The final two years of my 25-year career in journalism, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out a way to prolong my career. I explored starting a news non-profit, tested out the viability of for-profit newsletters, and dreamed of getting back to the old ways that I had experienced as an alt-weekly journalist.
None of them made sense.
Not financially. Not creatively. And, most importantly, not from a customer perspective.
Simply put: readers simply aren’t demanding the type of products I knew how to produce and which I had led award-winning teams to create for two decades.
Thanks to the internet, there were, and are, too many options for readers to choose from. And to make matters worse, today’s readers either can’t tell the difference between pay-to-play content or don’t care. The latter, unfortunately, is the most likely.
One of the final straws came when I interviewed with a large chain and was told they had already begun using AI to write news articles, and they were pleased with the results. In addition, this same chain told me that not only would I have to put in a full day’s work five days, but I’d be required to attend, host, or participate in after-hours events on a weekly basis. Of course, it goes without saying that this was a news organization that wanted its writers and editors to publish breaking news throughout the day and evening. Clicks were all that mattered.
Having lived that life before, and having demanded it of my writers, I had no desire to go back to that.
During that time, I rarely spent time with my family, I lived under the constant threat of being fired for some minor mistake or laid off because I was the highest paid member of the editorial team. I was drowning in debt, I had developed OCD and anxiety, I drank into the wee hours, I no longer had time to exercise, and I had devolved into a click bait beast who was always looking for a new hot take to drive traffic. But I could have dealt with all of that if I thought there was a future, any future, in the business for the next 20+ years of my working life. There wasn’t. If pay-to-play news outlets weren’t going to be the end of journalism, then AI certainly would be.
Around this time, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a journalism-only problem. It was a problem for all content creation, whether that content was news or music or literature or visual art or radio or YouTube, or hell, porn. Each one was flush with creators and most were, and still are, hacks. They don’t produce content as much as they co-op other people’s art.They don’t create new work or break new stories, they comment on them.
Gone were the days when a band could have a hit record and be set or a new novelist could publish a best-seller and give up their job as a teacher. Over with.
Outside of large corporate IP — or Taylor Fucking Swift — the commercial value of art and journalism was quickly approaching zero.
And so, I left the industry entirely. But I didn’t give up writing. I just changed the reasons why I did it. Web traffic? State-wide political notoriety? Hate from my enemies, love from my fans? None of it. I decided the only path forward was to write for myself.
Of course, that would be with an audience in mind. But the audience was no longer one of the main focuses. And neither was working my tail off so someone else could live a cushy life, throwing around cash while their so-called family of employees scraped by. Fuck that.
So, if you’re angry about the arrival of AI and worried that it will make it impossible to survive solely on the wages of creation alone, I hate to say it, but that day arrived a long time ago for a lot of folks. Many of whom are vastly superior to those living large, whether that’s as a star writer for the New York Times, a currently hot musician, or a genre novelist whose work is regularly optioned by Hollywood.
Their time is coming. They just don’t know it yet.
As for me, I’ll write for myself.
I never expect to get paid.
In fact, I don’t care if I do or not.
In fact, you’ll find that whatever I do next, I’ll charge readers exactly what my work is worth: nothing.
The exact same as yours.
WYATT DUVALL 