Passion V Paywall

Passion got us here, but passion doesn’t pay rent. VAGUE Resident Daisy Riley explores the growing tension between creative freedom and financial survival and questions whether the two can really exist.

Despite what those of us inside the creative industries are feeling, according to the Creative PECs Good Word Review 2023, our industry is booming. 

“More than eight in ten (83%) of those working in the Creative Industries work in professional or managerial roles, compared to 46% across the UK workforce. Nearly three quarters (73%) of those employed in Creative Occupations are degree-educated (44% of those working across all industries are as well-qualified). In some parts of the Creative Sector productivity is 1.5 times the UK average…” 

It surely doesn’t feel like that can be the case when we see initiatives closing down around us due to lack of funding, every creative we know has a ‘day job’ and the government is constantly trying to cut our funding as a ‘non-essential’ or ‘dead end’ practice. 

Creatives are almost 2x more likely to be self-employed and are also much more likely to come across part time work or non-permanent work - ie. our work is unstable. And this report makes a strong case for consideration of not just the quantity of work available to creatives, but the quality of said work.

Our industry is also particularly at risk of pay disparity, with a few ‘star’ high earners skewing data to make the creative industries look like one of the most well paid fields to work in, when in fact we have a huge gender pay gap. POC also face huge pay disparity and the fact that so many of us are freelancers mean we undertake huge amounts of hidden labour managing our businesses, dealing with clients, accepting low wages or extra work and even, unfortunately, having to pour time and money into small claims court when our clients don’t pay us.

That’s not even touching on the unpaid labour that creative industries literally run on.

“...every creative we know has a ‘day job’ and the government is constantly trying to cut our funding as a ‘non-essential’ or ‘dead end’ practice. ”

Instead, we should pay attention to the recent shift, especially within the media landscape, of creatives putting their skills behind a paywall. Whether that’s acting as influencers and requesting payment to collaborate on content, setting up themselves as an agency to share their skills, ideas and expertise in return for payment, or hiding their content behind subscriptions on platforms like OnlyFans or Substack. It’s great to be able to subscription-ify your talent if you’re a creative as it means there’s a level of stability that one-off projects just can’t promise, as subscribers pay small, regular fees to you. It also means that whilst creatives embark on essays or think pieces that they honestly would be writing for the fun of it themselves, they can actually generate income too. 

It isn’t just freelancers setting up defences to keep their ideas locked away behind financial gates. Oxford University's Reuters Institute reported that more than two-thirds (69%) of leading newspapers across the UK, EU and US are operating some kind of online paywall. We know print media and heritage titles have been struggling, and we’ve pined over the loss of too many iconic publications in recent years. For them to be able to make a little extra income from the online content that they share is also good news.

There’s a huge pressure to publish endless content to stay relevant and hold attention, much of which was being shared for free previously, and now labour can be directly charged back to the people consuming it. (Hopefully that translates to the interns writing it all being paid too…) A frequent argument in favour of paywalls has been that it helps publications reduce reliance on advertisers, which ultimately means their journalism needn’t bend to advertisers' will, and they produce better work. 

Tick, tick, tick - right? 

But who is paying to access that information? Apparently only 5% of Brits are prepared to pay for online news - after all they see everything for free on social media. It’s somewhat saddening to see such a lack of value for good journalism, but in a crippling financial crisis paying for news is a huge luxury - especially when you can get hot takes and seemingly well researched headlines from Instagram.

This leads us into the problem, when everything factual, thoughtful and intentional is blocked behind a paywall, the majority of us turn to whatever is available. And this is how we get to problems like our parents falling for an AI images and headlines claiming the apocalypse is coming. It’s how younger generations are failing to develop critical analysis skills, and how we’ve all become trapped in bubbles of vitriolic opposites - clinging onto single sentences to define our opinions instead of deeply understanding topics and their nuances. 

The Reuters Institute found that “weekly use of online news has fallen at sharper rates among younger people and those without a university degree” with interest in the news also sharply decreasing for younger internet users. Partially due to their preference of entertainment content (it’s what they’ve grown up with after all) and the intentional decisions by social media platforms to invest in “prioritising things like entertaining short-form video and de-prioritising news. Facebook, in particular, has turned away from news and fact-checking following years of grief from all sides of the political spectrum.”

It gets really scary when we start looking at politics. A report by the  Global Strategy Group and Navigator Research found that 4 in 10 voters don’t read the news, they wait for headlines to find them, and then absorb whatever they see without fact-checking. We’re becoming more and more passive in the way that we hunt out information, would it be too woke of me say it’s probably intentional? 

“Participation in public life and debate is often considered a central element of civic engagement in democratic societies. It matters, then, both how (and how much) people are participating in these debates as well as who is shaping them… relatively smaller numbers of (often more male, more partisan, and more motivated) people take up most of the active news participation… These trends raise new questions surrounding what participation and engagement mean in an increasingly online but less openly participatory news environment. It may be less that participation has decreased than that the nature of participation is changing, as many publishers move away from open features of news participation like online comments sections and as social media platforms downrank or limit users’ interactions with news.” 

How do these worrying shifts in our passive news consumption relate to creatives trying to keep themselves afloat with their work? 

Paywalls stop people accessing good writing. If someone barely cares to read the news, they certainly won’t care to pay to access it. But that’s exactly what we need - easy to understand, freely accessible, and well written stories that connect us to each other, to the rest of the world, and ground provocative, moral panics in the more understandable grey area in which most stories exist. 

“But that’s exactly what we need - easy to understand, freely accessible, and well written stories that connect us to each other, to the rest of the world...”

Asking journalists to freely share their work, i.e. news, think pieces, and thought leadership, risks putting them right back where they started: without autonomy, and without a reliable income.

Maybe what we really need is a newfound appreciation and investment in the creatives and communicators who make information and connection possible, and the rest will follow.

credits

words — daisy riley

design — gloria ukoh