“Free is when you don’t have to pay for nothin’ or do nothin’. I want to be free! Free as a bird!”
Frank Zappa
This month Rupert Murdoch announced that his online publications will from now on be charging for their content, no doubt anticipating the impending death knell of the printed newspaper: 1605 – 20?? Add to this the growing popularity of electronic readers such as Kindle, etc, and the inevitable demise of paper publishing comes yet a step closer to reality.
And yet last week the new owner of the Evening Standard, Russian tycoon Alexander Lebedev, has announced that he is to give away the flagging circulation newspaper for free. He estimates that if he goes from selling 250,000 copies a day to giving away 600,000, it will give him more clout when selling to advertisers. But while in the short term this may be seen as a clever counter-intuitive move, I predict that ultimately it will be no more than a stay of execution for a doomed medium.
And what about all those trees? Not to mention the pollution. Have you seen how thick the Evening Standard is these days? It’s already hard enough digging your way to a seat on the Tube through all those discarded copies of the London Paper and Lite. 600,000 feral copies of the Evening Standard blowing around London’s streets could bring the capital to a standstill! Billions of wasted, pointless words…
Not that I’m complaining. It’s what I get paid for. In the beginning was the word. Every day millions, if not billions, of words are produced – must be produced - as matter of necessity. Advertising, company reports, brochures, websites, sales letters, sausage wrappers, affidavits - someone has to write this mountain of stuff.
The leviathan we call capitalism has spawned this phenomenon as a by-product of its unstoppable success. Without a constant supply of written words capitalism would simply fail to exist. (Compare this state of affairs with the pre-industrial world, where a total absence of the written word would have inconvenienced few but monks and theologians.)
Never underestimate the power of the word. Let me ask you a question. Who do you think runs the world? Politicians? Banks? Global Corporations? Let me ask you another question. Do prime ministers and presidents, CEOs, company chairmen, bank bosses and sundry tycoons write their own speeches? What do you think? And who gives one bank or multi-national the edge over another?
You’ve guessed it. In both cases, it’s those unkempt backroom types with dodgy haircuts and suspicious personal habits – otherwise known as copywriters. It’s a fact. Copywriters run the world. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then we copywriters are pen-carrying mercenaries – we get paid by the highest bidders to peddle their version of the truth. Not only do we peddle it, but it many cases we conceive it, define it, and feed it to the world in digestible chunks – like feeding time at the zoo. War or peace? Prosperity or ruin? The difference rests with the power of the word. And with great power comes great pay cheques. Why? Because most people in the world of business can’t write – and this includes the head honchos. What a copywriter finds as easy as falling off the proverbial log causes the majority of chief execs to suffer a severe case of the shakes. And the good news is that the smarter members of the business community recognise the fact. They need copywriters. Capitalism needs copywriters. And it’s willing to pay handsomely. Get good at it!
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