Summary
Hardly a day passes without finding a pitch from some wannabe freeloader in my e-mail. "Our magazine doesn't have a budget for content, but we'd love to use your cartoon about... " "We can't offer a salary per se, but you would get amazing exposure to thousands of discrete users if ... " Content is still king. Online leeches just don't want to pay the kingmakers.
"Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types ... who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden," computer scientist Jaron Lanier wrote recently in the New York Times: "Stop whining and join the party!" Like other old media types, I'm working overtime to try to smash these economic lemons into sweet, lucrative lemonade. In the meantime, I called the bank that holds my mortgage. "I don't have a budget to pay you per se," I cooed. "But think of the awesome prestige your corporation receives just by being associated with a cartoonist and columnist whose work is literally read by millions of-" Click. Citibank (Bangalore), Ltd., signing out.So I'm cranky. I've already been through this give-it-away-for-the-exposure crap before. It wasn't any more fun in the 1980s than it is now. In my 20s, when I was starting on my quest to become a fulltime dispenser of drawings mocking the president, I let shoestring operations like Poetry Halifax North, a tiny review in Nova Scotia, and Against The Current, a socialist magazine out of Detroit, print my cartoons for free. They didn't offer much exposure, but I needed the tearsheets. Not getting paid sucked, but giving away my "content" was understandable-my "clients" were broke.See the full content of this document
Extract
Future Imperfect, Part 1
NEW YORK-August J. Pollak was thrilled when the Huffington Post asked him to blog for them. Joining the widely read liberal Web site was a great break, thought the astute political cartoonist/blogger whose work appears at the perfectly named "Some Guy with a Web site." Then they told him about his salary: zero.
"I love the Huffington Post, and I love the exposure I get from them," Pollak ...See the full content of this document
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