When Kathryn Born got recruited to run a visual arts blog for Tribune Media’s Chicago Now network, she dared to get her hopes up. After years of working in the arts for little or no money, she thought this might be the opportunity she’d been waiting for: a vehicle for reviews, profiles, and news with enough muscle to pay the writers.
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Born had come to Chicago Now from Bad at Sports, the weekly arts-talk podcast created four years ago by Richard Holland and Duncan MacKenzie. Bad at Sports logged its 200th episode in June, and Born had been with it since episode 12, wearing many hats—mostly administrative and promotional. Like everybody else there, she’d volunteered her time. (She’d bonded with the founders after meeting them online and getting into a flame war during which Holland called her opinions “narrow-minded and uninformed.”)
Bad at Sports is a labor of love. Money is “just not what they’re about,” Born says. “Richard Holland always said, ‘We’re never going to pay people for content.’” And, although Born “loves” BAS and is still part of the team, listed on the Web site as “Chicago correspondent,” she says “that’s where I felt a little bit of a divide. I just can’t ask people to work forever for free.”
Born, who’d started out paying her writers, had to retrench, even on token amounts. “I had to say, ‘I’m sorry, this doesn’t pay anything, and I can’t pay you,’” she recalls. On Thanksgiving weekend, when it came time to sign her third 90-day contract, she bowed out. Stephanie Burke took over, and Born—still thinking that online arts publishing could be financially viable but convinced that she needed to control ad sales—went to plan B: a trio of Web sites she’d been incubating since before Tribune Media came along, and which she now runs with Burke’s help.
