Stuart Dredge has written about the recent online row about paying journalists. The short of the story is Nate Thayer was asked to repurpose an article for The Atlantic for no money, and countless toys were rapidly thrown out of countless prams by countless writers, bloggers and people who just really like throwing toys out of prams.

Dredge is calmer than most, and argues against the commonplace default position these days that people should always be paid for writing.

My wife and I have a site called Apps Playground, about children’s apps, which is profitable (to the tune of £20-£30 of App Store affiliate fees a month, once hosting costs are deducted) as long as you don’t factor in the time we spend writing it. So we’re writing for free, but it’s our own thing.

If someone – say a big technology site like TechCrunch or Mashable – asked me to write the kind of stuff I do for The Guardian for them for free, would I? Obviously no. If they asked me to do a guest piece for free in my role as Apps Playground co-founder, with a link to the site? Obviously yes. Different hats.

On the surface, this looks similar to the regular ‘write for us in return for exposure’ offer every seasoned writer I know gets from publications on a fairly regular basis. As Dredge notes, writing for free is about the trade-off—whether or not you will potentially see more overall long-term value/income in return for giving away some of your time.

That said, this is looking at things from an individual’s viewpoint rather than a wider context. When publications—especially online—trend towards unsustainable rates (or in many cases, no rates), everyone’s individual one-off potentially leads to a situation where no-one gets paid. As someone who’s almost entirely a professional writer these days, that scares the shit out of me. Having been doing this gig for well over a decade now, with (so far) precisely no editors hunting me down and repeatedly punching me in the face while yelling about inaccurate use of interrobangs, I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of things. But even so, it’s hard to see how it’s possible in the long term to compete against free, if that’s the way things go.

Dredge notes:

Perhaps, too, there are simply too many journalists, and new digital economics mean we’ll have to work harder and scrap smarter to stay in the game. There’s an interesting parallel with musicians here, I think, which is probably a separate article in itself.

He may well be right. Perhaps the entire creative sector is moving towards an end point where the vast majority of those within it—even those who’d previously had long and healthy careers—simply won’t be able to survive. Writing, music, and other creative endeavours could become little more than hobbyist pastimes, filling an hour in an evening before the creator goes to bed, ready for another day doing a ‘proper’ job, whatever that might be. That doesn’t so much horrify me as make me incredibly sad. If we cannot find a place and see value in creative tasks, I think we’ll be poorer for it and publications/other outlets will increasingly become unfocussed; however, perhaps with more people having a voice, diversity will flourish, great new creators will break through, and people will start once again thinking about paying directly to read, watch or hear more work from them, rather than waiting until they’ve a spare evening to craft something new.

Update: Gary Marshall adds his thoughts.

In my role as games editor for Tap! magazine, I see and download more iOS games than most people, and so when trends occur, they tend to be very apparent to me. One that’s very much in full flow is the lardy iOS game. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable for an iOS game to have a very large file-size, if it has a ton of art and other assets, but some recent downloads strike me as utterly crazy. Puzzle Quest 2—essentially a match-three game—weighs in at 576 MB. Worms Crazy Golf HD clocks in at 436 MB—for a side-on artillery game! (By contrast, the similar Super Stickman Golf is an eighth of that size.) And there are many other examples.

The problem is, things get worse on the device, because the app download is only half the story—the buggers then decompress on your device, since app bundles are essentially ZIP files. And then this happens:

• Modern Combat 3: 1.75 GB
• The Oregon Trail for iPad: 1.22 GB
• Puzzle Quest 2: 1.22 GB
• Worms Crazy Golf HD: 995 MB
• Infinity Blade (previously impressively svelte, but no longer): 923 MB
• Street Fighter IV Volt: 876 MB

And then there are countless fairly simple games racking up space into the hundreds of megabytes, often due to poor compression and a lack of interest in efficiency. A good point of comparison are the iOS ZX Spectrum emulators. Elite’s ZX Spectrum collection for iPad is well over 100 MB but the universal Spectaculator is just 19 MB when decompressed. Both apps are essentially the same, enabling you to play ancient Spectrum games on your device. Cracking open the app bundles reveals major differences in approach, though: Elite’s app is packed with hefty PNG files (each up to 2 MB in size—two thirds of the executable file, which is only 2.9 MB), used as full-screen backgrounds for every game’s selection screen. They make the app a little prettier, but also hugely increase its weight. Similar fairly pointless additions affect other iOS games, too, such as Namco’s Galaga collection, which weighs in at 144 MB, in part due to a pointless ‘you’ll only watch this once’ 36 MB movie being included in the app bundle. For good measure, all the jingles are WAV files, so you get 20-second clips of music weighing in at 1.5 MB or so each, rather than relatively tiny MP3s.

Most platforms tend towards bloat as developers learn new tricks and push them in terms of presentation, but iOS has two massive problems in this regard: devices have fixed storage, and updates must be downloaded in full. On the first of those points, if you have an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone, you cannot add extra storage. If your device is fairly full, are you going to delete a ton of games, music and apps to make way for the latest bloated ‘epic’, or are you going to think “sod that” and just download a smaller, sleeker game instead? (This, of course, makes the assumption people actually bother to look at such details; it’s more likely that many download games and only then get annoyed when they realise it wants to grab a fifteenth of their device’s storage, and that there’s no easy way of making room. And I’ll bet only a fraction of iOS device owners who do check app sizes in App Store listings realise apps decompress when on the device—Apple really should be listing expanded app sizes as well as download sizes.) On the second point, once you have a bunch of games, what then when updates appear? It’s all very well downloading a few updates for small apps, but those listed earlier in this article total several GB. If you’re on capped broadband, that’s a huge chunk of your monthly allowance; even if you’re not, you can tie up your bandwidth downloading such colossal games, thereby annoying other people in your household.

I can’t really see things changing. As iOS matures as a gaming platform, a large number of developers are getting sucked in by ‘realism’, ‘gloss’ and ‘3D’. Over time, we’re going to see more—not fewer—games that are in excess of 1 GB to download, and even larger on devices. But sooner or later, people are going to get sick of not being able to load new games, and of massive updates, and they’re just not going to bother. At that point, it’s the devs that care that should win out; and it’s not quite like the old days of squeezing every byte out of a VIC-20—all you’re really having to do is think a bit about your assets and the formats you use, which is a very slight compromise to your vision, in order to improve the practical side of user experience.

See, this is the problem with sites that depend on eyeballs rather than sites that just happen to quite like eyeballs. The former needs HITS HITS HITS and churns out any old article that, too often, ends up with a quality level akin to a cunning anagram of the capitalised text earlier in this sentence. A case in point: MacRumors. Now, I sometimes like MacRumors, and I earlier today linked to a great piece on OS X sandboxing. So how is this followed up? With a load of unsubstantiated crap, based on claims by ‘sources’ that spoke to Digitimes—presumably, the same kind of ‘sources’ that have been so stunningly accurate about everything Apple in recent years.

To be fair to MacRumors, the site’s reason for existence is in its name, but, just once, I wish one of these sites would start pushing out informative, interesting analysis, rather than reporting any old crap that comes their way and misinterpreting it. From the latest post:

Digitimes claims that Apple is going to “completely overhaul” its product lineups in 2012. The site specifically lists the iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air lines.

MacRumors then quotes the following from the original Digitimes report:

Apple plans to completely overhaul its product lineups, including iPad, iMac, iPhone and MacBook Air, in 2012 and is expected to finalize order volumes for key parts and components for the next-generation iPad in December, according to sources in the upstream supply chain.

And comes to the following conclusion:

We interpret the report to mean new designs for the listed product lines.

I interpret things slightly differently: Digitimes, which far too often just flings bullshit guesswork about Apple on to the internet, has just flung some bullshit guesswork on to the internet. Maybe Apple will or won’t redesign some of its products next year, but unless you’ve got some solid, hard facts, please just stop reporting on rumours that have no substance.

Arnold Kim has written a great article for MacRumors about the upcoming sandboxing restrictions on OS X. I admit to not really thinking about this a great deal, but it’s clear Apple’s new approach could be a very big problem for any Mac user who uses anything beyond pretty basic apps:

Examples of Mac Apps that will be affected include iTunes controllers (Tagalicious, CoverSutra), inter-app communication (Fantastical), apps that browse the file system (Transmit), system-wide keyboard shortcut utilities (TextExpander), file syncing, and backups utilities.

From what I’d heard in the past, apps that require ‘deep’ system access and hacks were most at threat, but it’s clear that such access and hacks are actually pretty commonplace. For example, if apps that browse the file system (beyond, I suspect, Open/Save dialogs) are at threat from being booted out of the Mac App Store, that’s practically every app related to web design.

Jason Snell commented for Macworld about the plans:

Not only does this approach risk turning the Mac App Store into a wasteland of arcade games and one-trick-pony apps, it risks dumbing down the Mac app ecosystem as a whole.

What’s clear is that Snell might have been being optimistic here, since many of the very best one-trick-pony apps are those that provide extra functionality to existing apps. A case in point: I Love Stars, which shows a rating for the currently playing iTunes track in the menu bar and enables you to amend it by clicking dots/stars. It’s pretty depressing to think that even apps like this might soon disappear.

Snell:

While developers can always opt out of the Mac App Store, they’re reluctant to do so.

There are good reasons for this. First, most Mac users never buy new software, but Apple is using the Mac App Store to change this, training users to buy apps in much the same way it did on iOS. But I suspect it’ll be increasingly rare for people to stray beyond the store, and so if your app isn’t included, you risk losing a lot of sales. Secondly, I still suspect the Mac App Store is only temporarily an optional means of installing Mac software. At some point, it’s going to become the only way, perhaps with OS X Whatever 10.8 Is Called, in 2013. If this all comes to pass, we really will have seen a lot of iOS come back to the Mac—perhaps a bit too much.

Note: I’d welcome any comments from developers on this article, not least if I’m misinterpreting how things might come to pass next year on OS X.

Digital magazines still have adverts non-shock, a response to Marco Arment’s Double dipping, where he complained about adverts in iOS magazine apps, was one of the most-read and commented-on (and also divisive) things on this blog for months. Those in the publishing industry backed my stance, and readers tended to offer a range of opinions, from siding with Arment to agreeing wholeheartedly with me.

Arment has since followed up, clarifying some points and linking to an article by Nicolas Barajas, who attempts to guess at some costs and how digital magazines without adverts could be funded. Barajas initially has some good news, at least in theory:

With [my] figures — a staff of 29, 22 illustrations and five contributed works per issue — the bill due at the end of the year is $3,642,200. You’ll need just over 20K subscribers to break even.

I say “in theory”, because 20,000 subscribers would wipe out a fairly large chunk of the UK’s niche magazine industry in one fell swoop. In the US, magazines sometimes start panicking when circulations dip under 100,000, but UK niche mags rely less on subscriptions and more on retail, hence being able to survive with lower readership levels.

Anyway, Barajas then admits:

But in order to make the numbers a lot neater, I’ve eliminated a lot of basic things: There’s no talk of renting space; we haven’t actually built a website, iPad app, or content management system; maintenance and support costs for a server and subscription model haven’t been touched. We’ve assumed our writers submit nothing but flawless prose, thoroughly fact-checked and without a single typo or grammatical error.

And that is a problem. To be honest, for many of the mags I write for, the guesswork Barajas makes for editorial staff is a little excessive, but the lack of taking into account infrastructure of any sort means you’re talking 20,000 subscribers always being around to fund just the editorial content of his imaginary digital New Yorker—and that’s a big ask. Throw in infrastructure as well and that subscriber base would have to be much higher. That’s a bigger ask.

Arment’s response has been to change tack slightly:

[…] the bigger issue is that I actually don’t want all of that content. Obviously, this is a personal detail, and it’s not The New Yorker’s problem, but I skip the Goings On section and most of the Reviews. I don’t need most of the Talk, and I wouldn’t notice if half of the illustrations were missing. Less than half of the proposed staff is working on content that I’ll read: mainly, the feature articles.

He and others have hinted at magazines opening up their content and allowing cherry-picking. You’d pay just for the features you want to read, or for specific sections. In a sense, that’s more or less a commercialised Instapaper, so it’s no wonder Arment likes such an idea. It’s not something I’d dismiss out of hand, but I do wonder where that would leave the industry as a whole. There would certainly be a danger of ensuring every article would be commercially viable on its own, potentially reducing risk and following a more web-like ‘eyeballs are all that matter’ model. You’d lose ‘browsing’, hitting upon something you actually find interesting in a section you don’t often read, or about a subject you don’t usually find appealing. And rather than coherent publications geared towards certain demographics, you’d instead end up with an editor curating content for smaller and smaller niche markets.

It doesn’t sound very magazine-like—more, as I said, a commercial Instapaper or a bit like Kindle Singles. Perhaps that is what people want—I certainly don’t have any answers there. The one thing I do sense is that there’s a massive shift ahead for publishing, but no-one knows what it is yet. Until we find out, we’re going to continue seeing existing models being reworked slightly for digital, frustrating the likes of Arment and like-minded people, yet also delighting those who still enjoy magazines but don’t have space to store bound paper editions.