Better no wine writers than flacks
There was a terrific article in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine that I commend to everyone who has any interest in publishing, wine writing and social media. It’s as good a capsule description of where we are now as anything I’ve seen.
The author, Andrew Rice, covers a lot of territory. Basically, these are his chief points:
– Writers who worked for print publications are getting laid off, and seeking new opportunities, mainly online.
– Unfortunately, online pubs have not yet figured out a revenue stream, so these writers are either unpaid, or paid peanuts.
– Thus, while it’s true that online sites have done a good job destroying traditional print media, they’ve done a terrible job creating viable alternatives to it.
– One model that shows promise is “a commune of bloggers” wherein many bloggers pool their talents into a single online site, hoping their collective weight will attract eyeballs. (Think Huffington Post.) But making money still remains a formidable challenge.
– Two other models, subscriptions and premium memberships, are being tinkered with, so far with unproved results.
All these things, we already know, having covered this for years. But then, towards the end of the article, Rice gets into a territory that troubles me, and should trouble you, very much: “blurring the division between reporting and advertising.” In this model, a blog posting would “let advertisers…produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site.” In other words, independent reporting would have, squeezed into its crevices like caulking in a windowpane, advertiser-created content, of which the reader might be entirely unaware. It would be as if I told you I was enjoying a cold, refeshing bottle of Coca Cola while writing these words.
Disclosure: Heimoff was paid by Coca Cola to produce this image.
Rice has enough sound journalistic sense to state that “Not long ago, such an idea would have been considered heretical, and in many newsrooms, it still is.” But then, he quotes somebody named Merrill Brown, described as “a veteran media executive and investor” who is entrepreneurially “building a network of local news sites.” “Hopefully we’re breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented,” Mr. Brown says. Times are so tough for writers, Brown implies, that they need to get over their holier-than-thou ideological purity and take the money, no matter what they have to do to get it. Or, as Rice puts it, “The recession has, through fear and necessity, made capitalists out of everyone.” Even those once-gnarled, hard-bitten wretches, reporters.
Incidentally, the reason I smell so squeaky clean is because I just showered with Dial Soap.
Disclosure: Heimoff was paid to mention “Dial Soap” in this blog
To me, the firewall between church and state — between the editorial and advertising sides of a publication — is sacrosanct. I can’t imagine being unbiased without that firewall existing. Look, I’m not an idiot. I understand that some 80% of a publication’s revenues come from advertising, not subscriptions. I know that Wine Enthusiast’s advertisers pay my bills. I try to respect the firewall, while not being needlessly antagonistic to anyone, advertisers included. That doesn’t mean an advertiser won’t get a lousy score, if I feel the wine deserves it, and the management of Wine Enthusiast has been very good about not reproaching me for reproaching advertisers’ bad wines.
By the way, I couldn’t have completed today’s post without the help of my friend, Xanax.
Disclosure: Heimoff was paid by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals to include this reference to Xanax.
Surely we can all agree this is the only model that makes sense. Can’t we? Would you find credible an alcoholic beverage magazine where there was functionally no difference between editorial and advertising? If you would, I have a subscription to The Tasting Panel I’d like to sell you. I’m not saying it’s impossible for a writer to write well with the right hand while the left hand is indulging in an orgy of product placement. Writing is a fungible skill, and in that sense, it is an amoral act. The writer can apply his skills in any direction, just as a printer can work for the U.S. Treasury or as a counterfeiter.
Say, have you seen the new Robin Hood? Fantastic movie! Check it out!
This space paid for by Universal Pictures
What I am saying is how profoundly uncomfortable I am to be watching this Brave New World plunge us into a new reality defined by advertisers, for advertisers, and confused by consumers as reality. It may be better to have no writers at all than to have writers who, through sheer economic desperation, sink into flackdom.
Great article, Steve, and I just wanted to note that while reading it I was enjoying a tall thermos filled with steaming hot Peet’s Coffee, brewed to perfection with a splash of Vanilla-flavored SILK soymilk.
[ This comment sponsored by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, and SILK).
Cheers!
I am Peet’s wine person, not you, Dude! You will be hearing from my attorneys!
I confess. The reason I have said that the Heimoff blog is the best general purpose blog in the western world is that he gives me all his leftovers. Otherwise, I would not get to review all those Screaming Eagles, Colgins, Littorais, Mark Auberts, etc that dominate his coverage of CA wine.
Thanks, Steve, you are the best–this week. The FTC requires that I disclose that I am negotiating with Parker for his leftovers.
Oh, and Andrew Rice does not know squat about publications that have something fungible to sell–like wine reviews. It really does not matter whether you are the WS, WE, CGCW or CT, if you have a fungible product, you will find a way to make money. If you Appellation America, with all that brilliant data that nobody wanted to pay for, you will go out of business no matter how good the writing is.
Well done commentary, Steve. I think it’s terribly important to maintain that firewall between the advertising side and the editorial side for a publication to have any credibility with me.
I get irritated (well….mildly annoyed) when I read thru BonApetit and see a several page section that has been paid for by Gallo or K-J or SnakeRiverWinePromotionalCouncil touting the product or region and it being only thinly disguised as advertising material. I’m quick to pick up on that sort of thing, but I’m not so sure all readers do.
I have rather strong uncertainity about how well that firewall is maintained by the WineSpec, from several stories I’ve heard from winemakers. Even in the WE, when I see those labels printed beside some reviews and not others, it raises a flag in my mind.
Tom
Tom, there are things that all magazines, including WE, do. As long as the reader can figure out, without too much hassle, what’s editorial and what’s advertising, I’m okay with it. It’s just the way things are. What’s that old saying — don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Steve,
The Huffington Post model, while not really a “commune of bloggers” model (that would really describe a group blog, where everybody involved can post anything they want, without editing or any other barrier between thought and publication), is likely the next successful model for wine publication. Huffington made it work by her ability to attract significant names. In wine, we are going to have to make it work by attracting significant quality, and letting people build their names. But it can work. Indeed, without doing any more self-promotion, it does seem to be working.
On the “advertorial” side, I can tell you we have been approached by several customers for the Ad Network interested in placing content on the magazine. We have not done it and will not do it in the magazine, but some sites will. The key there is to tell the reader the source of the content. If the blogger does so, it is not really different from the advertisements run in boxes labeled “advertisement” but written to look like a story, the sort of thing we find in magazines and newspapers every day. Indeed, it is not different from advertising inserts found in certain magazines in the wine world, including one that is Enthusiast-ic about pleasing its advertisers (as it should be, within ethical boundaries).
David, when Enthusiast runs advertorials they are so labeled. As for HuffPo “making it work,” my understanding is that contributors do NOT get paid. They do it for reasons of prestige, career enhancement, etc. but no money. So I can’t see wine writers making a decent living by contributing to “a commune of bloggers.”
Steve, I agree Enthusiast labels advertorials, as is appropriate. Nothing else intended there.
The HuffPo example did not go to the payment method, but her ability to generate interest given her political celebrity. HuffPo itself is profitable, or at least sells a bunch of advertising. Therefore that MODEL could produce revenue that could be shared with the writers. As for a decent living, you’re right. I don’t see that model being able to pay multiple people full salaries. It does not even really fit the model, which is to open up the environment to all writers, publishing the best available material each day. Rather, it would be able to provide payment per story, leveling the field and turning everybody into free-lancers. That is a big raise for bloggers and a tragic demotion for salaried magazine staff. Is it the best option? No, of course not. Is it the future, given that newspapers are presently residing in hospice facilities, and magazines are looking at long term care insurance? Perhaps.
If I had to bet, I’d bet on a low-cost subscription model: microscopic audiences paying small fees that, in aggregate, translate to a decent living for the content creator.
I’ll give you a real-life example: I have a friend who’s a jazz musician and he makes a decent living giving concerts and selling CDs. He sells 5,000 copies of every CD he produces and his only marketing is email to a subscriber base of about 15,000 people. If he had the marketing and overhead costs of a record label, expending lots of effort reaching people who aren’t interested, he’d have to sell five times that many just to break even. As it sits now, talking to small and dedicated audience, he charges more per CD than major labels can and his costs are entirely variable.
Imagine a blog sufficiently compelling that it could get 30,000 people to pay $5 a year for a subscription. That’s a pittance paid by an audience that in television terms would earn a 0.001% rating. A dismal failure by conventional media standards but a roaring success as a single proprietorship. After expenses — bandwidth, travel, etc. — the blogger banks maybe $100,000 a year.
That’s not an impossible scenario, and its not unlike what happened in the magazine business. As the big, general interest glossies died, people theorized the end of magazines. Instead, they gave way to smaller, specialized publications like Cat Fancy and — yes — Wine Enthusiast. The magazine industry didn’t die; it grew bigger and more profitable than ever, attracting specialized audiences willing to pay premium prices for content that exactly matched their interest.
Steve:
This: “In this model, a blog posting would “let advertisers…produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site”….sounds a lot like the advertorials that I see in any number of magazines (particularly travel and business publications” that look like straightforward stories but are labeled “paid advertisement” at the top of the page.
I’m not sure I have any problem with this, assuming the “paid advertisement” is brightly lit.
let’s remember this business evolved from free wine, free trips, retailer columns, etc. all you need to do is ask your sales force who matters.
harvey
Tom, that’s not how the new model would work. The way I read it, Mr. Brown is suggesting a single article with actual reporting larded in with “marketing-created” material that would somehow be “labeled.” I don’t know how that would work. If there’s a clear and distinct difference between the “advertorial” part and the “journalistic” part, I’m fine with it. But from the sound of it, there wouldn’t be. That was my whole point in having soap, xanax, etc. in there.
Mr. Johnson’s model has a certain logic, but actual experience mitigates against it in my view.
The audiences for wine blogs, if one reads the numbers is in the thousands for the big wine blogs. One would have to get all of the casual viewers several times over to make that model work.
In the meantime, in order to have content that is fungible (people will exchange cash for it), that content requires a fair bit of time and a certain uniqueness. An individual musician has unique content, and there is a working model for its value. I don’t see either the value, the content or the audience scope for wine bloggers.
Steve, you must have a hit counter (seemingly everyone does). Do you get tens of thousands of repeat visitors? If you did not have WE providing you with wine to taste, could you generate enough reviews to have fungible content? Do you think that people will pay for your brilliant commentary?
Could your blog work within the Johnson model–assuming that WE would let you charge but not post wine reviews?
The Huffington Post model for wine already exists:
http://palatepress.com/
http://www.zesterdaily.com/
http://www.winereviewonline.com/
You’re right, Charlie, that the key to the model I propose is the unique and compelling nature of the blogger.
If I had to offer an example of a blog that is on the verge of being differentiated enough to develop a subscription model, God-help-me I think I’d offer up Hosemaster of Wine. He’d have to put a lot more work into it and willingly volunteer to live the rest of his life in hiding, but when he hits the mark he’s as close to a must-read as there is in independent wine blogging.
Online publications earn a fraction of their print counterpart, in most cases. Above “Tom” suggests that only 30,000 memberships at $5 per year, should not be too hard to acheive and would offer a good living (minus expenses). Does anybody out there know how hard it is to get 30,000 people to view a wine blog? Or how much money that would cost? Lot’s… trust me. So if something like 2% (very high conversion) of all site visitors signed up for your subscription, you would only need 1.5 million site visitors before you reached your goal of 30k members.
Not to pick on blogger Tom, I’m just trying to explain why most blogs, wine included, do not produce much revenue.
Brett, totally agree. I have one of the top wine blogs in America and can frankly tell you that persuading 30,000 of my viewers to buy a $5 membership is impossible. The same is true of every other top wine blog in America. Otherwise, they would have done it.
For the record, “Tom” did not say 30,000 memberships “should not be too hard to achieve.” He — that is, I — said it was “not an impossible scenario.”
There is a meaningful difference between those two characterizations.
We should keep in mind the type of publication that people may or may not pay for. I do think that there are some wine writers who cover the industry and the issues of the day, and have style, who could generate enough income. Such a cyber pub would probably not review wines since there are so many other outlets.
These few bloggers would keep up on the buzz eg. Dario Sattui taking on Firefighters–that both industry folks and wine enthusiasts just want to hear about. a Herb Caen, maybe, or Walter Winchell/Jimmy Breslin/Page Six/Kup/Malcolm Gladwell, Ashley Dupré. Rather than subscriptions that require many thousands of subscribers, the donation/pay what you can and think the opinion is worth mode might be more productive. Putting aside his politics, another Steve, Steve Sailer, I bet generates a pretty good income from what he calls his “panhandling”.
Then there are online pubs like Lew Purdue’s Wine Industry Insight–“News you NEED to know”– and the Wine Business Insider which will/do generate enough income because enough professionals have to stay in the know.
Tom, don’t let Ron read that you considered his work “wine blogging” otherwise he’d have to do a parody on himself… that’s analogous to “crossing the streams” and may cause a serious black hole in the cosmos.
As it relates to ads running within online content, I don’t think we are talking about any thing new here… it’s in print, it’s on the web already… I think we all agree if money is to be made in this “online writing” model, it’s from advertising because no one is going to pay a subscription for what’s already available for free… (see ebobparker.com)
Tom–
The HoseMaster? I like it better when there are only a handful of us and the whole thing is a big inside joke.
I would, however, nominate Vinography as a blog that might find a way to monetize some or all of the effort of its creator. Alder is more than just a font of fun and information. He has a data base of opinion about wine, and he is an entrepreneur. His model and his goals are very different from folks like Steve or Ron or Ken Payton.
My best guess as to the way that the top bloggers are going to get paid is that they will be hired onto the staffs of existing publications. Alder already has a column in Sommelier magazine. I don’t know if he gets paid for it, but the mag does distribute only by subscription.
Tom, thanks for correcting me. I only scan through the comments and I should have read the whole comment before I commented.
Steve, I must say that this is probably one of the only blogs I’ve ever been on that does not have any type of advertising or sponsorship. So I know you mean business when you say that there should be a firewall between the newsroom and the advertising department.
The article was really good, and very telling. The company in New York that hasn’t turned a profit and is going back to the well for some more investment money…should tell us something.
I almost “sponsored” one of the L.A. Wine Examiners. But I didn’t think she was worth the $39 when I saw that she only posted once per month.
-glad I’m not graduating from college with a degree in journalism right about now.
I’ve been wondering what will happen in the digital “repackage” – plagiarize – Tweet-and-link world when journalists who were paid to do the interviews and research stop writing (writing being inclusive: photos, video, audio, graphics). It’s the not so much the PPW (pennies per word) but the background research, reporting and travel that go unpaid. Even a two-bit piece takes fact-checking, emails, and phone calls.
That’s the big gap. I know of no editor in any media who will publish a second story from someone who gets the facts and the quotes wrong in the first story. (Libel lawyers aren’t paid in proportion to my PPW rate – but there’s a thought!). And to add to the troubles, it’s usually work for hire (boy, was that a mistake).
Yet….I absolutely love digital creativity and inspiration. So, c’mon guys, there is another model.
Dump old school “advertorial” jitters. Take a quantum step to true digital. Unmask words to reveal their 20th century binary code origins (…when it’s not accurate, it’s wrong). We’re effectively “open source,” so hold onto the copyright and license the content/code – for free or wrapped in a proprietary advertising skin or platform (aka all media).
Content is dead, long live the 01000011 01001111 01000100 01000101 00100001
The advertorial line is continuing to creep forward. I don’t know what everyone else’s practice is, but we don’t write copy for advertisers, which is what some would prefer (the final result being a happy face look at a wine/region/whatever presumably with a small “Advertisement” in the top of the page written by one of our writers). Like WE and WS, we’d run an advertorial given to us, probably with PAID ADVERTISEMENT in bigger letters than the advertiser would like, but I fear a gradual creeping toward The Tasting Panel’s approach of pay for play.
Oh, and the Huffington Post is not profitable. It probably could be, if it was run more tightly, and they say they will be at the end of this year, but right now it isn’t. And that’s with not paying most of their contributors and frankly, mostly leeching off the work of others (most of the content is produced by other news organizations).
This goes back to what Alder always says, it’s nearly impossible to make money on a blog right now.
This is all very thought provoking. Thanks Steve.
A question to the group – it seems to me that most pundits/experts agree that blogs, not just wine blogs, but all blogs will never produce enough income for someone to actually live on. That said, will blogs really last in the long run?
How long can Steve keep this up? This blog is an enormous amount of work. If he’s not getting paid at some point, why keep going? It’s a great read and very informative but Steve has said himself that hardly anyone would be willing to spend the $5 for a subscription. Where does this all end?
Phi, I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time as what you have Alder saying: no money from blogs. Only thing is, every time I say it, the bloggers slam me for hating social media!
Bill, that is the question of the day. Believe me, all the top wine bloggers are asking the same thing. For now, the answer is, the bloggers will continue to pour time and energy into their blogs (and into responding to comments) for the foreseeable future. It’s not an impossible expenditure of time, and — speaking not just for myself, but for the other wine bloggers I know — it’s so much fun that there’s no reason to give it up.
Advertorial is advertorial is antiquated. But what is wrong with being paid?
Most of the advertorial money comes from the same government-funded wine regions that pay for trips. Purely private advertorial (not ads) is rare and often due to some xxx anniversary or 50/50 with a govt or the EU.
As long as a blogger is a publisher and protects and values the content/code, I do not understand why no ads. Ban advertorial, ban pay to play. I don’t see a lot of fire and brimstone coming from wine blogs aimed at specific advertising targets anyway.
Who keeps a list of wine bloggers who accept ads?
There are bloggers who make a living at it, though not (that I know of) in wine blogging. Andrew Sullivan’s blog generates enough money that it supports a staff of three, and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo has grown into a small media empire, with reporters in both Washington and New York.
My bet is that the wine bloggers who make a pay model work will come out of the same niches that, pre-web, powered newsletters. Burghound, for example, covers Burgundy in depth. People who are really into Burgundy have demonstrated a willingness to pay for that specialized content. I don’t know if there’s a living in it for Allen Meadows, but I believe it’s a valid example.
Kathy, it would be a lot easier to keep a list of wine bloggers who DON’T accept ads. That list would have very few names on it, starting with mine.
Steve,
Interesting post. Indeed, it seems the debate between paid-for advertising and subscriptions will be the future testing ground of revenue-generation online.
But I think you do both your readers – and readers the world over – a great disservice by imagining that they will merely consume advertising dressed as editorial. I wouldn’t be so worried about what you perceive as their inability to turn their back at this kind of writing – I don’t think people put up with that sort of stuff for long.
So you’re basically down to trust.
I looked at a copy of Wine Enthusiast that I had lying around (admittedly it’s from March 2009 – I couldn’t find a more recent one) and guess what?
It contained 70 pages of editorial on wine, of which 4 were actually about cocktails and 14 had ½ page ads (I did not count labels published in the ‘Buying Guide’ which are a paid-for add-on for producers and would add another 8 half-pages of advertising).
Add to this 20 pages of advertising, including advertorial (funnily named ‘special promotion’) and advertising for WE’s own products
Thus 33% of the magazine had some kind of editorial on it or, if you count the labels, you’re flirting around the 50% mark.
Which is about the ratio of column-space to advertising-space you have in your post above.
Now it’s just down to whose editorial proceedure you find more transparent/trustworthy…
Best
Oliver
Oliver, the commercial pages in Wine Enthusiast allow the editorial pages to exist. I don’t have a problem with that, and I don’t think it’s difficult for readers to tell the difference. As I’ve expressed before, my concern for these new models is that the bright line between advertising and editorial will become hopelessly blurred.
Sure, I’m just saying that people are pretty good at recognising what is advertising and what isn’t and that you shouldn’t be that concerned.
You shouldn’t be concerned because if people flock to read the blurred advert/editorial – we’ll all know we’ve been doing it wrong for decades.
Whereas – and I believe we will find – readers may well get wise to the ploy pretty quickly.
Added to which, the ‘bright line’ in print isn’t always obvious. You wouldn’t expect readers to immediately realise the labels in WE’s buying guide are paid-for and the ‘Special Promotion’ is named as such in font the same size as the photography and design credits, and there is little, design-wise that separates the advertorial from the editorial.
I admit there are concerns with new models of advertising online (and you do well to bring them to wider attention) and I’ve thought about this for some time, but I don’t believe it will be a problem in the long run unless thousands of people love it – in which case, who are you (or I) to argue?
Oliver
It was no so long ago that magazines that reviewed wine did not take advertising and magazines that took advertising did not review wine. Marvin Shanken changed all that, but there are still a half dozen or more magazines, in various print and online forms, that do not take any advertising and make their ways in life strictly through subscription fees.
The fact that the WS and WE have far more subscribers than Parker, Tanzer, Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine or Dan Berger’s Wine Experience clearly indicates that the average consumer does not care about the blurring of the lines that has happened so far.
My guess is that WE is pushing the envelope about as far as it can be pushed by not identifying all of its advertising as advertising.
And it affects us all. In my publication, label art (we do not usually show full labels but the artsy parts of the labels) is used with highly rated wines for visual relief so that we do not look like a phone book. Recently, a winery PR person inquired of us how much it would cost for his label art to run in Connoisseurs’ Guide. Our response was simple. Make a wine that gets high ratings and we will run it for free. But, you cannot buy the placement. In WE, that placement is purchased.
It may not change many buying patterns, but the wineries must believe that it changes something or they would not be throwing cash at the WE. And this is just label depictions.
What about the publication that openly solicits advertorial placements that it writes and charges big bucks for those placements, while never telling its readers that it is all bought and paid for.
I hope that we are not headed to that world. The suggestion that the readers are expected to tell wheat from chaff when the publication fails to indentify it is a step too far in my view. Caveat emptor gets us to places like Goldman Sachs selling bad investments to its clients while making money creating those bad investments.
I have a better idea. TELL THE TRUTH. If you cannot tell the truth, then you are de facto telling us that you have something to hide. Sorry boys and girls but that kind of behavior cannot be acceptable.
Charlie, where does WE not identify its ads as ads?
Steve,
Again you have raised a worthy topic with appropriate analysis — which in turn has spawned more intelligent discussion.
With all due respect to you, the answer to the question you posed to Charlie is simple: the wine label gallery in WE’s buying guide is pure advertorial consistently disguised as editorial. Yes, of course, the wines have been tasted and rated blind. However, each label represents a paid promotion; as a result, every single one of those pages, by ASME (American Sociaety of Magazine Editors) standards ought to be labeled as advertorial at the top of the page. As it stands now, the only indication that labels are advertising comes in the fine print obx that appears on one page of the buying guide, away from the actual labels.
Further, the placement of these wine reviews ahead of the rest of the buying guide — in a format the imitates the sort of presentation that has long existed in Wine Spectator (for Best Buys, Cellar Selections, et al) — is a subtle but undeniable means of portraying the paid-label reviews as editorial favorites.
Steve–Fair question.
I will let you answer it because you know better than I. Are all label placements indentified as advertisments immediately next to those labels? Perhaps I was misled by Oliver Styles comments and did not stop to look.
You tell me and I will believe it–and will amend my earlier comments as appropriate. By the way, I realize that you keep your end of the business separate and I suspect that the same is true at WS. Not so sure about some others whose policies seem totally bent to me.
And as I said above, the blurring of the lines is already accepted by the large body of readership. I am not fond of it, and I think it all should be clearly labelled as advertising in whatever form it takes.
Charlie, in the Buying Guide it says “Labels are paid promotions. Wineries and winery representatives are given the opportunity to submit labels, which are reproduced and printed along with tasting notes and scores. For information on label purchases, contact…” etc. It’s in the beholder’s eye whether or not this statement is prominant enough. For some people, I suspect, the answer will never be no.
Well, let’s just say that there is information but that the individual labels are not identified as adverts. Who gets fooled and who does not is hard to say.
Not your problem, of course, because of the separation of content and advertising.
I quit paying for ad’s a few years ago when I knew that paid advertising is less legit as consumers today are aware of the keen difference between paid ad’s and word of mouth advertising. A friend or aquaintence recommending a product of service is much more believable than paid words. I guess it’s always been that way is just more clear to more people now. Power to the little people.
My lysdexia made me read the headline as, “No Better Wine Writers than Flacks.”
My lysdexia made me read the headline, “Better no wine writers than flacks,” as “No Better wine writers than flacks.”
deerga