I just found this piece (in the NYT Style section, which is itself telling) and it seems to me a bit depressing.  Is one way that "writers" are able to survive in this economy, by selling the idea of "being a writer" to other people?  Is participating in the public intellectual sphere itself not so much about having something to say as it is about convincing others that they should pay you so that you can help them think they have something to say?

Consider a parallel, but quite different, market restructuring, this one in the music business.  Up till ten or fifteen years ago, most bands made their money through album sales.  Then came music on the interwebs, and apps like Spotify.  And illegal things like Napster, before them.  And now, no one among the Yewt actually buys CDs.  (I know because I am not a member of the Yewt and I buy CDs, and the Yewt, whenever they find out about this, mock me for it.  On the plus side, hardly anyone goes to used-music stores now.  On the negative side, that's why many used-music stores are closing.)  Anyway, once kids stopped spending their cash on music, musicians were kind of screwed.  They discovered that the way to make money was to tour a LOT.  So that's where most musicians who are successful make their money.  The market shifted.

But note--it's just the venue in which people "consume" their music that has changed.  Their audience is still listening to their music.  Writers have faced a similar economic change, and everyone knows they have, but they have not responded by finding a way to re-monetize their core thing--their writing.  Instead, if the article is right, they have monetized the idea of "being a writer."  That seems problematic in itself.

As I write about this I recall another article I came across a couple days ago, on the decline of fact-checking.  Authors complain that their books aren't fact checked by publishers.  This seems odd to me.  Fact checking is important in books. But the publishers are absolutely right: finally it is the responsibility of the author to stand behind everything she or he says. It's a bit weird to be complaining about fact-checking in books as a publishing issue; maybe it's about the easy way in which celebrity books are increasingly written with less regard for being right than being right on time. Maybe, that is, this too is about the changing ecology of the public intellectual sphere.  

Both of these pieces make me wonder--do we have a good constituency of reality-based authors out there these days?  Is this a sign of a decline in the quality of writers, or simply a sign that bad money will find a way to spend itself?  I don't know.  I'm interested in keeping an eye on things.