It's well known and well documented that the media landscape, that forms such an important part of our job in PR, is irrevocably changing. In fact, in many ways, that change has already happened. The number of media sites and trade publications has drastically reduced, and those which are still going are massively reducing the number of staff journalists they employ.

The natural career progression for many journalists who (either through their own choice or otherwise) decide to leave the "comfort" of the newsroom floor is to make the leap into the unknown world of freelance journalism.

In good times the life of a freelance journalist is seemingly one of all pros, and no cons. Flexible working, the ability to drive your own schedule, no news editor to contend with or office politics to negotiate. Perhaps most importantly, there is the chance to make a bit more money (which is surely no bad thing). A freelancer with solid reputation and good contacts can open a world of opportunities writing for in-house corporate mags, copywriting for PR agencies or producing marketing collateral, and all this is in addition to the bread and butter work of producing copy for the press (sometimes producing copy for their old employers at a far higher pro rata rate than if they were still a full time employee of said publication).

But these aren't good times… and the freelance world is tougher and more competitive than ever before.

So it's perhaps not surprising then that a new trend for "performance related" commissions is increasingly becoming popular amongst editors. Traditionally when commissioned by an editor to produce an article, a freelancer is paid by the word or alternatively a flat rate is agreed in advance. Under a performance-related option the amount a freelancer gets paid is in direct correlation to the number of hits the final article gets on the publications website.

It's a simple risk and reward scheme - if the journalist writes great copy that's engaging and interesting to the audience then they get paid more, if the article doesn't cut the mustard and nobody reads it then they get paid less, or potentially nothing. On the face of it, this is the epitome of a perfect, meritocratic system - the best rise to the top and are rewarded for it. Indeed in the PR world, we've been held to account by payment by results systems for years - offering to waive percentage chunks of fee if agreed metrics fail to be hit.

But the internet's a funny old thing and should a journalist's quality and his or her output really be measured by a metric with as many nuances as simple page impressions?

Tony Hallett has sat on both sides of the fence during his career. Firstly, as a founding editor of tech site Silicon.com, he worked daily with staff writers as well as guest writers, freelance journalists and bloggers and more latterly as an entrepreneur at his own company Collective Content. I caught up with Tony to get his thoughts on whether payment by results really stacks up.

"This has been going on for a little while now and it's not that straightforwardly bad or good. In one respect, publications have always chased eyeballs, going back decades.

"One outlet (I won't name) has a deal with some bloggers who end up extremely well paid for their efforts. The editor over there calls the contract (as there usually has to be a contract): 'The best deal in blogging'."

I asked Tony whether there was a chance journalists would go off-piste in the pursuit of 'eyeball-grabbing' copy / headlines which get plenty of hits, but at the cost of quality journalism.

"When a writer (usually freelance, as you pick up on) has a deal where they are rewarded by traffic, they don't usually have licence to write about naked robots using P2P on iPads. Their beat is often niche and doesn't overlap other writers'." 

So what about the cons? What happens when this model doesn't work?

"Other places will have experimented with the performance-based approach and ultimately pissed-off writers (especially if they try to map to staff editors who don't write much), organisations they cover and ultimately - if all that happens - advertisers."

"In the end, it's all about HOW it's done, not naturally a bad thing. I can see it happening more and more."

Stephen