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Toto, I'm not Dave Kansas anymore | page 1, 2
(Mind you, none of this is to say that journalists getting in on IPOs today won't profit handsomely in the meantime: I'm not a stock analyst, and I certainly hope they do, if for no other reason than the possibility of some of them buying me drinks someday.) Either all publications will start magnanimously giving away equity, on- or offline, good times or bad -- in which case I also expect chocolate-flavored snowfalls -- or employers will offer what the market will bear. But Dr. Koop's cash-in is something different: as Robert X. Cringely pointed out in the New York Times, it's a well-known person being able to sell equity in his name. Journalists, for the most part, spend their careers building their names, only to rent them for relatively small sums to venture capitalists. If someday writers, having turned themselves into brands, can own those brands, that would be a real transfer of power rather than simply another employee benefit. The Washington Post's "Media Notes" columnist, Howard Kurtz, ended his Dave Kansas story, "How does MediaNotes.com sound?" He can laugh, but I hope he dropped a line to these nice German chaps with a generous buyout offer. James Poniewozik's column has appeared in Media, every Monday and Thursday The other question starting to be raised is whether journalistic wealth is healthy. A recent Newsweek article quotes a journalism professor who says students, offered stock options instead of $20,000 starting salaries, are "asking aloud whether they can be idealistic about journalism and get a piece of the pie at the same time." To which I say: Kids, nothing will kill your idealism faster than your first pay-stub at $20K a year. What's puzzling is the sense that a journalist's striking it rich off his craft is inherently harmful, which likewise seems the subtext of exercises like Brill's Content's publication of journalists' salaries (though I agree the information is of some use to readers). OK, you can argue that wealthy journalists become out of touch with the common man. But a journalist should be able to understand any group of people, and can't belong to all. (And here's a dirty secret: Good writers do not become writers because they are so much like their fellow man. They become writers because they believe they know better than their fellow man.) Of more concern is that online writers and editors, who already know perhaps too well what pieces draw traffic, will start making editorial decisions like publishers -- which in fact they will be. But this pressure (please the market or lose money) may be largely redundant with an old-fashioned, stronger editorial pressure (please the market or you're fired). How much is a writer worth? Nothing. How much is a writer worth? A hundred million bucks. How much is a writer worth? Whatever that writer can get. If Dave Kansas can get $900 million honestly, God bless him. It's plenty possible, conversely, to earn $25,000 a year without integrity. It's wrong -- not to mention stupid -- for writers to make their work solely about the money, but if anything, an indigent writer may be more corruptible than a rich one. Corruption is not about how much you have or how much you're offered; it's about how much you want and what you'll do for it. If you know the answer to that question, well, you can always give Dave Kansas a call. And if you're reading this, Dave? I drink Manhattans.
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