These terms can have ambiguous meanings, but one term has a positive connotation and the other a negative.
If you’re a salaried watch writer who has a corporation funding every word you write, and a team assisting you every step of the way, it’s easy to criticize a hard-working solo media entrepreneur by calling them a “gatekeeper” or “transactional” from behind your computer screen, as though you offer insight into something you’ve never done yourself.
Until you’ve received so many product announcements at one time that it’s unmanageable to cover them all yourself, you have no clue. Until you’ve risked everything and gone all in — with no guaranteed paycheck. You cannot even begin to fathom what it’s like.
Anyone who thinks someone who has created over four thousand watch articles (the majority unpaid), gone to fifteen Swiss watch shows on their own dime (many writers get their trips comped), visited a dozen watch factories (these are awesome but generate no revenue), attended hundreds of watch events (for no money), is “transactional” — is delusional. Just the same as someone who thinks a college athlete, who trained their entire life (when most kids were out having fun), in addition to going to school, to earn the starting position in college, and who earns NIL money as a result, is somehow in the wrong because they want to be paid for their hard work.
Running a business or training like an athlete can be highly rewarding — but it’s not as easy to achieve success as some might think. If it were, everyone would be doing it. And the failure rate is sky high. Case in point, even the most venerable watch publication ever, Hodinkee, was days away from reaching the end of its burn rate before Watches of Switzerland stepped in and saved them. They had clearly become too big and inefficient.
Professional Watches is highly curated, not because we’re sitting on a high horse, but because time is our most important asset, and we’re relentlessly efficient.
There’s always something to do, but not enough time to do it, and that doesn’t strictly mean delivering content. Each day, some of my time is dedicated to writing, editing, research, business development, website management, data analysis, administrative work, social media, moderation, archive management, photography, and other tasks. Our website alone has 25,000 images, and our cloud backup archives have 250,000. Think about that, and try to comprehend why everything must be filtered: images, words, releases, events. If you say yes to everyone, you’ll never get anything meaningful done. Quality over quantity.
As a solopreneur, in the nonstop media space, I can tell you from experience that curation is not gatekeeping — it’s a means of survival.
