We should all be so lucky. Right before a media company begins its mass exodus of layoffs, journalists sometimes find themselves in the eye of the storm, reading HR emails announcing buyouts for those willing to voluntarily jump ship early. The buyouts are often a last-ditch effort to stem the hemorrhaging expenses that have mounted in the wake of decreased advertising sales. Though it’s apparent that these buyouts are a foreshadowing of much less lucrative layoffs, many look at their future job prospects and cling to the sinking ship, unwilling to jump off early for fear of drowning.
But even those who take these buyouts – which are sometimes between three to six months worth of current salary – often view those months as the cushion time to update their resumes and begin reaching out to their contacts at other news organizations. Never mind that many of these news organizations are on the verge of announcing their own cost cutting measures - first by decreasing their freelance budgets and then later taking a scythe to the news staff.
Though the proportions vary, most news executives will admit that the cost of running the editorial content in a newspaper or magazine makes up only a small percentage of the expenses needed to run the entire news organization (I’ve seen claims of anywhere between 10% and 25%). It is an industry besieged by middlemen, and as each reader flows away from print and toward the shaky and less-stable advertising land of the internet, those middle men are quickly being revealed to have no clothes.
In November of last year, Anil Dash, vice president of blogging company Six Apart, announced a “TypePad Journalist Bailout Program.” The idea behind the program is to aid recently laid-off journalists by setting them up with their own blog and enrolling them in Six Apart’s newly-launched advertising network; in essence the journalists would be able to continue their reporting while TypePad would handle the back-end promotion and revenue-gathering.
I interviewed Dash for a PBS article, and when I mentioned the pessimistic online ad sales predictions voiced by Gawker publisher Nick Denton, he replied, “we're not trying to be a publisher, and though I think Nick is a successful publisher, there's still a middle man with Gawker just like Conde Nast or any other publisher. I think that model is inherently a little harder to sustain. The web is very efficient at routing around middlemen."
Putting myself in the mindset of the recently bought out journalist, I would take that six months of income and view it as start-up capital. The tools needed to conduct most reporting are little more than a laptop, an internet connection, and a phone – things the journalist likely had already. The only thing necessary to launch and maintain a blog full-time then is sustainable income. With a half year’s salary, you’d now be able to devote 40 hours to producing original content and you would have six months to build up a sizable enough audience so that the blog could be self-sustaining through advertising.
Of course it’s not as easy as it seems. As critics in my PBS article pointed out, good reporters do not necessarily make quality bloggers because when you’re running your own blog you essentially become your own marketer. If you’re not savvy in social media – and most reporters aren’t – then your content will be unlikely to gain much traction.
But if you do happen to understand how to navigate the online sphere, that six months of salary may be all that’s needed to strike out on your own, sign up for a blog advertising network – whether it’s Blogads, TypePad, or Federated Media – and eliminate the middle man completely. The worst case scenario would be to begin looking for a new job if after a few months you’re unable to gain a foothold in the blogosphere. There should be at least a few media traditional media outlets left by then.