to write for them rather than paying more money to a veteran who knows what his or her talent is worth."
There is so much sad truth in this. It's been the elephant in the room for about a year and a half now. There are only a very few gigs in poker that don't actively favor cost over quality in 2010, not nearly enough for the number of talented writers that have gravitated towards the industry in the last five years. Thus those writers who don't land a plum gig are forced to choose between undercutting themselves or looking for a new industry in which to write.
This problem, this new formula of "cost > quality", isn't unique to poker. As Katkin pointed out to me yesterday, it's part of a larger trend across almost all writing disciplines, especially media (I know that poker media isn't really "media". Just work with me here.) and probably across many creative disciplines. Ask musicians and photographers what's happened to their rates in the last few years.
You might think that poker should be immune to that trend but "shit rolls downhill" and individual content creators are definitely at the base of the hill. When the online poker sites grew sufficiently large playerbases, they didn't need to spend as much to acquire new players. They started to squeeze the affiliates. The affiliates, accustomed to the huge profit margins of the boom years, saw their net revenue declining and were alarmed. They started looking more closely at their costs and trying to determine which costs were the most revenue-maximizing so that they could continue to enjoy the same absolute level of profits that they did four years ago. At the same time, there was an influx of inexperienced writers who really wanted to be around poker.
The law of supply and demand collided in a predictable way. Because most forms of written content don't produce as many views as most poker video content, sites looked to cut their writing costs first and foremost. With a supply of cheap labor readily available and profit margins declining, the prices media sites were willing to pay for writers began to drop.
The video / writing dichotomoy is also part of the problem. In the 21st century, more people prefer to receive their information passively (watching it) than actively (reading it). Even the most magnificently written piece of poker writing is rarely going to get as many hits as run-of-the-mill video content. Unfortunately for writers, poker media organizations seem to value the two costs equally, under a rubric we can call, "cost of acquiring content".
All of these factors formed a gigantic hammer which started smashing down the rates talented poker writers could command. If you weren't working for an online poker site, which views the costs of talented writers as a drop in the "marketing expense" bucket, you were likely to be caught by those hammer blows.
This morning Otis remarked, "If you give your talent away today, don't complain when people expect you to give it away forever." I fully agree with this statement. It is the main reason why I haven't worked for PokerNews -- not written a single word for them on the front page or in live reporting -- since the morning that the WSOP Main Event went on hiatus almost three months ago.
But I also understand the business rationale behind the drop in rates. I may not like it but I understand it. Businesses don't exist to provide individuals with a livelihood. They exist to make money, usually as much money as those businesses can.
As the poker industry has evolved, businesses associated with it have had to evolve also. You'd hope that poker businesses would treat their people well but you'd also expect businesses to act like businesses. They're going to make decisions that make the most sense for their bottom line and if they have to "crack a few eggs" along the way you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll crack those eggs.
Speaking from personal experience, there are some legitimate questions you probably could ask about the way PokerNews handled the whole situation with Change100. But those questions aren't germane to the larger issue of cost being favored over quality in poker writing. Unfortunately for those of us who have made a living in this industry for years, that's a trend not likely to change in the foreseeable future.