Tag: publishing

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Pay (Molly) What You Want

Molly White is a writer. Wait, she’s an amazing writer. You may know her from Web3 is Going Just Great which is “a project to track some examples of how things in the blockchains/crypto/web3 technology space aren’t actually going as well as its proponents might like you to believe”.

She also does a newsletter called [citation needed] which (critically) covers cryptocurrency, AI, and other issues in the tech industry.

For [citation needed] she offers a Pay What You Want model. Here’s an excerpt from the about page:

All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choose to pay for a subscription or not.

That said, paid subscribers are crucial to allowing me to continue doing this kind of research and writing, and so if you are able to support my work I would be immensely grateful. You will also get access to additional features including commenting.

I understand that not everyone is willing or able to support at the same rate, so I’ve set up a system to allow you to pay what you want. The suggested rate is $10/month or $100/year, which comes out to around $2.50 a newsletter just for the weekly recaps — less when you factor in the additional deep dives and special editions. But whatever you want to or can afford to pay is just fine with me, and deeply appreciated.

There’s a bit more on the about page to read, but I really wanted to include the above text. (The rest of the page is mostly about Molly and her credentials.)

This is how I want it to work. This is the Pay What You Want method, and I think it can work… because it does work.

I subscribe (and by that I mean pay) for a number of publications in Milwaukee. Mainly Urban Milwaukee, OnMilwaukee, and I think The Recombobulation Area. (Note I said I think because I can’t remember if I signed up so I need to recheck that. I’m not a fan of Substack, which Dan uses, but I still want to support him.)

Of the above, only The Recombobulation Area is a one-person shop, and the other two are large(r) organizations with full staffs. They both do ads, and that’s fine, they need to do so, but I will pick either of them over the old guard of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or any of the local TV stations who usually offer a healthy mix of too many ads and poor design.

Sorry, back to Pay (Molly) What You Want! I should find more examples of this concept. I remember when I got in touch with a news organization that offered subscriptions because they published one really great story, and I wanted to support them. They told me I could subscribe for $99 per year. That was it. They had no option for a one-time donation or a Pay What You Want option, which is sad. I would have immediately subscribed for $1 per month, and maybe increased that if more great stories were published, but they lost me.

I support Inkscape and OpenSCAD each month, and being able to choose the amount, or given more options on smaller amounts, is what got me in. If the options were too high I’d really have to weigh the decision, but $1 or $5 per month is a no-brainer for me.

Are there more people & organizations out there utilizing a Pay What You Want model?

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Why are you sharing things online?

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It’s 2023, and I think it’s a fair question… Why are you sharing things online?

If I look back to when I started sharing things online, which was probably around 1995 or so, it was because I was learning a lot from the Internet. I remember printing out this file at work that was probably 25 pages which was some Perl documentation. (Remember, this is before people had laptops or phones that could access the Internet.) I read those Perl docs when I was “offline” and when I would get back to a computer I would try things out. This is how I learned Perl, and I learned it because people were willing to write up documentation and post it online. Because others shared, I was able to learn, and from that point on I felt that sharing information and knowledge was something I wanted to do.

Of course this blog started in 1997, but I had been sharing a bit before that. A weblog (or “blog” as it was later named) seemed a perfect fit for me. I entered the publishing world as a hobby around 1986, and professionally in 1994. Moving from zines and magazines to electronic publishing seemed like the thing to do at the time. I also ended up working in book publishing for a bit, and the reason I got those gigs was due to publishing my work electronically on the Internet.

So for me, those two aspects; wanting to share what I learned so other could learn, and being involved in (and enjoying) publishing for most of my life… are the reasons I share.

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Photo… Published!

If you pick up the April 2011 issue of Milwaukee Magazine, and flip to page 60, you’ll see one of my photos.

Neat!

It’s neat, but it’s also weird for me. You see, I interned at Milwaukee Magazine in 1993, and ended up working for QuadCreative (and while at QC I also did work for Milwaukee Magazine, in fact I’m pretty sure I built the first web sites for both organizations.)

So anyway, in the process of working at QuadCreative I met Cory Zimmermann, who is part of Z2 Marketing and Z2 Photo, and one of the big reasons I know what I do about photography.

To clarify, this isn’t some inside job… The person at Milwaukee Magazine had no idea who I was, and it was just a coincidence that I once worked there (I left in 2000) and just happened to stumble across the photo on Flickr and thought it would work for the article.

I don’t know if it’s becoming less cool to see your work in print now that (almost) everything is digital, but hey, I come from the publishing world (of paper!) and I still think it’s cool to see an actual printed magazine with one of my photos in it.

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Green Day vs. The Knack

Through a strange set of circumstances (isn’t it always that way on the Internet) I came across this archive of zines, which included a PDF of Massive Zine #1, which I contributed to…

Here’s the piece I wrote, in all it’s scanner and JPG’d glory…

Massive Zine

I also contributed a bunch of full-page graphics to Massive Zine #2 (PDF) which I won’t show here because they aren’t nearly as funny…

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Musings on publishing and copyrights

I’m never sure if I think about these issues more because I’ve been involved in publishing for over 20 years, or if it’s because I’m a big fan of Creative Commons, or because I create music and images… or maybe it’s a combination of all those things…

Chances are, if you are reading this blog, that you are a publisher too. Most us are nowadays… If you have a blog, or a Flickr account, or upload videos to the web, you are a publisher. So my question to you is, do you think about the rights of others when you publish something you created, and incorporate their work?

I’ve seen it too many times in videos… someone puts together the visuals, the part they created, and then grabs some artist’s song to drop on top of it. Often it will be a song from a well known artist, used without permission. People often say “I’m not making money from it” or “It’s just for fun, no one is really going to see it” but saying those things dismisses the value of the artist’s work, and missed the fact that by publishing, you are showing it to the world.

Worse yet, is when people do this and re-license the work. Sorry, but you can’t just grab some Foo Fighter’s song, use it in your video, and put it under a Creative Commons license… or can you?

This is where I think things get a little gray. I mean, my old pal Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles often uses material in his shows that have different licenses, and makes note of it in the show. So while the portions of his show he creates are under a specific license of his choosing, other parts (often songs) are not.

So the question is, can you create a work, put it under a license, and use material from different licenses in it? We start to see that whole “infection” thing they talk about in the software world.

I don’t have the answer to this, and it’s one of the continually nagging parts of licensing, and copyright, and Creative Commons I think about.