I read an insightful blog by Lorie Parch recently ("Forget the content farm; meet the "content garden'"), discussing the concepts of content farms and content gardens -- places where clients and the general public can harvest lots of content, including a mix of professional and not-so-professional authors.
Parch is a professional writer behind contentsuperstars.com, and she wrote about the continued devaluation of professional writing, and professional writers.
I could not agree more. I have watched for several years as a legion of new tuitorial start-ups and online information centers have cropped up, all offering minimum wage rates for content producers -- not writers; content producers.
The most unfortunate aspect to this trend is that the general public is in many cases being sold a pig in a poke when they subscribe to such sites. They all claim to offer only quality content. That isn't possible under this business model.
Parch is correct when she notes in her blog that content isn't king. The demand these days by many of these new ventures seems to be content for its own sake -- no matter how original, how well written, or how valuable to the reader.
As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for, and content sites that pay meager wages get writers that deserve meager wages -- not experienced writers and editors that have true subject area expertise.
To prove my point, I invite you to check out the listings on Craigslist.com in ANY city, and look under writing and editing job opportunities. Clearly it requires little if any experience to get many of these new writing gigs.
I invite other professional writes and editors to check out Parch's blog, which can be found at...
http://contentsuperstars.com/2011/08/forget-the-content-farm-meet-the-%E2%80%9Ccontent-garden%E2%80%9D/
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