The new cost of news by MacPhail...

From the article:

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 It's also clear that the rabble.ca model isn't sustainable, or, at least, fair and scalable. Staff and volunteers contribute willingly to the gift economy that makes rabble run. But, that is a fragile well to drink from for a sustained period, especially during an economic drought. And, while we have depended upon the kindness of non-strangers, the gift/reward ratio needs to tilt a little more in their favour.

Snert, the line between being paid and volunteering one's time in one's workplace, is a characteristic of many many left and progressive organizations and NGOs, and yes, as a former worker at a few of them in the past I would say that's an exploitative framework. Nonetheless, the work needs to get done, and those of us who worked or worked in those kinds of organizations know that nobody's drawing a "fat cat" salary and the budget is constrained. We get it done, and rarely complain about it, because we believe in the services, the message, the organization's work as being valuable.

What alternatives are you prepared to offer, Snert? I'm sure the folks at rabble would love to hear them.

The two big business and pro-bankster parties would love to find people who will work for free. Similarly, war hawks would prefer not to have to pay mercenaries to destabilize various countries and private security outfits, launder drug money for covert ops etc when  waging war on poor people around the world.

And I think the rightwing will step up efforts to privatize the internet and create "smart" internet at great cost as opposed to building a speedier and freer dumb one. I think donating ones' time and money to leftwing internet causes will be a labour of love for some, just as the Spanish Republicans, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Cuban campesinos, and Vietnamese NVA donated their sweat, blood, and tears to fighting imperialists at the gates. It's a war on democracy, comrades, and youve all been drafted like it or not.

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What alternatives are you prepared to offer, Snert? I'm sure the folks at rabble would love to hear them.

I would suggest that Rabble's paid staff go on strike and demand to be paid for their labour.

Failing that, I suppose I'd suggest that if Rabble lacks the money to pay its employees, maybe it's time to cut back a little on the expansion and the advertising and the sponsorships and the free prizes until such time as revenues are sufficient to pay staff. A lot of babblers seem to say they liked the old software fine, for example. I wonder if not upgrading might have left sufficient funds to pay employees fairly?

What I find funny (and your response emphasizes this) is how it's totally OK for a progressive site like Rabble to do this. Anyone else expecting their employees to work free overtime is evil. Rabble is, evidently, exempt, presumably because "they have to". How important does the cause have to be before it's no longer necessary to treat employees fairly or to practice what you preach?

What Maysie said.  Sure, it's problematic, but say we all go on strike for more wages.  That basically means the site is shut down, because almost all of the revenues we generate go to our wages.  (And yes, that includes the salaries of our technical team who implemented the redesign).

None of us who work for rabble depend on it as our full-time income.  Not even our publisher, who is also paid part-time, works full-time, and does the lion's share of the revenue generation.  And she's the first one to forgo her paycheque if there hasn't been enough raised at the end of the month.

rabble.ca is basically an activist project.  It requires some paid positions because they require more time than most of us can donate for free.  But we also put in a lot of volunteer hours because we also consider it activist work and a project that we believe in.  We know that's the nature of the business.  There's no "management" making all the money while the workers are asked to volunteer their time.  We all volunteer our time because rabble wouldn't exist if we didn't.

Maysie wrote:

Issues I deal with include being proactive about staff burn out rates, frustration, as well as chronic budget issues and staff being underpaid for the sector (my sector isn't media by the way). 

Why not take a Rae Day like the National Ghost, I mean, Post? And I'm sure some of us have worked for private enterprise outfits where taking a mental health day off wasnt out of the question. Sounds like Rabblers need to schedule a safety meeting.

Very well.  I had assumed that money was spent sponsoring events, and that rabble advertised, but if not then my mistake.  And as long as everyone is OK with volunteering, I'm not the one to tell them they shouldn't be (though the article kind of made it sound like perhaps the long hours + no pay was starting to wear thin).

Wayne MacPhail wrote:

Snert, what level of financial support do you currently offer rabble.ca?

I'm sorry, but this is a bullshit response. Are people that don't pay income tax not permitted to criticize the government? I'm not particularly enamoured with Snert's line of questioning, but I do have criticisms and concerns about rabble's 'business model' and to be bullied into silence because I don't donate enough cash to the cause is 100% bullshit.

Catchfire, what's bullshit is people jumping to erroneous conclusions about the motivations and management of rabble. All the non-staff board members volunteer their time, offer additional pro bono consultation and other free work and/or contribute writing. So, we are exploiting ourselves I suppose. We all do this because it is a cause not just a job. Ill-informed discussions like this just drain the spirit a bit.

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Catchfire, what's bullshit is people jumping to erroneous conclusions about the motivations and management of rabble

Scrutiny of organizations and their management seems generally well tolerated here, if not perhaps even encouraged. Are you saying that Rabble should be exempt from this?

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Ill-informed discussions like this just drain the spirit a bit.

Ya. When people suggest that my employer should treat me more fairly, sometimes I just want to throw in the towel. I'll try to refrain from any such suggestions.

I guess all that's left is the awkard business of the cheque.  That was two comments in this post.  What's that going to set me back?  Do you do Interac?

Wayne MacPhail wrote:

Catchfire, what's bullshit is people jumping to erroneous conclusions about the motivations and management of rabble. All the non-staff board members volunteer their time, offer additional pro bono consultation and other free work and/or contribute writing. So, we are exploiting ourselves I suppose. We all do this because it is a cause not just a job. Ill-informed discussions like this just drain the spirit a bit.

Wayne, all this could have been said--indeed, as Maysie and Michelle did above--without the tacky implication that those who criticize rabble.ca's 'business model' need to pony up some cash before their voices are heard.

I do agree that it is an interesting problem, and LTJ brings up an interesting suggestion that the decline of journalism we've seen in recent years is a result of big news agencies' inability to maintain robust newsrooms. Obviously, the vast majority of babblers want to see rabble as a legitimate tonic to that problem. But there are questions as to how to achieve that.

For example, what do we make of your assertion, Wayne, that rabble's structure is in fact unsustainable? I think there is something to the fact that rabble relies on stretched labour to survive, and that big news chains make these same arguments when they lay off local journalists in favour of news wires. I don't think that this is any reflection on the motives of rabble's management, of course, but doesn't it at least question the path? Your response in the article is packed with truisms and generalities:

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We should grow our own, and think local. We should cover ourselves, take civic responsibility to inform ourselves and our neighbours and not depend on large, expensive and unwieldy newsrooms to do it for us. Many of them have clanked and bellowed ungently into their good nights.

That doesn't mean we should undervalue, or ignore the experience and expertise that goes into longer form, longer-to-do investigative journalism. Far from it. Part of the additional funding news sites like rabble needs should be earmarked to hire shop-worn journalists to do what they do best. But, there is a lot of day-to-day journalism we can all participate in.

Who will train these journalists? Isn't this also a bit disingenuous since many (most?) of the stories rabble picks up (for free) are first published in for-profit publications? 'Think local' is an appealing concept, but how does it apply to international stories?

The Guardian is still putting out high quality, skeptical journalism, although their liberal business model still raises some questions. It seems to me that the only real alternative to LaPointe's model is citizen journalism, but not for an organization like rabble, but organizations like DailyKos, EmptyWheel, or from individuals like the AngryArab who give us learned, local perspecives on stories the average citizen is unable to break into and the larger media chains are unwilling to stray from the status quo. Otherwise, aren't we just building mini-Posts?

I'd be willing to assume that there's more ways to be compensated in a collective endeavor such as Rabble.  In seeing motivation and dedication examined soley in terms of a weekly pay cheque, does it feel like having one's bare pocket picked?

Farmpunk wrote:

Snert wants to "scrutinize" rabble.  Great.  Get a blog and snert away.  Rabble ain't the government, Catchfire, so I think MacPhail is being perfectly reasonable to fire questions back at an anonymous poster who feels it's his\her duty to scrutinize and criticize rabble when all it's doing is providing news, info, and a place to hang and hack - for free.

LOL, I agree.

Who is "its management", Snert?  Just curious.

"We should grow our own, and think local. We should cover ourselves, take civic responsibility to inform ourselves and our neighbours and not depend on large, expensive and unwieldy newsrooms to do it for us. Many of them have clanked and bellowed ungently into their good nights."

This has occurred to me when thinking of the plights of London's two media outlets, the Free Press and "A Channel".   These outfits were bought, and probably still struggle against their share  of debt due to the corporate idea of media "synergies".     Thing is, both made money when the city and surrounding area was a third of it's current size or even smaller.  Of course, technologies and business has changed, and that's added stress.    But, I think both are still viable now, and can be into the future.

However, they can't take Wayne's model, because in order to "save money" they've come to relly less on local news, but instead import more from the corporate overlord.

The Freeps has been running imported editorials from Toronto now for over a year. Readers and viewers don't like this, and it's continued their downward slides. I think it has to do with the people in the medium not understanding their medium. 

I make a point of listening to Terry O'Rielly's "Age of Persuasion" on CBC radio.  O'Rielly said he likes radio the best because there's an intimacy with the listener you don't get with any other medium.  His understanding of that makes the show not only informative, but a tactile experience.

Seems to me that people in all these various mediums want to concentrate on someone else's medium, instead of concentrating on what they know. 

They need to think inside the box.

Farmpunk wrote:

I thought LTJ's point was more along the line that the msm is doing the work that no one on the net is currently.  Doesn't most of our ground level news come from the msm, which is then turned around by legions of bloggers and netsperts into something they claim as their own?

That was indeed my point.

That said, I don't believe that the MSM was suffering from a decline in revenues while they closed local newsrooms (of course, in the last few months the decline in revenue is real, but the trend is a decade old).

It goes back to the glory days of 'media convergence', and their insane spending sprees. Local journalism was cut to pay for Conrad Black's dreams of empire, and the follies of BellGlobeMedia.

I'll parrot T-P's line of thinking.  The Free Press made money and used to be decent.

I never said it was ever decent. 

Seriously, I remember people like me used to grumble over the London Free Press/CFPL T.V./ CFPL A.M./ F.M. 96 Blackburn owned monopoly.  Now,  we'd have it back compared to the media monopolies we have now.

It's difficult to view the effects of Quebecor buying local papers, or CTV buying, and now shedding, the "A Channels" as anything but vandalism.

Speaking of which, CTV announced today-- in bitter and passive aggressive language-- that they are selling three of the "A Channels" to Shaw communications.  And said the remaining two-- which must be London-- will not seek licence renewal this August.

Price of the three "A Channels"? A dollar each.

Maybe for the price of a small Tims, we can pick up the London station, Farmpunk. Or, should I say, Vice President Farmpunk?

http://www.am980.ca/home/News/GeneralNewsDetail/tabid/967/Default.aspx?i...

And while a lot of people laugh at Rogers news and local programs, and the reliance on volunteers, it's also the some of the best local news in London, for instance, while it's up against the well funded and staffed (at least until the last round of layoffs) "A" London.

I think I mentioned before that George Clark, who does a lot of the news at the Roger's station (last time I looked) started in the mail room at CFPL T.V. 

And, that's what's missing in the picture.    There will be local T.V. stations and newspapers that survive all the pressures that exist today.  But, in order to survive they need the flexibility that corporate ownership does not allow.   It also needs a living connection to the community that corporate ownership has destroyed or ignored.

If Shaw was smart, they'd take a very hands off ownership style on the three stations they picked up.