The friction point

I'm a blessed man. By sheer cosmic coincidence and divine intervention I have been blessed with in-laws who not only share my interests and values but largely work in the same field as I do. My brother-in-law is a technical director for a local television news station and my sister-in-law is a writer for numerous publications, including the Houston Chronicle (where I also write a couple of blogs). How this happened is beyond me, but I takes my blessings where I gets 'em.

The fact that we work in the same industry makes it easy for us to slip into conversations about our jobs. And last night, as we sat by the pool sipping a glass of wine and watching my nieces defy the odds and live through various near misses with the concrete edge, the topic of "dilution" came up.

Our careers are suffering from a glut of under-trained and over-eager personnel.

We, the three of us, are actually trained in what we do. As writers we each went through both the education system and the "school of hard knocks" to learn, hone and refine our craft. And sure, I mix up the occasional "its" and "it's," even after twenty some-odd years of professional writing, but I've earned the right to a mechanics mistake every now and then. The same can be said for television and film production. I put a lot of sweat, blood and tears into learning the trade. No one bought me a camera and a computer to play with. I had to beg, borrow and... well, you get the idea.

Now, though, it's become almost impossible to make a living as a writer OR a producer. At least as an independent, anyway.

Try this little experiment - open another browser window (because we wouldn't want you surfing away from THIS column, now would we!), go to your favorite (Google) search engine (Google) and type ANYTHING. And yes, "anything" is an acceptable search term to use if you're stuck for ideas.

Now read.

You won't have any trouble performing this experiment because you'll likely get a few million hits on whatever term you chose. There were 414 million hits on the term "anything" alone. That's a lot of verbiage floating around, readable free of charge. And the majority of it was written by people who made nothing on it. They weren't writing for profit, just fun. And that, my friends, typifies my conundrum.

How do you make a living as a writer when there are so many people doing the work for free?

Now go to YouTube. I don't even have to be clever here. Just visiting the URL gives you at least half a dozen shorts made by people with video cameras and computers that I would have killed for only ten years ago. With the advent of "prosumer" cameras, which can produce broadcast and even feature-film quality video, anyone can pick up and do the things I do to make a living.

And that, dear readers, is why it has become increasingly difficult to turn a buck in this industry.

Now, that is a problem for the professional in this industry, but it's not "the end." Because every new problem opens up new avenues of solutions to explore. What's happening, right before our eyes, is an evolution of an industry that was dominated by "experts" for decades. The amateur can now stake a claim in territory that was out of reach and off-limits before. But that doesn't make this old dinosaur into oil just yet. We're now at the friction point. Now it's "evolve or die."

As "writing" and "production" become more accessible to the layperson we're starting to see NEW industries arise. For example, YouTube. Who could have predicted, back even in the mid-90's, that a web site where anyone can create and share their videos and films would ever be practical? The compression software that makes video sites a reality came as a direct result of the layperson wanting to share his or her vision with the world. And with these new compression techniques have come new technologies such as High Definition television and DVDs.

From the writer's side of the table, "blogging" has become a more reliable source for news and information, in many respects, than the established news outlets. And writers who would otherwise have toiled in obscurity forever now have an outlet for their creative angst. A whole new publishing industry, books based on blogs, has cropped up. And sites like Wikipedia, a user-written encyclopedia that reflects the sum-total of human knowledge, have become a reality. It's like having the Library of Alexandria in digital form.

Yes, it's become tough to make a living as a writer and a producer. Not impossible, but tough. And yes, I might have to find a new line of work. But I'm actually ok with that. In fact, all of this sudden evolution has opened up vast new countries for me to explore. All I have to do is ask the right questions, focus on the right problem, and think outside of the normal rules and routines I've known throughout my life and I can conceive of a new industry, a new means of thriving in our ever evolving world.

When life hands you lemons, blog about them.

J. Kevin Tumlinson is the Editor of ViewOnline Magazine and a Producer for Hat Digital Media. His blog, "Making Movies" appears on the Houston Chronicle web site daily. He is blogging about lemonade right this second.

posted by Unknown @ 6:06 AM