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News & ArtsThursday, December 3, 2009
Media Journicide
Posted by Eli Sanders on Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 10:25 AM
The Newsosaur worries about a "looming, lost generation":
Vanishing employment opportunities and shrinking freelance compensation threaten to wipe out a substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists.
1
When will universities start offer degrees in professional blogging? Because the bloggers of the future are going to need training in journalism instead.
2
I'm a member of the "next generation of professional journalists" and I'm getting tired of all these articles about how journalism is simply going to DIE. Maybe I'm too much of an idealist, but I really think anyone who truly wants to be a journalist - who has a true insatiable journalistic curiosity - should be EXCITED about the state of journalism right now. There are all these technologies and mediums that allow us to come up with creative and original ways of giving information. Journalism isn't simply going to cease to exist because there isn't a profitable market model available yet. I believes it's inevitable that one will eventually be developed. And it will become the new standard. And journalism will be as fresh, creative, challenging and interesting as it ever has been.
5
The article is way too panicky. First of all, journalism isn't disappearing; the production of content is still profitable, at one end, in national behemoths like the NYT, News Corporation, cnn.com, etc. It's been that way for ages, but now the aggregators are websites like google rather than local papers.
At the local end, the internet has made it much, much easier to keep track of what's going on. Public meetings are recorded and placed online with documents. There's a mass of interested citizens digging into this stuff and reporting, as well as a relatively thin layer of professional reporters (the Stranger, Publicola, what's left of the dailies). This orchestra of content can be aggregated for next to nothing.
It's true that cushy, well-paid jobs at mid-market papers are dying out. That's a problem for journalists, but I'm not convinced it's a problem for democracy. People like writing, telling stories, and talking to powerful people; it's much more fun than working at Starbucks and people will still be drawn to it at those wages.
At the local end, the internet has made it much, much easier to keep track of what's going on. Public meetings are recorded and placed online with documents. There's a mass of interested citizens digging into this stuff and reporting, as well as a relatively thin layer of professional reporters (the Stranger, Publicola, what's left of the dailies). This orchestra of content can be aggregated for next to nothing.
It's true that cushy, well-paid jobs at mid-market papers are dying out. That's a problem for journalists, but I'm not convinced it's a problem for democracy. People like writing, telling stories, and talking to powerful people; it's much more fun than working at Starbucks and people will still be drawn to it at those wages.
7
For most of human history, journalists were stringers, those ink-stained gossip-mongering tabloid ambulance-chasing wretches. Forget what you were for a few years post-Nixon and revel in glory in your new (old) role.
That's what a professional journalist has been - and will be.
Nothing wrong with it. It's what the public wants, and the sooner you adapt, the better.
Or did I miss something when penny dreadfuls ruled the literate world?
What you describe as professional journalism is what used to be an affectation of trust fund babies and the upper class and upper middle classes who wrote journals of literary merit and published papers ascribing to a higher purpose. There never really was any money in that, but for a few decades you lived in an artificial rarity.
(my stepdad was a professional journalist - UTA masters in journalism)
That's what a professional journalist has been - and will be.
Nothing wrong with it. It's what the public wants, and the sooner you adapt, the better.
Or did I miss something when penny dreadfuls ruled the literate world?
What you describe as professional journalism is what used to be an affectation of trust fund babies and the upper class and upper middle classes who wrote journals of literary merit and published papers ascribing to a higher purpose. There never really was any money in that, but for a few decades you lived in an artificial rarity.
(my stepdad was a professional journalist - UTA masters in journalism)
9
it's not that journalism is going away. it's just that nobody's going to get paid for it. works for me.
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