So if old media outlets—and their nice paychecks—are fading fast, what is replacing them? As far as money goes, that’s still an open question on the freelance side.

Most websites don’t pay anything close to what comparable print publications pay, primarily because what they are earning in revenue isn’t close to what a healthy print magazine pulls in on a monthly basis. Plenty of people I know are making great money as a new type of travel writer, but most of them are content owners, not just writers.

Fair or not, the era of “user-generated content” has also devalued the worth of the written word. We’re all drowning in words and can only consume a fraction of even what interests us the most. TripAdvisor has more pages posted than most other travel sites added together—and they haven’t paid for hardly any of the content. Yelp’s review numbers grew from 8 million to 83 million in just the first five years of the ‘10s. All but the fakes were posted by volunteers who wanted to rant or rave—typos and bad grammar be damned.

Then consider all the “content marketing” going on by people who only see the words as a means to an end: to get e-mail signups, get people into a marketing funnel, or enhance their authority in order to get paid speaking engagements. It wouldn’t cross their minds that this is a paid service done by professionals.

Getting mad at all these people who “write for free” and devalue the work of those who want to get paid for it is a fruitless exercise.

The genie is already out of the bottle and it likes the fresh air.

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