Online Mid-List

Ellen Willis writes:

Lamar Graham is absolutely right about the scare factor; before reading his comments I had already written the following sentence: "Salon's action scored a direct hit on my own secret writer's paranoia: does anyone actually read my stuff?" This irrational (we hope) fear is common among those of us whose articles are the journalistic equivalent of that fragile species, the mid-list book: we may appear in relatively mainstream publications rather than (or as well as) small journals, but we aren't household names or (the same thing?) TV personalities. And one hedge against that fear has been our ability to assume our share of the credit for the circulation of the publications we write for: surely the fact that the Times, or more modestly The Nation, is willing to publish a piece of mine is a vote of confidence that some good chunk of its readers will be interested.

Of course, editors and publishers have always preferred to stop spending money on writers who don't get read, but until now they've been forced to rely on such inexact evidence as mail, surveys and their own intuition. If they were losing circulation or ad revenue they could fire a bunch of people and hire new ones, but it wasn't necessarily clear which ones to keep and which to weed out. Similarly, writers have always worried about who is reading them and who isn't. Now, just as we who once had to wait months for book publishers' antediluvian bureaucracies to disgorge their sales figures can track our daily standing on Amazon.com, we can look forward (as more and more journalism moves onto the Web) to obsessively checking the number of hits each of our stories has gotten.

Unfortunately, though, the information will be more useful to the accountants than it will be to us. A writer can have a pathetically small readership by Internet standards, yet still reach some thousands of people. Paranoid fantasies aside, there are a lot of writers out there whose work excites and enlightens me who will never be massively popular. There are other writers whose unpopularity attests to their non-readers' good sense. But statistics alone can't distinguish one category from the other. They can, however, cut writers off from opportunities to be read and, no small consideration, to make some semblance of a living. If the economic imperative of "a consistently enormous volume of traffic" is simply built into the Web, the way the imperative of a mass national audience was built into network television, this suggests disappointing limitations on the possibilities of the medium.

Clearly the use of hit-counting as a staff-culling device has to shift the balance of power further toward media companies and away from their "content providers"; toward market "efficiency," i.e. corporate rationalization and segmentation, and away from opportunities for mid-list writers to participate in the public conversation. On the other hand, this a relatively minor wrinkle on what — if you believe that the majority of writers, artists, and intellectuals whose work can't pay for itself on the open market are an important social resource that should be nurtured — is already a cultural crisis: all the mechanisms that have allowed such people to survive in various niches of the economy are shriveling up. Book publishers no longer use the profits from best-sellers to subsidize worthy money-losers; broadcasters won't have their entertainment divisions underwrite expensive news reporting; universities eliminate tenured jobs with low course loads (our circle's own niche) in favor of expendable, exploitable adjuncts; cheap urban living space has vanished as our latter-day feudal lords sell and rent it for what the plutocrat market will bear; and let's not even talk about what's happened to government grants. So now it seems Web sites will be able to ensure that those who don't carry their commercial weight can be easily dropped from the payroll. No big news here.

But Salon's move does imply new questions about a writer's relationship to an audience and the mediation of a publication — a supposedly collective enterprise — between writer and reader. Graham's analysis and my own observations suggest that the very concept of a "publication" is an anachronistic holdover from print media. There are, after all, no "issues" of a Web site. There is no discrete collection of material segregated from the surrounding media environment by covers. When I pick up a newspaper or magazine, I don't normally read everything in it, but I do read a lot of pieces I wouldn't bother to go out of my way to find, because they're there and because the context in which they're embedded adds a dimension to their existence. I'm interested in what New Republic or The New Yorker has to say about x or y or what they think is important this week, and so I'll browse through an issue and end up reading writers I've never heard of, or writers I dislike, on subjects I had no special prior interest in. And it's true that I don't have the same relationship with Web "publications." As Graham points out, you can't casually browse through a Web site taking in stuff with your peripheral vision; you have to actively choose to call up a page. And usually you can read only a small fraction of what's on a given site.

Obviously, writers who are used to print can't simply transpose to the Web their usual strategies of connecting with their readers, and it's likely that many writers have sensibilities that won't work online, like squeaky-voiced movie actors who couldn't make the transition to talkies. But what of the writers who can get an audience, just not an enormous volume of traffic? No doubt there will be plenty of noncommercial sites where such writers will be welcome to post their work, so long as they don't expect to get paid for it. The question is, what mechanism, if any, will serve the "sponsorship" function of publications, both economically and culturally?