There’s an assumption that if you write for the national press, you must be well-off: journalism is, after all, a profession.
Nope, it’s a craft. As we can prove, for as those who consider it a profession move in the pay has fallen. Social status being a part of total compensation….
Too dull to read to the end.
Howsoever that may be I was struck by “one of the few to straggle on is the Evening Standard, which went freesheet and focused on reaching reception-starved underground commuters”. So that’s doomed then.
I don’t think journalists enjoy social status of the kind one might want.
I don’t think journalists enjoy social status of the kind one might want.
Here in the States, journalists have about the same social status as crack whores. The difference being that crack whores actually have to satisfy the needs of their audience before getting paid.
Well at least Sarah’s pretty self aware. I’ve heard similar spiels from barristers, who have bemoaned ,for example, teachers earning more than them with all their benefits to boot. And similar spiels from teachers who bemoan, well perhaps it’s easier to list what they don’t bemoan- their holidays. Yet Sarah still thinks something has been lost to the world not just her. It hasn’t: people have more info now and that was all the journos job fundamentally was: a provider of information.
And actually, Timmy, journalism doesn’t really fit the definition of a craft any more than it fits the definition of a profession.
It’s a job and nothing more.
I don’t have a high opinion of most journalists, but I sure as hell wish my name was Wolf Blitzer
It’s a job and nothing more.
Or even a pastime, given the number of people who have day jobs who seem to get published.
Journalism is a trade.
Here in the States, journalists have about the same social status as crack whores.
I confess that I don’t understand how journalism works in the US; every city seems to have 2 or 3 well-staffed papers. Its major publications seem able to fund writers who spend months on a story and their readers are happy to consume acres of verbiage. I remember once reading a New Yorker profile of an alt-country singer which ran to about 18 pages. I think the performer had released one album and an EP at that point, maybe 12 songs.
Then you have all the online nonsense like Vox or Vice or whatever. I’m amazed there’s anyone left to work as a crack whore.
Perhaps journalists moonlight as crack shores for improved social status?
I confess that I don’t understand how journalism works in the US; every city seems to have 2 or 3 well-staffed papers.
You’re about 25 years late to the party. Outside of a few cities like New York, most cities have one daily… and most of those are owned by companies like New Media, Gannett and McClatchy (ie, non-local ownership).
Examples: The Cleveland Plain Dealer (owned by Advance) is only delivered four days a week, and has a subscription base of somewhere around 116,000 weekdays and 255,000 on Sunday. It serves a metro population of about 2 million. The Columbus Dispatch (Gannett) has little original reporting outside of sports. It’s metro reporting has declined to the point of being nearly non-existent. For a metro population of 2 million their circulation is 81,000 and 140,000.
When journalists mainly churn out PR statements using Ctr-C/Ctrl-V, then it’s not likely to be well paid or be considered a profession.
Print journalism in the U.S. has been killed by the internet. Not because of content*, but because the internet sucked all the advertising revenue out of print. Layoffs and consolidation will continue.
*Hard left content hasn’t helped them. There are plenty of older people who would enjoy a daily, but being generally conservative, they aren’t going to buy the hard left crap.
Gamecock –
While it’s true that the internet has drained advertising revenues, one cannot underestimate the damage caused by local newspapers’ willful neglect of half its potential audience (the non-lefty types) by pushing biased reporting and/or self-censorship.
There’s more than one reason Jeff Bezos was able to buy the Washington Post for one dollar. Losing advertising revenue to the internet doesn’t explain catastrophic losses in circulation/readership. Not providing a product that appeals to a broad base of potential readers does.
“ Given my time again, I wouldn’t choose journalism”
Most people the wrong side of 40 could say given my time again I wouldn’t do X.
“The new generation of hacks are weak actors reliant on weak institutions”
And attacking the next generation to boot, welcome to middle age.
I can’t be arsed reading the rest of that after that self-pitying start, but I did follow the link on her name to her Twitter account and see she describes herself as a “vaginacentrist”. I’ve no idea what that’s meant to mean and don’t care, it just tells me that I was right not to read the Unheard article and to avoid her writing like the plague.
@BIND
Lots of truth right there.
@Dennis
“Examples: The Cleveland Plain Dealer (owned by Advance) is only delivered four days a week, and has a subscription base of somewhere around 116,000 weekdays and 255,000 on Sunday. It serves a metro population of about 2 million. The Columbus Dispatch (Gannett) has little original reporting outside of sports. It’s metro reporting has declined to the point of being nearly non-existent. For a metro population of 2 million their circulation is 81,000 and 140,000.”
While I agree MC’s description sounds a couple of decades out of date, even those kinds of numbers – in metro populations of a couple of million – are comparable in size to national newspapers in the UK. Even some of our biggest, oldest names are on just a couple of hundred thousand. Complicated by online subscriptions and so on, but to a Rightpondian it can still look like America has a surprising number of papers.
@BIND
(Not saying it’s worth reading, for it’s all been said a thousand times already, but the latter part of the piece actually departs at quite a radical angle from the self-pity that precedes it: It is, on the face of it, baffling that certain positions which are niche in the public at large can attain the status of unassailable truth within the media. Most people, by and large, don’t adhere to privilege theory, for example. Which isn’t to say privilege theory shouldn’t feature in any journalism — but nor should it be the only framework through which rights are discussed, and nor should any dissension from privilege theory be treated as prima facie evidence of bigotry. Such ideas take hold because they work as markers of belonging: your commitment to them shows your commitment to the institution. And they are enforced for two reasons: because to let them slide would be to make yourself vulnerable to the same attacks, and because excluding other people from the field increases your access to the shrinking resources available. … It matters, deeply, that the organisations to which we entrust the discovery and dissemination of information and ideas have grown hostile to free speech and free thought. It matters that they have grown closer to being intellectual monocultures: if the national press was populated by more people who’d had their career grounding doing vox pops in the regions, I wonder whether the 2016 referendum result would have felt like quite such an ambush.)
Hallowed Be,
“Yet Sarah still thinks something has been lost to the world not just her. It hasn’t: people have more info now and that was all the journos job fundamentally was: a provider of information.”
More particularly, they were the conduits of information, the editors of information. Local shop is having some trouble, they’d call up the newspaper and a journalist would come out. Today, the shop would just write it on their local Facebook group. And rather than an editor deciding what is important, the market does with likes/retweets etc.
I think the problem is that we have all these journalists, when what we really need are reporters. Don’t need a degree for that…
MBE,
She may make a good point in that last paragraph, and that last line sums it up nicely, but what a lot of words. It might help if they practised brevity as well.
I think it means she herself believes she’s a cunt
Even twenty years ago vast numbers of graduates were trying to get into journalism. You had then and you have now thousands of people chasing the odd vacancy. Think again why they are paid pisspoor salaries, even if they stuff they wrote isn’t hard-left gibberish junk. It isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. Newspapers are oversubscribed for unpaid internships!