“
Switcheroo“, the episode of This America life from a couple of weeks ago, featured a brilliant piece on a company that provides ‘local’ news pieces for newspapers by mining facts and paying people in the Phillippines on the order of a few cents to collate and write short pieces that are then printed in newspapers as though they had a local news reporter working at the paper. What was striking was the powerful economic argument in favour of this model (this company,
Journatec Journatic is hiring, while newspapers lay off reporters), and in the face of a failing business model, the attempt to come up with new ideas and ways to generate revenue, no matter unpleasant it may seem, or contradictory to the ideals of ‘real’ journalism. It is impossible, also, not to see the present state of VFX reflected in this, and new business models need to emerge no matter how much they seem to degrade the craft at the heart of good VFX work. Already
you can find ads online, people advertising jobs needing minutes of high-end animation, offering to pay a fraction of what you would expect, and eager young inexperienced artists willing to give it a go. They’ll get what they pay for, no doubt, but it is here. This is the competition.
