As if to add insult to injury, EW's announcement of layoffs came just a few days after its decision to open its "platform," i.e. the publication, to "the people formerly known as the audience." In regular human-speak, that means they want to get people to write for free so that they don't have to pay anyone to do it. Yes, publications have always employed interns who worked in exchange for bylines. But in the past, there was light at the end of the tunnel of white-collar indentured servitude. Interns were there to learn a trade, like apprentice plumbers or electricians. It was understood that at some point they'd go out into the world and be able to earn a living doing the thing they'd just spent months or years studying. They weren't being conditioned for a world in which every writer was basically an intern. As NPR's Linda Holmes observed, "the thing that's scary about the EW 'write for free' business model is that people used to write for free hoping to get paid by EW someday."



There are, I'm sure, many complex, overlapping and perhaps contradictory reasons why media companies have no interest in publishing properly compensated criticism by informed and seasoned writers. I don't pretend to understand all of them, although I suspect the die was cast in the late '90s, when newspapers and magazines bowed to tech gurus and prognosticators and started giving away their content. This made everyone—but particularly the younger generation—get used to thinking that writing was something they were entitled to have, like air or water; that it was not really valuable, indeed that it was not really work; that it was not really something that was "made"; that was not creative, and that for all these reasons it was not supposed to be compensated by anyone, not in any real sense—that it was, instead, a combination of entertainment and personal indulgence, something along the lines of an open mic night in print form, with people trying out "material," basking in the applause ("exposure"), and maybe picking up a little walking-around money. Like a violin player at a bus stop.



Whenever I dig into this topic, I get pushback from people who point out that the newspaper and magazine industries as we once knew them also employed mediocre or unoriginal writers and editors. Those people's inability to earn a living now, however personally devastating it may be to them and their families, is no great loss to readers, I'm told—or to the universe as a whole. That might be so. I can't imagine the coldness required to try to decide such a hypothetical question, so I'm just going to let it lie, except to say that I would happily live with knowledge of a 90% worthlessness rate in journalism if the tradeoff were employment for writers of Owen Gleiberman's caliber.



It's well and good to say that we critics should be doing it anyway, For the Love of It—that all this harshness is a test of our collective dedication, and we should look at criticism, or entertainment reporting, as a calling or an avocation, or maybe a hobby, and quit griping.

I would ask anyone who might say such a thing to take a look at their own profession and the paycheck they receive for practicing it, and ask how they would feel about being told that from now on they should do it just "for the love," with no hope of earning a proper living at it.



Yes, this is the way of the world. Yes, this is how things increasingly are done. I know. I get it.



It's still not right.