Comment by dannyobrien

2 days ago

I've been involved in a lot of discussions about "what is journalism? what do real journalists do?", and the best response I've heard was from Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame), who told me "Journalists pick up the phone." It may have already dated as a pithy description, but the idea of literally calling[1] people to fact-check or dig deeper is a low bar that a surprising amount of current journalism doesn't clear. And I say this as someone who has definitely done the non-journalism: just writing an opinion, or a column, or blog post, or whatever. Or, perhaps most insidiously, when you have a thesis for an article and you just collect the (partial) facts you need to flesh out that thesis.

I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do. But it's as Thomas says, that scarcity means that it's still as valuable (and recognisable) as it always was.

[1] Or emailing -- but emailing, and emailing, and emailing, then calling, and emailing again until you get an answer.

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dannyobrien

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starkparker  2 days ago

> I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do.

As someone both built for and trained to do it, I can tell you I'd be making at least US$150k/year less if I was still doing it. I wager I'd be short about $1.25M in career earnings through just salary in the time since I moved from the copy desk to tech.

That's factoring in how, through the first third of my tech career I was still making just $35-60k/year. And I was ecstatic, because $35k was a five-figure raise over running the front section of a daily newspaper.

Every person in the first two newsrooms I worked in is either dead or has left the journalism field completely, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the entire team of editors, artists, and photographers who worked on the winning story. Most are now in PR, consulting, or (as a symptom of being near the Gulf Coast) in some arm of the fossil-fuels industry. One of the last whose career I keep track of just took up mail-order baking.

It's a financially unsustainable field in any market. At 5 years' experience at the head of the editing wheel, I was living paycheck-to-paycheck paying just $400/month in rent, living with two roommates in a single-wide trailer in the middle of a sugar cane field.

The vast majority of those City Desk-style journalism jobs made primary-school teaching salaries look attractive _25 years ago_, much less now. By the time I left, all of those jobs that I knew of had either moved to contract gigs or stringers (freelancers paid by column inches of text) unless you were in a big-city market or working for a regional/national paper.

The myth of building up a journalism career at an institution from the bottom of the org through shoe-leather reporting alone, without already knowing or being related to someone who could move you ahead of the rest, was already far past dead in most of the US.

If I could find a journalism job that paid half what I make now, made me travel constantly, had shit benefits, got me put on watchlists, made me deal with some of the slimiest people on the planet in the forms of career local politicians and court lawyers on the daily, and put me in precarious situations... I'd still probably take it, because I miss it every day. But that job flat-out does not exist in any form that I'd get a callback for unless I married into a publisher's extended family, and hasn't for decades.

  • tptacek  2 days ago

    Urban primary school teachers get a pretty attractive comp package these days!

    • sethammons  2 days ago

      I was a teacher and stopped in 2011. Pay was $38k/yr with summer school. Looks like the same southern California inner city school district pays $68k/yr now for the same pay step. That is a big jump but I am not sure I would call it attractive. And in North Carolina's state capital, where I am now, the rate is $50k/yr. That is some struggle-bus territory.

      My first programming gig doubled my income and nearly halved my hours. The stress lowering alone would have been worth it. I haven't had anyone try to physically fight me as a dev. I think the same applies today; teachers are underpaid.

  • YZF  2 days ago

    Appreciate the inside perspective.

    I'm curious what's your take on news agencies like Reuters and AP? Do they pay better? Do they have resources to do real journalism?