Southwell’s Word Emporium

For most of my media career I have been an editor or curator of content rather than a writer.

I’d like to change that.

Being, as always, 20 years behind the curve I am starting a blog, but a blog with ambitions.

At its centre is one of the most absurd ambitions a modern writer could secretly harbour.

I want to be paid.

Yes, that’s right … paid!

I don’t want to add items to my “portfolio” but to receive, even in a minor and hopefully one day more substantial way, money for what I write.

The problem with the internet (I am here to tell you, Sonny Jim, so put on your “being lectured to spats”) is its inventors were hippy dippy let’s “make-everything-free-for-everyone-and-create-a-better-world-with-sprinklings-of moonbeams” types.

While this was admirable and has been, on the whole, a boon for humanity, the digital world is just the real world… digitized.

It obeys the same rules of human behaviour and economics.

Creating a “commons”, where no one was paid meant nothing was of relative value.

Hence this post “sells” at the same rate NYT or Times of London ones once did – until they were paywalled.

As human beings are endlessly economically inventive and driven it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to make money from the digital commons.

This was largely and ingeniously done by using the thing the internet magnetically attracted – people and their need to interact.

Obviously, the place you go to interact most widely is the place most people go.

This creates its own momentum, leading to giant arenas such as Facebook, which gained enough traction (people) to survive the market’s ruthless cull.

Google worked out that the best way to make sense of the sprawling, otherwise impossibly disparate, internet was to find out where most people were going and send more people there.

Thus monopolies or oligopolies grew and took over the “commons” – as was inevitable.

The thing being sold, or sigh… monetised in tech marketing speak, was the content people provided – for, and get this! – nothing!

This has had serious repercussions for the “old media”, a topic for another day(s).

It also means free writing is available from a million amateurs and even professionals.

I realise it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to buck this trend, even in my small way.

We have been socialised to expect free content, and that includes me.

If I can find a way around a paywall, I will, as I did yesterday to read this absolute corker of an AFR piece by Pru Goward.

But of course there is no such thing as a free lunch, or a hilarious bit of unintentional parody, the best description I think of for Mrs Goward’s wonderful contribution.

My aim, after seeing how popular I can make my free blog, is to be paid even if a nominal amount.

In time, I may invite other writers to contribute but always with the principle they will be paid.

My site’s motto, I hope, will be: “You’ll pay for that” or perhaps “Making words count”.

I have an analogue steam-powered brain, so have always struggled with tech.

As far as I know the internet works by having lots of little men carrying around pixels, a bit like the Doozers.

So the “making people pay” mechanics are yet to be worked out. I am happy to take suggestions.

I know there are other places that do this sort of thing, such as Medium or Substack, but I want to try my own thing.

Using the same principle as a drug pusher at an inner city school playground I will for a while dole out product for free, as a market test to see if there are enough takers.

Since reactivating what had been my dormant Twitter account I have sent out at least 17K tweets.

Probably 90% of them have been to fight the good fight to reclaim Victoria from a political organisation that suffocates the state like, to borrow Matt Taibbi’s phrase, a malignant vampire squid.

I like to write about politics – obviously the Covid situation – from a classical liberal point of view with seasoning dollops of crusty conservatism.

However, I want to write about many other things. I might even throw that open to a vote.

I will mainly promote my posts from Twitter, which for now can also serve as the “comments section” and please give feedback there.

I’ll still be on Twitter otherwise, making mean comments about Lisa Wilkinson and Peter Fitzsimons because, the Twitter data tells me, that’s what the people want.

Giving people what they want and finding out what they will pay for it is the only economic system that works in any decent way.

Alright let’s get on.