How do wine writers make a living?

Interesting posts (and plenty of comment) about the difficulties of making money from wine writing online recently from two high-profile bloggers, one by Jamie Goode of Wineanorak.com and the other by Dr. Vino aka Tyler Colman.

Goode writes “I suspect those who approach online from a print mindset, and value their own work too highly to be able to give it away, will not be the ones who flourish in this new medium”. Read his post here.

Colman goes further: “The best advice for [wine] bloggers is to blog for love. Or exposure for more profitable activities (such as selling wine or selling books or a TV show). However, trying to write a blog for money can be a fool’s errand fraught with conflicts of interest.” Rest of post here.

My observation is that writing has always been subsidised, even if it was monks transcribing the bible who were underwritten by the religious establishment centuries ago. The old media model which saw expensive advertisements as the means of paying journalists’ salaries is rapidly becoming defunct and new media practitioners haven’t yet worked out how to extract payment for content.  In the short term, free content becomes the means to attract audience and other activities such as wine competitions and led tastings provide the revenue.