“Blogs are so over.”
A friend threw out this casual, but carefully sharpened, zinger a few weeks ago. Whether it was true or just partially true, it amused me to think how quickly we lived through the blog ‘moment’. How a medium so ubiquitous and necessary fifteen years ago to writers scrambling for diminishing opportunities, was now so blasé and dated that it almost felt odd to admit you currently had one.
I fought against being defined as a ‘blogger’ for years. Apart from the ugly sound of the word (which matters when one plays with language for a living), I was a writer, dammit, and I treasured the history, camaraderie, and craft inherent in the term.
So were my blogging colleagues for that matter. Even if they felt looked down upon by a Legacy Media contemptuously surveying the barbarians at the gate, they were still writers.
There were good writers and bad writers in that melee just as there had been in The Before Times. There was still a pecking order based loosely on experience, skill, or luck. We were simply writing in a modern medium, with fewer gatekeepers.
The Blog Heyday
There was a sense of freedom to be found in that undiscovered country. But there was also a price to be paid. Where the gatekeepers had once offered salaries, stipends, flat fees, respectability, and royalties for words that merited promotion from the scribbles on a writer’s desk (not to mention career paths for the Happy Chosen or the Persistent-as-Hell) the blogosphere offered….
Ah yes. The rub. Information for free. Photos for free. Ideas for free. Words for free.
In online publications, rates per word shrunk to a fraction of what they had been in The Before Times. Or they were eliminated all together in favor of free “exposure.” Various memes began to circulate in writer chat groups in response: “Exposure Bucks won’t pay the rent.” “Man cannot live on Exposure alone.” etc. They still circulate.
You can even get a tee shirt thanks to Atlanta-based graphic designer Sarah Lawrence (whose profession feels equal pressure). Click the shirt to get one for yourself.
Money for Words, or Money for Clicks?
Thus, writers, who had always expected to be poor, but never expected to defend the need to make a living, became bloggers who still had bills to pay, heavy new overhead costs to sort, a new skill set to master, and an unreasonable expectation of philanthropy to overcome.
Why shouldn’t they write for free? What was the value of words anyway? Write in your spare time. Write in your retired time. Write when you get off work. How terribly vulgar to insist that you be paid fairly if you wrote well. Didn’t everyone?
No. They didn’t. New industries that focused on blogging to elicit ad revenue made it clear that it wasn’t the words that mattered anymore, but eyeballs on ads. “You’ll need to pick your topic first.” counselled one popular site burned into my memory. “Pick something popular you are interested in.”
You’ll need to pick your topic first. I still remember reading that –as a garden writer looking for SEO advice — and feeling my stomach turn.
Where did that leave the writer who not only knew his topic, but was passionate about it? Scrambling, that’s where.
Free of Ads Doesn’t Mean It’s Free To Run
Yet it became obvious at that time that writers had to move online, whether they liked it or not. Though I still write for three local monthly newspapers, by and large, the voice of a trusted independent garden columnist in your struggling local and larger newspapers has for the most part disappeared in the last 15 years — replaced by cheaper-by-the-dozen AP articles that flood the country with homogenous, nameless, mediocracy.
Thankfully in the beginning, website hosting costs were low and as a bonus, my articles were still paid for by newspapers who granted me rights to publish as part of our agreements. I could keep my website free of ads. Now I am fortunate to write commissioned articles for large papers and magazines from time to time, but such rights are understandably impossible.
I rarely update my own site with new articles as a consequence of this shift. Instead it has morphed into more of a landing page for gardeners and media outlets/conference organizers who read my work elsewhere, hear the podcast, or hear me speak at a conference and wish to know more about my garden, my UK tours, and my background. I still keep it free of ads and view it as a necessary, if painful, expense. I think many writers do.
Bigger Blogs Have Bigger Expenses
Here on GardenRant, many monetization methods were tried over the years — from trustworthy sponsors who paid for individual ads, to writers who fronted costs and found themselves in the red.
In 2020 we settled on a well-known third-party ad service ratcheted down to its lowest revenue settings to give our audience the least amount of distraction possible. Thus we stay free of influence, but still manage to piss off the odd reader or two in our effrontery to make ends meet.
Are blogs over? Not if we have anything to do with it. But it does help that the eight of us are in it together. Not surprisingly, paying to write is a luxury for which few people have the stomach or the pocketbook.
Those who said “stuff that” and got into bed with companies as brand ambassadors or paid partners merely did what they had to do — now bereft of the protection of legacy gatekeepers who could act as revenue intermediaries between conflict of interest and a need to pay the bills; and aided by professional organizations that happily connected writer to sponsor.
Those legacy gatekeepers are now a rare breed, but where they have survived, many still take conflict of interest in journalism seriously. When I started freelancing for the Wall Street Journal, I had to be vetted for any product connections that might affect what I wrote about and how. I admit, it made me happy to know the gatekeepers still upheld the standards, even though they haven’t had a dedicated garden columnist for years.
Shifting to Social Media
A few years passed. Hyper-novelty wasn’t finished with us and social media took over. In droves, bloggers working on their own shifted their energies to easily updatable and more easily monetized platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or Substack. Some gave up completely, faced with the high costs of maintaining a site securely, the complexity of updating that site, and a dwindling audience base that was quickly adapting to a culture of constant content.
Now we are all considered ‘content creators’ — such content to be churned out to feed an insatiable hunger, not a thoughtful or engaged audience. Our readers are ‘followers’, our worth measured in likes or views — however disinterested the viewer. “What kind of content are you looking for on GardenRant?” I was asked by a would-be contributor three years ago. “We’re not looking for ‘content'” I told her. “We’re looking for good writers, with a strong opinion and the skill to express it.” I probably pissed her off. But I meant it.
You Gotta Hustle
Such writing takes time. As the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Russell Page said at a lecture I attended many years ago when he was in his eighties, “I feel terrible for writers now. They have no time to think.”
Compelling writing requires the space to be able to think about what you are saying, Baker told his audience that day. But modern writers cannot concentrate on the thinking OR the writing. There are too many platforms to be updated, cross promotions to be fired off, mailing lists to be built, tech glitches to be fixed, and [hopefully] viral reels to be created. Expertise is secondary to Performance if the algorithms are to be appeased.
Often times writers find themselves simply administering a writer’s life instead of living it.
But just as worrying, readers online have little time to think about what they have just read. Before they even get started on a post or article, a warning informs them of how long it will take to read it. And there is always the next article, or ad, or entertaining short, to grab their attention, leading them inexorably to a full Amazon cart and a vague sense of unease at the end of the day.
Overwhelming Change?
Enter AI. And the Hyper Novelty Scramble goes into overdrive.
Many garden writers who made bread-and-butter money by writing researched or experience-based descriptions of plants for catalogs or journals have been supplanted by their robot peers who efficiently scrape the work of the Once-Paid to produce words for free.
What company with business sense would pay for anything more than an editor to read over the cleverly written, informative blurbs that AI dashes off in three seconds or less? What editor with a too-busy day would take the research time necessary to catch the odd hallucination?
They happen.
What value books? If fiction and non-fiction works are being put together by self-published scam artists who haven’t the faintest idea how to put together a compelling sentence much less a book — but know how to use generative AI to create a well-crafted simulacrum, how is the industry cheapened and diluted? Quite often, such books are published under the names of published authors to give them credibility — until they are reported.
I was quite thrilled recently to see that I apparently published my third book in 2020:
Or Is It a Great Opportunity?
For a busy writer, juggling more than has ever been juggled in pursuit of a viable writing career, AI is the closest thing to an assistant they’ll ever have.
- It can create engaging social media posts you don’t have time for.
- It can scan a transcript for plant names and spell them properly.
- It can find images in the public domain to help pitch an idea.
- It can flag potential grammatical errors, and offer an alternative.
- It can generate ideas based on popular searches.
- It can scan email correspondence and create centralized contact lists that you always meant to do but never did.
- It can generate illustrative photos for a presentation.
It can create that list above.
Just kidding. I did that. But AI could have done it and I could have saved some time.
Once More Unto The Breach
I’m still teaching myself to pivot and re-pivot in a world of hyper-novelty. It’s the smart thing to do, but it’s also a big ask when one is concurrently wrestling with the knowledge that such novelties have contributed substantially to the decline of our species’ ability to think, reason, and remain literate.
They’re not only negating the need to write, they’ve negated the desire to read — and there’s much more than how to grow a carrot on the line here.
We are at the very beginning of the biggest culturally transformative shift since the motor car hit horse and carriage streets. Can writers who deeply value voice, and have spent the last two decades fighting for it, allow themselves to take advantage of opportunities that feel suspiciously like erasure?
We must — as ethically and carefully as we can. Like the coachman, the groomsman, the farrier, and the stable boy, we either get familiar with the steering wheel and brace ourselves for an unexpected journey, or it’s time to get out of the business.
If you have read this reflection to the end, please know that we are exceptionally grateful to you for your support here at GardenRant over the years, and for the thousands of comments, emails, and conversations you have taken time to write to let us know a post resonated.
Thankfully, ‘the topic’ that we and decades of garden writers before us uncynically chose to explore and share — before likes, clicks, and viral moments came on the scene — isn’t just any topic. It’s the antidote to the addling hyper novelty that greets every one of us each time we open our laptops, book a ticket, visit a doctor, call a company, or pay for a few apples at the market.
Hopefully we can center ourselves in the quiet joy of that place even as we navigate new ways of sharing it. — MW
Is it really possible for AI to write something with actual heart and passion? I don’t believe it. And what about those writers whose unique voice and experience we love? Can AI ever gather that kind of following?
I wouldn’t think so, however yesterday a friend in a different business shared that she was headed off to a long retreat and needed to write a letter to her mailing list to let them know how and why she would be out of town. Running out of time, she gave the main points to ChatGPT and asked it to craft a letter in her voice, (which is quite lyrical). She was blown away by the response, which took hardly any editing on her part to finesse.
I don’t think such writing has true ‘heart or passion’ but can it create a simulacrum of such? Yes. Is that enough? No. We have received comments on this site which have obviously been generated by AI — and the obviousness lies in the too-perfect crafting of the witticism. That, in itself, becomes boring. And predictable.
It reminds me a bit of playing chess against a computer to train oneself for human opponents. There is no winning against the computer, but you will learn to think in different ways. The fun and the challenge and the purpose is to sit across from another human being and win — despite the unpredictability of your choices and theirs. Good writing is just as unpredictable. –MW
Marianne, you have done a good job of crystallizing the shift from reading and writing to AI. Along with this, I’m afraid, will come increasing detachment with surrogate AI emotional relationships and less personal communication. Passionate? I don’t think so.
I’ve been studying that trend in Japan particularly — very worrying Allen. – MW
Marianne I was holding my breath reading the second from the end paragraph. I thought I was about to read ‘so you understand why we are laying down our pens at Garden Rant’ Whew!
Thank you for providing this thoughtful, honest, behind-the-scene rant.
Food for thought!
Yes. My initial reaction too. So glad the rant will continue!
Thank you both. We are very much here! It’s an institution at this point. 🙂 –MW
Well, just to make myself thoroughly unpopular: we can access a podcast, video or audio book by asking a piece of tech to provide it. How long before we no longer need to read, never mind write?
Anne, I think we’re already there; my 30-something co-worker is a voracious listener of podcasts and audio books, but says he hasn’t read a book or any print media for over a decade. He gets his news from social media and word of mouth; if he needs to find out how to do something, there’s a You Tube for that. His friends are all the same, he says. If ever there were a perfect audience for an evil AI robot mastermind, they are it.
On the other hand, I take heart in the fact that vinyl records and browsing bricks-and-mortar bookshops are back in vogue. Maybe as the cost of food, appliances and cars skyrockets, a more hands on do-it-yourself trend will bring people back to repairing things, reading and writing, gardening and other “lost arts”. Who knows?
Apparently, in the UK, 61 per cent of our 16 to 24-year-olds describe themselves as either “non-readers” or “lapsed readers”.
I understand that harking back to earlier forms, but it rarely takes everyone there. Strange thoughts…..
You’re right, not everyone would go there. When I think how we got to a place where reading became so common, naturally I think of education. A good public education system drives all kinds of good things, like teaching everyone how to read and write, among others. Not sure how that’s going to go in the US now… it’s already not really necessary to read the reading or even write the papers yourself, in a lot of cases.
I think we have to broaden the definition of reading, because of the world we live in, but also because the narrow definition of reading being eyes on typed words implies that people who are unable to read due to blindness, or dyslexia or another disability “can’t read.”
That’s my concern looking forward. Do we — weirdly enough — find ourselves regressed to an oral-based society after a few more decades chomping our McDonalds cheeseburger infotainment? Unable to express ourselves well, and therefore we no longer try? Spoiler alert: in that world there are always those who can, and they are the ones that rule. Not a great road to travel, but the easier one I fear. – MW
I am trying to think about how I want to respond. I am a reader and a gardener but not a writer. So should I ask AI to put into words? No, I’ll just say thanks for your thoughtful writing and that I enjoy all of the Garden Rant columns or whatever these articles are called.
Thank you Anne. We appreciate our readers and commenters just as much. Thanks for being a part of GardenRant! – MW
Speaking of AI, I interviewed someone in the nursery trade this week who asked anxiously if I were using it to write my article about him. He told me a trade magazine had done that – letting AI write the article based on an interview – and it was FULL of errors.
No one thought to go back to him and fact check after they half-assed their job in the first place? That is a massive fail on several levels. The biggest starting with the fact that it’s a trade magazine (not catalog copy) and they should know better. –MW
Great post, Marianne. I came into garden writing in 2006 as a blogging “barbarian at the gate,” never expecting that my desire to join the online conversation about gardening would become an obsessive creative outlet, which in turn led to a writing career. But how the garden-writing field has changed even since then, as you aptly describe. It’s hard to keep up technologically and even harder to make money at writing in a world where everyone is swiping through an endless stream of 7-second humor reels.
I’m grateful that Garden Rant is still at it, and that you and the other writers are still posting long-form, thoughtful articles like this one. Blogging may be free to consume, but it’s not free for the blogger. I don’t begrudge any blogger a few ads, so long as pop-ups don’t keep me from being able to actually read it. I’m still blogging without ads despite ever-higher blog expenses, including web hosting, domain fee, plugins, web design costs, blog subscription service, etc. It’s pure stubbornness at this point.
Now in my 20th year, blogging is still a creative expression for me. It’s also a record and how I think through gardens I’ve visited. And though unpaid, blogging has led to all the paid work in the gardening world I’ve had the good fortune to land on, from design to freelance writing to photography to books. And not least, it’s led to meaningful connections and friendships with other garden writers, professional and non, via the Garden Fling and other groups that went from online to IRL.
AI may ultimately replace garden writers, but at least it’ll never replace actual gardening — unless we get to Holodeck-level virtual reality. Which I suppose is only a matter of time, now I think of it. Brave new worlds indeed.
Pam, thank you so much for adding your experience to the post — though you should mention your latest book — Gardens of Texas: Visions of Resilience from the Lone Star State. Congratulations — I understand it’s a good one!
I don’t think all readers understand the enormous costs associated with websites — it’s why we get pushback from time to time on our ads. But subscription-based services are another level of complexity that this writing team doesn’t have the time to administrate. Perhaps we should get AI on it, eh? – MW
Lots of good information in your post Marianne. I often see AI at work in articles and wonder how much of the information in the article is really true. At times the Almighty slips into my sphere and on one such occasion I came upon a way to hunt for information without AI interfering. I mentioned it to my bridge club group and everyone seemed to already know! But I will pass it on here just in case someone hasn’t heard. When looking up information, after typing what you want to know, leave a space and then -ai. (That’s a minus sign ai)
So glad Garden Rant will continue.
We are gardeners after all.
When AI can plant my vegetable garden and weed my border, I’ll endorse it.
Right now AI takes away the fun (the researching, the thinking, the looking) and leaves us with the drudgery (which I think some of us enjoy at least some of the time.)
I use AI but it is not a fulsome tool. It feels like reading Cliffs Notes.
I’m grateful to those who have supported me on my writing journey so far, and I hope to continue to build on firm foundations for the future.
However my path is a gamble. I’m heading into writing for a world that treasures social media influencers and when even respected horticultural organisations are using AI as an excuse to cut expensive human expertise.
I was told fairly recently that the last thing British garden writing needs is another working class gardener. I’ve since struggled to find more than a handful of working class garden writers in the UK, let alone any writing about plants rather than allotments and vegetables, The problem those who harbour these sorts of sentiments have is that they just make me more determined to press on.
I agree, the decline of any interest in reading is the bigger problem now. I recall the uncertainty when newspapers and periodicals started transitioning to online delivery and downsizing, but I can’t remember how many doomsday projections there were for the end of the essay and journalistic writing altogether. College English departments have dealt with anxiety for a long time over the value of reading and now it seems to have come to fruition, the complete devaluing of close reading and critical thinking. AI has certainly exacerbated this- few people under a certain age now are likely to sit and read through an essay in their life- but from what I see, the smartphone was probably the beginning of the end. Maybe garden writers can take heart that their target audience is an anachronistic bunch. There have been a couple best-selling garden and nature books recently, and the gardening classics never get old, and it’s a style of highly personal writing AI can not replace.
Thanks Marianne- lots of food for thought!
I remember one particular blog entry from long ago. The subject? The making and eating of the writer’s morning oatmeal, and then bicycling around Boston. That was pretty much it.
Somehow this post was indelible, sticking with me for many years. Maybe the glutinousness of the oatmeal reference?
It was amusing, vulnerable, relatable, and enlightening in a way that long form articles and thoroughly-researched books generally are not.
No matter what the social media-heads say, a blog can still be a wonderful thing.
Just not remunerative—alas.
Hear, hear!!! What SHE said
Thank you Marianne for your clarity of thought and defense of the writer’s voice.
“Often times writers find themselves simply administering a writer’s life instead of living it.” = money quote, or you know, not real money but possibly a line that will go “viral”.
Would that be an “exposure quote”? LOLOL. Thanks Lorene. Glad it resonated. It’s been a crazy two decades. – MW
Here, here!
“What company with business sense would pay for anything more than an editor to read over the cleverly written, informative blurbs that AI dashes off in three seconds or less?”
Heck yeah, they do it anyway. Without notifying a writer–or putting in the advance contract which you sign and reread in worried horror–after an accepted and paid for piece of writing is published under your name and it in no way reflects what you submitted? And you never missed any email from an editor to collaborated on edits which include replacing the majority of the adjectives with choices that look like while writing I used a random word generator? AND to make it “accessible,” it’s auto narrated by AI? Audiobook narrators careers are in similar danger if corporate publishers get the idea in their head to replace them. (CAN YOU IMAGINE IF SOMEONE THOUGHT AI TRANSLATION WAS A GOOD IDEA???) And “my” story–in fact a rather personal piece of gardening memoir which made the entire experience more wounding–was also accompanied by a colorful illustration. This was, at the time of my submission months before, and many years before that, a publication that proudly commissioned beautiful black and white art for each piece in the magazine. It was the part I was most eagerly anticipating at time of publication.
Imagine my horror when they swiftly changed formats to online (bummer, but as your post well illustrates, the only change is constant) but mentioned it made color art an option (fine, cool), and I opened the article to see a blatantly AI generated image. (Waves sadly at our fellows in arms, the illustrators.)
I’m embarrassed it exists, abet in a tiny corner of the internet behind a paywall, but feel like I have no recourse except to expel it from my mind. But it’s been haunting me for more than a year and now this comment rant has helped, so thank you for that!