Evan Smith of Texas Tribune: 'Journalists Deserve a Living Wage'

Because the Tribune does not receive advertising, Smith said, it relies on “five buckets” of revenue: membership, major donors, foundations, corporate sponsorship, and earned income through events and premium products like newsletters. And, despite what he calls “the Nick Denton legacy” of online news, the Tribune will never pay its writers based on their page views.

“Nobody took a pay cut when they left their jobs to come and work for the Tribune,” Smith said. “One of the benefits of raising enough money to do a real operation was we could pay honest to goodness real journalists a real wage. Journalists deserve a living wage, not to be nickel and dimed on the basis of traffic.”

Inaccurate, and not completely fair to Nick, because Gawker writers got a bonus based on pageviews, their base pay was separate. This became too expensive for Nick and he abandoned it. Now they’re concerned more with unique visitors than pageviews. Obviously if you’re a traffic generating machine, you’re going to be more valuable to the bottom line but saying pay is directly tied to traffic as if they’re being paid per click is disingenuous.

Writers should not paint themselves into the same dilemma ad sellers have. Television may be a medium of scarcity when it comes to available ad time, but if the same number of people see my ad on my laptop monitor that see it on my television monitor, I shouldn’t be charging less for the one on my laptop. The dilution of the value of web traffic in relation to other mediums has a direct correlation to how much money online media outlets have to give to their writers.

For Smith, it’s also easy to knock incentivizing pageviews when your business plan is not tied to them. Ultimately it boils down to what will be more sustainable. You can’t run a profitable news site based on ad revenue without being obsessed with traffic. It’s a game of volume. While I agree with you that Smith is taking an unfair shot at Denton, ultimately what Smith is suggesting is that his business plan allows the Tribune to make decisions, personnel and otherwise, without putting an undue emphasis on traffic, which I believe is a healthier—and perhaps more sustainable—way to run an editorial site.