Jeff Ward Wants My Writing — Free (2)

In the previous installment I sketched Jeff Ward’s attack on me for having the temerity to charge a subscription fee for access to the website I’ve organized and published, the Photography Criticism CyberArchive.

Ward has convinced himself, and seeks to convince his readers, that asking to get paid for the labor and expense involved in this project makes me a “luddite” and someone who doesn’t “get’ the internets.” [Plural his.] I regret that I find myself unexpectedly crossing swords with Ward, because I enjoy his well-written blog, this Public Address 4.0, and find him generally a thoughtful commentator. In this instance, however, Ward’s naïveté and inexpertise are glaring.

Let me start my analysis by defining the experience level from which we each speak. I’ve made my living as a working professional writer since 1968. This means that, in large part, I derive my income from licensing usage rights to my writings. That in turn requires others — book and periodical publishers and, to a lesser extent, online publishers — to consider that writing worth paying for, which signifies that, in most cases, they have readers willing to pay money to read what I write and/or advertisers ready to subsidize its presentation.

Ward staunchly opposes “monetized knowledge,” by which he means any “business model” that involves people (for which read him) paying for the privilege of access to intellectual property produced by others. Yet, in the same polemic, he states that “Coming of age as a photographer in the late 70s/early 80s, I was [sic] railed against postmodern critics such as Andy Grundberg and Peter Galassi (still do, in some respects). A. D. Coleman was a breath of fresh air, and reading his constant columns in Photo Metro and elsewhere, I had the feeling that I wasn’t completely alone in appreciating both a rich tradition and new frontiers for photography.”

I appreciate the kudos, of course. But Ward demostrably doesn’t “get” the real world. What made it possible for him and many others to read my “constant columns in Photo Metro and elsewhere” was precisely my ability to “monetize” the IP I produce. I did this by (a) ensuring that its quality and substance would attract an audience, and then (b) putting it in the hands of a network of editors willing (at least in part) to pay for it, so that (c) I could make a modest living from generating it, thereby (d) enabling myself to continue creating it. In the trade we call this “self-syndication”; it’s a labor-intensive but sometimes viable way of ensuring wider distribution of one’s writings via multiple publications thereof.

In short, it’s a “business model,” to use a term that Ward employs as an epithet. Unlike him, my colleagues at the National Writers Union don’t disdain it. I’m a founding member of the NWU, which has engaged me periodically to teach this business model to my fellow professionals. If you intend to earn your living as a professional writer, you’d damn well better have a business model if you hope to survive. It took me awhile to develop my own; no one taught it to me. But I couldn’t have made it through 40-plus years as an independent freelance critic, historian, and cultural journalist without one.

Ward doesn’t need to have a business model for his writing, and can afford to sneer at the idea, because he’s an amateur writer. From the scant biographical info he offers at his blog, he’s 51, living in the Twin Cities, and part-way through a doctorate at the University of Minnesota. I assume he’s either independently wealthy or has some revenue stream from professional activity other than writing. So far as I can tell, he has never produced any writing for which anyone — whether publisher, editor, or reader — would pay. Thus self-publication and free distribution are apparently his only recourse. Perhaps this inability to establish a successful business model for his own writing explains his drive to persuade others to follow his example. Or perhaps he simply enjoys the role of perpetual amateur as a writer.

In any case, the debate here runs between a working professional writer with four decades’ experience as such and an amateur writer who’s published a blog for eight years. The reader can ascribe credibility as he or she considers reasonable in that circumstance.

Per Ward’s account, we did indeed meet at a Society for Photographic Education National Conference several years ago. I’d dropped out of the SPE in 1986, for a variety of reasons. When I decided to rejoin, circa 1997, I found it devolving —  as actively planned by its board of directors — into a student organization, hybridized with the business model of the Audubon Society. ($25 and an interest in birds and poof! you’re a member . . . and they’ll waive the interest in birds.)

Mostly out of nostalgia for the days when pioneers in the field — Van Deren Coke, Barbara Morgan, Wynn Bullock — attended these events, and in order to stay in touch with respected colleagues (Robert Heinecken, Joyce Neimanas, Carl Chiarenza) who put in occasional appearances, and for the feedback it provided from the academic sector of my readership, I started going to the conferences again. I offset the expenses thereof by renting a table in the conference Exhibits Fair, alongside Aperture and Nazraeli Press and Sprint Systems and Nikon and the Maine Photographic Workshops.

Table rental gave me two conference passes, one of which I’d turn over to my webmaster, John Alley, as a way of thanking him for years of uncompensated service. Between what that saved us on conference registration fees and what I pulled in from book sales at the table, I covered a chunk of conference costs for both us and even some of my travel expenses. Seemed a fair deal (as a business expense): my own little storefront for two days, with the likelihood of breaking even on the costs thereof.

I used this temporary shop to sell (and autograph, when requested) copies of my books — monetized knowledge! — that I transported there; to meet and greet my colleagues, their students, and various others; to distribute information about my two free-access websites (The Nearby Café, already up and running when I reinvolved myself with the SPE, and the New Eyes Project, premiered in 2006); and, upon its launch in 2003, to explain, answers questions about, and sell subscriptions to the Photography Criticism CyberArchive, the site that has evoked Ward’s ire.

So when Ward stepped up to my table in the Exhibits Fair at the SPE National Conference, he walked into my shop — my place of business — during business hours. He didn’t have the courtesy to ask me if I could spare the time to meet with him after business hours so he could discuss my Archive project with me. He simply began haranguing me, in front of my actual and prospective customers, about how I should give my wares away free of charge.

When Ward writes “I just couldn’t convince [Coleman] (in a brief conversation at least) that the future should be open and accessible repositories,” therefore, he elides his own rudeness and unprofessionalism in interfering with my trade by standing in front of my sales table and giving me a hard time, until I broke through his persistent diatribe and made it clear, as tactfully as I could, that I considered his behavior inappropriate in the situation and his presence in my shop unwelcome. Not to mention the presumption of his conviction that, as a newbie writer of amateur standing, he’s thought longer, deeper, and better than I and others have about the questions involved in content aggregation and the online distribution of IP.

Ward himself says of the “information wants to be free” crowd, “Information doesn’t want anything. The public that uses it does.” Of course the slogan is ridiculous; I’ve mocked it myself for years. But, in relation to IP, many of the “wants” of “the public that uses it” are no less foolish, and some are actively harmful. Most pernicious is the sense of entitlement underlying the assumption that one “should” get anyone else’s labor at no cost. Follow the tortured logic behind that arrogance and you end up with slavery, though whoever leads you down that path surely won’t put that name to its destination.

Who doesn’t want free IP? For that matter, who doesn’t want free shoes? Curiously, people like Ward, who would never dream of stepping into a shoe store and demanding a gift of footwear, have no problem insisting that others provide them with with non-“monetized” (for which read free) knowledge, information, data, and other forms of IP. What hypocrisy. I guarantee you that when Ward left my table at the SPE conference Exhibits Fair he didn’t walk over to the booths of Kodak or Adobe or Apple or Calumet Photographic or Blurb.com to castigate their reps as they “hawked” their wares for not providing him with free hardware, software, photo supplies, or production of his photo books. They’d have been far less courteous to him than I was.

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. I may not “‘get’ the internets” in the way Ward insists I should, but I track it steadily enough to know that the current discussion among content providers concerns what many refer to as “the end of free.” As Mick Jagger sings, “You can’t always get what you want — but, if you try real hard, you just might get what you need.” On that note, I’ll turn next to the identified target of Ward’s condemnation: the third website I organize, publish, edit, and fund, the Photography Criticism CyberArchive. It has an unusual business model, as it happens, and one of which I’m quite proud.

Part 2 of 1 | 2 | 3 | 4