John Harris writes:

Online tipping is now spreading fast – and beyond music services. With a view to familiarising people with spending money inside their domains, most of the big internet companies are joining in. Twitter has just launched a feature called Tip Jar, aimed at channelling donations to “creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits”. YouTube is expanding a feature called Applause that does the same for its influencers and video-makers; the new audio app Clubhouse, recently valued at $1bn, has introduced a tipping tool to “help creators build community, audience, and impact”. For some people, such words might ring true. But they also have a familiar sense of tech players trying to sidestep big questions about the dissolving of creativity into “content” and what that entails for thousands of people’s earnings, as the number of genuine “creatives” able to earn a living from their work seems to dwindle, something clearly accelerated by the Covid crisis.

The story extends from tipping into the ever-expanding world of platform-based writing. While traditional magazines and newspapers endlessly hit the skids and their collegiate, team-based model of journalism goes with them, an increasing number of writers and presenters now compete for individual donations and subscriptions via such platforms as Patreon and Substack. Particularly on the latter, the money earned by the most successful people seems impressive – but thousands more do their work for very little return at all.

Moreover, just as streaming favours wham-bam pop songs with the shortest of intros and an infectious hook built into every bar, these services are not centred on the kind of dogged reporting that requires serious resources, but commentary and polemic (as the British writer Helen Lewis recently put it: “shoe-leather reporting, deep investigations, and FOIA requests … rarely drive clicks by the million”). This is one of the reasons, perhaps, why we live in an age that is generating a lot more heat than light. [Continue reading…]