Tag: Premium

I’m Not Sure There’s a Workable Path for Professional Online Writers

by Freddie deBoer

So it won’t surprise anybody to learn that I really, really don’t like Buzzfeed.

Sometimes, when I consider the Buzzfeed phenomenon, I think I’m living in some sort of fictional satirical world where Buzzfeed is a symbol of how far media can fall. It’s like living in a Douglas Copeland novel. Buzzfeed’s particular brand of lowest common denominator clickbait, their “14 Giraffes Who Totally Look  Like Steve Buscemi,” their “25 Things Only People from [Insert Geographical Area Here] Understand,” their “Which of Fat Cat’s Minions from Chip’n’Dale’s Rescue Rangers Are You?” quizzes, their corpsefucking glurge, sitting side-by-side with their “branded content” like “12 Most Crunchtastic TV Moments Brought to You by Frito Lay,” subsidizing imperial stenographer Rosie Gray’s smears of Max Blumenthal (an actual journalist),  powered by an aggregation model that comes pretty close to plagiarism even when it doesn’t devolve into the serial copy-and-pasting of Benny Johnson (thanks BlippoBoppo and CrushingBort), in an environment where they can memory hole 4,000 posts and think they don’t have to say anything in particular about it publicly, all lorded over by dumb-faced Ben Smith’s dumb face…. It’s bleak, man. I mean, I can see somebody getting a job offer from Buzzfeed and trying to rationalize it, telling themselves, “well, they’re not so bad….” Yes, they are. They are exactly that bad.

The thing is, I don’t know if there’s some more ethical path writers these days can walk and still end up being able to support themselves. It’s looking pretty grim out there for our professional online writers.

I’m someone who writes a lot of what I guess you would call media criticism. And that means that I’m frequently in the position of saying some not-very-nice things about people who write professionally online. But I criticize because I think that job is important; I happen to have some old-fashioned, corny ideas about the role that journalism and political commentary have to play in a democracy such as ours. We need professional writers– not just dedicated amateurs– to observe and comment on our society and our government, in order to ensure that both are functioning the way that they should, and to give our people information they need to make rational political choices. The problem is that the basic economics of that work have become so threatened that I don’t know what independent writers are supposed to do. I hate when talented people join up with outfits like Buzzfeed, which I think are genuinely making our country a stupider place. But I don’t see any clear path that people can take to preserve both their integrity and their ability to eat.

I could, if I was feeling masochistic, run down some of the publications that have recently shuttered or dramatically restructured in a way that has trimmed a lot of talented writers from their payrolls. Sports On Earth, for example, was a bright spot in the shouty, gimmicky world of online sports coverage, a place that provided steady work to talented writers like Tomas Rios and Jeb Lund, and which was willing to take a chance on genuinely unique work in a media world growing ever-more homogenous. Or look at the uncertain fate of The American Prospect, for decades an incubator of young liberal writing talent. TAP has prestige and it has a legacy, but you can’t pay the bills with either of those. NSFWCorp was always controversial, but everyone has to recognize that it was a bold attempt at producing real journalism with a new and unique funding model. But that model fell through. For awhile, there was a lot of hype about how hyper-local reporting would be the next wave in web publishing, but AOL’s massive Patch effort crashed and burned. Well, Patch is now a “new, nimble company,” and profitable– thanks in large measure to laying off 85% of its news staff. Even that mild success stems from putting a lot of people out of work.

There are way too many great writers– people like Lund and the brilliant and provocative Yasmin Nair and others– who don’t have a steady, secure gig that can keep them doing what they do best.

The basic economics of all of this are truly discouraging. Many people who are able to scratch out a living as professional writers have to do so with content mill writing, churning out four or five or six or more posts a day, sometimes for as little as $15 a post. Many have their pay tied to performance incentives, based on clicks, essentially mandating that people play the clickbait game if they want to pay the rent. The importance of Search Engine Optimization may be fading but the days of Please Facebook Favor My Post in Your Algorithm are in full bloom, and if anything that master is even less knowable than Google ever was. Freelancers might get $500 or $1000 for a strong, researched, reported story. That might sound like a lot, but when you’ve spot months conceiving, researching, reporting, and writing that piece, the math is dismal. Clearly, getting a job as an editor or staff writer at a deep-pocketed publication is best, and there’s no substitute for that kind of security. But I think people would be amazed at how little those positions sometimes pay, and they often require living in New York, DC, or Los Angeles, three ludicrously expensive places to live. I know people who work for well-known, national magazines, the kind of jobs thousands of young journos and writers want to work for, who still have to work on the side doing copy writing to make ends meet. And they’re the lucky ones.

There are some people who enjoy the blessing of working under a patronage model, where someone or some institution with deep pockets can afford to subsidize work that isn’t meant to pay for itself. But most writers simply have to chase clicks if they want to survive. What that means is that even the most independent writers tend to chase the same stories, writing post after post about Robin Williams or the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, knowing that those stories can succeed because they have succeeded already. That makes online writing a brutally homogeneous affair. Choire Sicha– who I think has as much integrity as anybody, although I’m sure he’d roll his eyes at that– made the case recently, saying:

I do not read a lot of things anymore. A lot of us don’t, we sort of go where the tide takes us. I feel weird about that. I opened up my Digg reader the other day, because I was on blogging duty at work, and everything was so duplicative of each other. I was like, yeah, okay, there’s that piece of news filtering through all these different websites, all the same things… no wonder I don’t go to them. I need to make a new folder in my Digg reader, I guess, that’s “Things That Are Surprising and Interesting and Maybe Weird.” It’s sort of… it’s not… I don’t know, something’s wrong.

That is hardly an experience unique to him. I posted a photo of a cluster of Slate stories about Robin Williams to my Facebook, a half-dozen different angles from the same website about the same dead celebrity. But I could have done the same thing with any number of other websites.

You probably know the causes by now. Even if you don’t believe in the Peak Ad thesis, you’ve got the essential problem that with so many websites and the ever-growing number of ads on social media like Facebook and Twitter, all competing with the Google behemoth, you’ve got a nearly limitless supply of online advertising, inevitably pushing down the value of ads. Sites have responded by coming up with new and innovative ways to fool readers into thinking ads are legitimate stories. We laughed at the Atlantic Scientology fiasco, but they were just a little ahead of the curve. We’re starting to see more and more attempts at direct monetization, with paywalls and subscription services, which is great. I hope they succeed. But the idea that online content has to be free is so deeply baked into the culture that it’s going to take great effort to get people used to the idea of paying. I think that the widespread mockery of the New York Times Times Select experiment was a major failure by the industry to think long-term. Sure, it was a failed experiment, and there’s nothing wrong with saying so. But the deep mockery of the very idea of a paywall helped contribute to a precedent that is still alive today. I clicked on a Haaretz link yesterday and was deeply annoyed to find that it was paywalled. It took me a little bit to realize that, when I get angered by the idea of a newspaper asking me to pay for its content, I’m part of the problem.

The sad fact is that there may just be too many mouths to feed, right now, and not enough money to go around. But even so, I don’t know how you solve this problem on the supply side. People are either going to be willing to pay for what they read or they aren’t.

I don’t want to sound too pessimistic. There’s lots of great stuff getting written out there. And I’m hoping that a combination of various models and formats can sustain the industry moving forward. Paid, niche-audience newsletters like Michael Brendan Dougherty’s The Slurve, the patronage model of Pierre Omidyar and First Look Media, porous paywalls and gated content like at The New York Times, and hybrid models like this very website– these can all work alongside sites paid for by advertising. There are some great new independent publications out there, like Jacobin Magazine or Rachel Rosenfelt’s The New Inquiry, although I have no idea if they are self-sustaining or close to it. I’ve come to a point where I recognize that universal condemnations of clickbait content simply aren’t fair, if I want to continue to enjoy lots of free stuff to read online. The question becomes what the clickbait is subsidizing, and who, and what the percentages are. Under the steady leadership of Max Read, I think Gawker has done a good job with achieving that kind of balance, for one example, but it’s always going to be a negotiation, and a struggle. And while I admire what Andrew has built here, this is a model that simply can’t be replicated by most people. It’s a functioning, self-sustaining website, but it isn’t a model or a plan.

We’ll have to see where this all goes next. For myself, I am merely trying to be more understanding and less quick to judge, while remaining adamantly opposed to PR and advertising masked as journalism. I used to mock people who spent their lives writing the same “Top Ten Dumbest Things Said on Faux News This Week” piece over and over again, but I don’t anymore. I don’t bring my online life into my day-to-day life; I think a majority of my classmates and professors have no idea I write online. But I still get undergrads who seek me out on campus, who come to me looking for advice on how to break into online writing as a profession. I never  know what to tell them. I have always written from the position of privilege of not needing to write to live. Sometimes I give them advice,  sometimes I put them in touch with editors I’m friendly with. But for their basic questions about how to make it, I don’t really know how to respond. It’s a tough business, and an essential one, and I genuinely don’t know if it’s going to survive.

(And for Christ’s sakes, if you like a site, whitelist it on your AdBlock, OK?)

Russia “Invades” Ukraine

by Dish Staff

A Russian aid convoy bound for eastern Ukraine crossed the border today without the permission of the Ukrainian government, which is calling the act an “invasion”:

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday morning that Moscow had run out of patience with “delays” and other “excuses” from Ukraine. It charged that Ukraine’s leaders were deliberately trying to slow-walk the delivery of aid to the war-torn region of Luhansk until “there is no one at all to provide help to.”

The decision to send in the aid without the consent of the Red Cross or Ukrainian authorities marked a dangerous new step in the four-month conflict. If Ukrainian forces fire on the trucks, they could trigger an all-out invasion by Russian forces that have accumulated by the tens of thousands across the border from eastern Ukraine. If they allow the trucks to disperse across the Luhansk region without any Ukrainian controls, Russia in effect will have imposed a cease-fire in the fight against pro-Russian separatists without Kiev’s permission.

That’s precisely what Ed Morrissey suspects the Kremlin is trying to do:

Russia tried a direct invasion last week in what appeared to be an attempt to start a shooting war. Although Russia later denied it, at first they confirmed the incursion, but didn’t follow up with military action when it came under Ukrainian fire. Prior to that, I warned that the aid convoy could be used to force the Ukrainian military into a unilateral cease-fire to prevent any Russian retaliation for convoy losses in potential firefights, and that seems to be at least one of the motives for running through the border now. Otherwise, why not wait for the inspections? …

Until the rebellion gets settled one way or the other, peace will not be forthcoming. The aid convoy only delays that resolution if Russia plans to use it as a barricade for the rebels, or as a beachhead for an occupation.

The Interpreter live-blog passes along a report that most of the trucks had not been inspected by Ukrainian border guards:

“In total, 34 people and 34 vehicles were processed. The total weight was 268,020 kg. Vehicles were loaded to two thirds of their capacity. The average weight of one vehicle was 8,375 kg. 32 trucks carried food products (buckwheat, rice, sugar and water), 2 trucks carried medical supplies,” report border guards. … Andrei Lysenko, the spokesman for the Ukrainian National Defence and Security Council (SNBO), has told reporters at a briefing today that more than 90 trucks (note that only 34 passed customs clearance) have set off into Ukrainian territory today.

Something You Don’t See Everyday: A Democrat Running On Obamacare

by Dish Staff

Senator Mark Pryor shows his party how it’s done:

Jonathan Cohn reminds us that “this is how Democrats usually win on Medicare and Medicaid—by reminding voters of what they have to lose from proposed Republican attacks on the programs”:

This isn’t just some ad the Pryor campaign posted online, in order to gin up donations from liberals. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports that it’s airing across the state, at a cost that runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And while one ad does not a political trend make, you don’t have to squint to see signs that the politics of Obamacare are shifting. Bloomberg News just did a study of Republican television ads and discovered that mentions of Obamacare are way down from where they were a few months ago. Meanwhile, as Sargent has pointed out several times, Republican Senators and Senate candidates are struggling to explain their opposition to the law, even in conservative states.

Alex Rogers looks at why Pryor’s ad works:

First, he hones in on the most popular aspect of the Affordable Care Act: coverage for those with preexisting conditions, which has support across the aisle.

“We all agree that nobody should be denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition,” David Ray, a Cotton campaign spokesman, told TIME in an emailed statement.

Second, Pryor’s ad doesn’t use the term “Obamacare,” the Affordable Care Act’s nickname first coined by its critics. AKaiser Health Tracking poll released August 1 found that a little over half of the public—53%—have an unfavorable view of Obamacare. But when referred to by a different name, the law’s negative ratings can decrease, polls show.

Republicans are attacking Pryor for not mentioning Obamacare by name. Buetler scores that fight:

Republicans working to defeat Pryor … criticize Pryor for eschewing the label, because the label’s just about the only thing they’re comfortable assailing. In this way, they resemble Democrats six and eight years ago, running against the Bush tax cuts (for the rich), knowing that they had no intention of letting anything but the most regressive of those tax cuts expire.

In that sense, the GOP’s obsession with the moniker, and only the moniker, is excellent news for Obamacare’s political durability.

Inconsolable In Islamabad

by Dish Staff

Pakistan may be on the brink of a political crisis after opposition leader Imran Khan suspended talks with the government in response to the appointment of a new police chief in Islamabad:

Khan, a famed cricketer-turned-politician, and fiery cleric Tahir-ul-Qadri have led massive protests from the eastern city of Lahore to the gates of parliament in Islamabad to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, accusing him of rigging the vote that brought him to power last year. The protests have raised fears of unrest in the nuclear-armed US ally with a history of political turmoil, and after a request from the country’s powerful military the government convened talks with Khan and Qadri’s representatives early Thursday. Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a senior leader of Khan’s party, told reporters that the opposition presented six demands, including Sharif’s resignation. …

Later on Thursday, Khan told his supporters that the government had removed the Islamabad police chief for not using force against him, and warned that the new police chief, Khalid Khattak, would follow orders to disperse the protests, which have thus far been peaceful.

The army’s growing role in containing this crisis makes Michael Kugelman very nervous:

With Islamabad increasingly on the defensive, the military is gaining an upper hand. Consider Sharif’s decision last week to make the armed forces responsible for security of sensitive facilities in Islamabad during the protests. This can be interpreted either as a sop to the military or as an acknowledgment that the government can’t protect its own people — or itself. Additionally, Sharif’s Independence Day speech on Aug. 14, the first official day of the protests, was rife with praise for Pakistan’s military. That such praise came from a civilian leader as combative as Sharif is quite telling. Most significantly, on Aug. 19, as marchers entered the Red Zone, the government ceded full security of the area to the military. The government gave the military carte blanche to do what it so relishes: serve as the nation’s protector and savior.

Furthermore, with many Pakistanis cheering on a countermilitancy offensive underway in North Waziristan, the military’s star could continue to rise in the coming weeks. Possible retaliatory terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities could prompt more calls for the military to provide security, which would further embolden Pakistan’s most powerful institution.

Why ISIS Brought Back Beheadings

by Dish Staff

Videos of masked militants beheading captive Westerners were a common feature of jihadist propaganda in the early years of the last decade, but such videos had scarcely been seen in a decade when the video of James Foley’s murder came to light this week. Katie Zavadski explains why:

According to University of Massachusetts, Lowell, professor Mia Bloom, the videos faded because they were frowned upon by higher-ups in organizations like Al Qaeda. Although Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a high-ranking Al Qaeda in Iraq operative, was said to have personally executed Americans Nicholas Berg and Eugene Armstrong, Bloom says superiors, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, looked down on the practice. “AQI got into a lot of trouble for those public beheadings,” she says, because they did more to alienate potential supporters than to recruit them.

“What’s interesting is that you saw a drop-off of these videos because they provoked somewhat of a backlash,” agrees SUNY Albany professor Victor Asal. While everyone knew these groups were doing horrible things, including beheadings, there was something particularly distasteful about videotaping their executions. By returning to these videos, ISIS is saying, “We will do what we want, how we want,” Asal says. “Be very, very scared of us.”

Adam Taylor explores ISIS’s macabre devotion to this particularly bloody method of murder:

The Islamic State may justify its beheadings with theology and history, but the use of the tactic is probably driven by more immediate factors. “I don’t think there’s anything inherently Islamist to these beheadings,” Max Abrahms, a Northeastern professor who studies jihadist groups, told The Post. “It’s important to recognize where Islamic State is coming from historically, in order to understand why it is beheading people — and why it’s using social media to broadcast it.”

In particular, Abrahms argues, the Islamic State may be seeking to differentiate itself from al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group he notes was “widely seen, even among jihadists, as a failure.” With high-profile beheadings, the Islamic State could be attempting to link itself to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a Guantanamo Bay detainee and alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who is now thought to have killed Pearl.

“No. No. No.” Ctd

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

Like many others, I was simply floored by the post in which a woman bravely details her experience of being raped and dealing with its aftereffects. (A college friend who was also raped forwarded me the story – it came with the subject line “oh my God.”) Never before has someone – even the two therapists I have seen since my rape, not even novelists, and I’ve read a few – crystallized those feelings, that experience, that shame, so powerfully and so accurately. It was all the things I’ve wanted to say for years but for which I’d never been able to find the exact right words. And then there they were.

I was raped my freshman year of college, within two weeks of having arrived at my school.

Initially, I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I just couldn’t. I had just started. I just wanted to be a normal student like everyone else. And that’s what I tried to be, even though I barely stayed above water. That is until I noticed how differently my friend was behaving when she returned from her junior year abroad. I recognized her symptoms immediately because they were the same symptoms I had been suffering from for the past few years. So I flat-out asked her if something had happened while she was abroad. She told me that yes – something did happen. We then confided in each other and spent our senior year trying to help each other feel a little bit less alone. We even gave ourselves the name “the rape sisters.”

That was years ago, and we have both since moved on. But you never move past. It’s always there. Whether it’s how you can never go into that deep wonderful sleep again the same way you used to, or the way someone brushes up against you in public, there’s always something to trigger that memory that never leaves.

I wish I knew who this author was so that I could give her a hug and tell her thank you. I wish they would hand her story out to incoming freshmen at every college and university in the country and make them read it. It is quite simply the best account of what rape does to a woman’s heart, mind, and soul that I have ever read.

And thank you for posting it. Stories like that, like ours, need to be told.

Another adds:

One thing that really brought home the reality of rape and assault to me was the Unbreakable Project. Survivors write down the words their rapists used and (sometimes) pose with them.

The Twice-Displaced Palestinians

by Jonah Shepp

Alice Su highlights the peculiar predicament of Palestinian Syrians, who unlike other displaced people looking to flee the civil war don’t have the right to seek refuge in neighboring countries:

Amid the millions of refugees from Syria flooding into neighboring countries like Lebanon and Jordan, a minority group is being quietly denied entry, detained, deported, and pushed out in any way possible: Palestinians. They are refugees who literally have nowhere to go.

In recent months, Jordanian and Lebanese authorities have acknowledged that Palestinians from Syria are not welcome to asylum in the same way that other Syrian refugees are. Jordan and Lebanon have respectively been barring Palestinians from entry since January and August 2013, in contrast with the treatment of some 600,000 Syrian nationals in Jordan and 1.5 million in Lebanon, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization has also documented forcible deportations of Palestinians—women and children included—from both countries.

I touched on this issue last week, and I’m glad to see it’s getting some more press. This is another example of the many ways Palestinians suffer for having no state of their own and no genuine acceptance in the countries where so many of them ended up after being displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars.

I’m somewhat agnostic on how best to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (more on that later), but the severe impact of Palestinian statelessness on the lives and welfare of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is—or at least ought to be—beyond dispute. Israel is the primary agent of this problem, but it’s worth remembering that most Arab states have not exactly been kind to the Palestinians either.

It’s also an example of how the Palestinian experience in the Arab Middle East since 1948 replicates with eerie similarity the experience of the Jews in Europe in the bad old days. Imagine living your entire life in a country where the majority of people look pretty much the same as you do but consider you foreign, undeserving of the rights of citizenship, and somehow a threat to them for reasons they can’t really articulate. Imagine being in perpetual danger of expulsion or worse at the whim of an autocrat or a populist mob, and having no place to go where you know you will be safe from that danger. One would think that two peoples having both been through such a harrowing experience would be able to find more common ground than they do, but perhaps the fearful worldview engendered by that trauma overrides whatever perspective it might provide.

Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The sex-worker-as-daughter debate, which Elizabeth launched, continues. Two readers cite two different missing pieces from the conversation thus far. One writes:

I am amazed by the Every Sex Worker Might be Somebody’s Daughter thread’s blind spot: not one person brought up the men who do sex work. Escorts and male performers in straight and gay pornography are all… somebody’s son.  Yet that doesn’t seem to worry anyone much. The same double-standard as always: sexually active women are sluts, sexually active men are studs.

The other sounds off:

The thread on this topic seems remarkably tone-deaf.

Should we evaluate all public policy issues through a “would you want your son/daughter to…” lens? Of course not. Is there lots of misguided, counter-productive, or irrelevant moralism and paternalism involved in some public policy? Sure. So some of the points made in the thread are well-taken, taken in isolation. But.

We also are all somebody’s child, or parent, or caretaker, or sibling, or spouse, etc. And these relationships tap into a specific part of our brain, and give us a specific set of perspectives on life. And sometimes it is positively healthy to ask ourselves to access that part of our thinking and feeling to a greater extent. At the least, speaking as if a whole realm of human awareness should be amputated from public concerns seems at best hugely unrealistic. Just think about the gay marriage issue. Homophobia was fine if you barely knew gay people even existed. Civil unions seemed OK if you knew that they existed, but didn’t know too much about their lives. But gay marriage became a moral imperative for many people because they knew and loved gay people personally, and saw them as, well…somebody’s daughter, or your own son or daughter. And that made a difference in how people saw the issue.

On another note, I think that people who want to jettison the “think about if she were somebody’s daughter” approach are just pretty naive about men. This line isn’t just a tool of patriarchal oppression. It’s used to counter-act male instincts (women have them also, but less strongly). And if you give men permission to stop asking the “what if she were…” questions, and give them free reign to assume that she might just as easily be a porn star, you might find that the results have a lot less to do with smashing the patriarchy than you first thought.

A Sudden Crisis

by Dish Staff

Screen Shot 2014-08-21 at 10.47.17 AM

As the UN refugee agency launches its largest aid effort in more than a decade to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in northern Iraq, Swati Sharma remarks on how rapidly the humanitarian disaster has unfolded:

The rate at which the situation in Iraq has deteriorated is the largest reason why it is being called one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent years. Let’s compare it with Syria.

While the climate there is extremely volatile, it has been deteriorating for more than three years. In comparison, conflicts in Iraq mostly started this year, and the worst of it commenced in June, when the Islamic State (then ISIS) took Mosul. Today, the number of displaced Iraqis is at 1.5 million — small in comparison to Syria’s 6.5 million — but almost 600,000 of them fled their homes in the past two months. Still, many were able to find homes and shelters in communities around northern Iraq.

In early August, Islamic State moved farther north. When the militant group took the northern region in and around the town of Sinjar, where many Yazidis live, more than 200,000 had to flee. Many were stranded on Mount Sinjar with dwindling resources, causing the Obama administration to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State.

Why Kidnap Journalists?

by Dish Staff

Jason Abbruzzese examines how journalists in conflict zones have become common targets for abduction:

The kidnapping of journalists is a relatively new issue. Reporters in conflict zones well understood the risks, but occupied a relatively sheltered position. “Pre-internet and pre-social media, pretty much all parities to wars and conflicts understood that they needed journalists to communicate their message, their view, to get the word out,” [Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma director Bruce] Shapiro says. Another part of the problem: major media organizations have closed foreign bureaus and become reliant on freelancers as cheap alternatives. Without the backing of major media organizations, these freelancers tend to be at even more risk — especially if they and their families happen to live in the country where the conflict is taking place.

Jack Shafer stands back:

The killing of an innocent reporter violates what many of us would call an unwritten social contract stipulating that journalists deserve protection because they’re witnesses to history, not state actors. …

The old framework, in which reporters are generally tolerated, may be coming to an end, especially on the Syria, Iraq, and Libya battlegrounds. As the New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson writes today, “Yesterday’s guerrillas have given way to terrorists, and now terrorists have given way to this new band [from the Islamic State], who are something like serial killers.” Serial killers tend to reject social contracts.

As we mourn Foley’s death, we need also acknowledge how routine the killing of reporters has become world-wide, and not just on the war-front. According to statistics compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 706 reporters have been murdered since 1992, and only 25 percent of them while covering a war. The remainder was assigned to other beats — crime, corruption, politics, human rights, and the like. Of the total dead, 94 percent weren’t foreign correspondents, they were local reporters.

David Rohde, who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, compares American and European approaches to negotiating with terrorists:

There are no easy answers in kidnapping cases. The United States cannot allow terrorist groups to control its foreign policy. One clear lesson that has emerged in recent years, however, is that security threats are more effectively countered by united American and European action. The divergent U.S. and European approach to abductions fails to deter captors or consistently safeguard victims.

Last month, a New York Times investigation found that al-Qaeda and its direct affiliates had received at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008—primarily from European governments. In the last year alone, they received $66 million. “Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil,” Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, wrote in a 2012 letter to the leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate in North Africa, “which I may describe as a profitable trade and a precious treasure.”

And James Traub probes the moral dilemma inherent in choosing whether or not to do so:

Should states pay ransom to kidnappers? If you are a friend or loved one of the victim, the answer is obviously yes. But even a more remote observer could cite the moral argument that the obligation to treat people as ends rather than means — what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” — forbids one to place the life of the abductee in a balance with abstract goods, like “sending a message” that kidnapping doesn’t pay. In any case, the consequences of capitulation are remote and hypothetical; the life is terribly real. …

The consequences of capitulating to terrorist kidnappers are ruinous. As a recent New York Times investigation revealed, “Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.” That’s why no European government will admit to making payments. The thought of Steven Sotloff jammed into a pit, awaiting death, when he might have been freed for nothing more than money, is unbearable. But the thought of rewarding the Islamic State for its savagery is also unbearable. A humane response to a monstrous act engenders more monstrousness.