Rambling: A foolish consistency. Oh, and love.

I'm inconsistent.

I rant and rhapsodize about the value of creativity for the love of it, and the wonderful things that happen when any person can make their creative work freely available to the world. But I also appreciate (for example) Cook's Illustrated, and their ability to make a business out of selling the same glazed carrot recipe a dozen different ways. OK, they sell thousands of other recipes, but it seems like those glazed carrots are around every corner.

Aren't these two positions inconsistent? Well, yes. But no. See, I don't really care whether you put your heart and soul into your very best work and give it away for free, or put your heart and soul into your very best work and sell it for top-gouge prices. I care about the heart and soul part.

Those things involve focus on the work--the article, book, picture, perfume, song, movie, dress, or ravioli. Not on the advertisers that might wish to be associated with it. Not on the number of eyes that might be tricked into glancing at the logos and exclamation points and 1-800 numbers that are dotted around it. But on the work itself.

The amateur can be focused on the work alone. The professionals who sell their work directly to an audience have to defer to the taste of that audience, but they are nevertheless focused on cultivating a cash-waving frenzy of greed in their customers. And that greed is about the work. Both generally care about making me as the reader (watcher, listener, eater, whatever) delighted or fascinated or horrified. A heart-and-soul reaction.

Works that exist to be decorated with ads, on the other hand, too often have no ambition beyond attracting more people than the work presented by the next magazine, channel, or website. As a group, they just need to be more engaging than doing nothing.

So that explains--or at least rationalizes--why I can wholeheartedly support the work of the amateur and of the professional who charges for his work. I'm not in the "information wants to be free" camp, I'm just greedy for good stuff to read or watch or listen to, and it increasingly seems to me that the good stuff is hampered, not nurtured, by advertising-dependent schemes.

Does it have to be that way? No. Newspapers and magazines have been partly supported by advertising for a very long time, and they haven't all descended to mediocrity. But lately it seems that a lot more of them have. And the average ad-motivated website falls even lower than the average mediocre magazine--in the competition with doing nothing, many of them lose.

Maybe it's a matter of policy. When the idea of a boundary between advertising and editorial is mentioned, I don't know that people actually giggle, but I do think that it's not the sacred trust that I fondly imagine it once was.

Or maybe it's about increasing dependence on advertisers. I read in A List Apart that these days eighty percent of the revenue for some periodicals comes from advertising. In theory, good work should attract a larger audience for ads, just as in the past it attracted more subscription dollars. But I suspect that there's a difference in focus. When periodicals are cheap or free, the reader doesn't have to do much choosing; he can sleepily page through a dozen magazines instead of eagerly awaiting one. Again, the work only has to be better than its absence.

The love is lost. Work created with little or no hope of compensation is loved by its creator. Expensive work chased by cash-waving hordes is loved by its consumer. Work created for the purpose of drawing in ad dollars and consumer eyes doesn't need to be loved by anyone. And it so often shows it.

Image: By ThatPeskyCommoner. Wikimedia Commons.