Slashdot Mirror
Pay-Per-View Journalism Is Burning Out Reporters Young
Hugh Pickens writes "Young journalists once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story, but the NY Times now reports that instead many are working online shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google's algorithms and draw readers their way. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times all display a 'most viewed' list on their home pages; some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles. 'At a [traditional] paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you're actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,' says Jim VandeHei, Politico's executive editor. 'Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.' The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. At Politico, roughly a dozen reporters have left in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. 'When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who's been working for a decade, not a couple of years,' says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 'I worry about burnout.'"
Do what Radley Balko, probably the most important civil liberties reporter out there right now, does: actually go after the nitty gritty details of the stories that rub you the wrong way from the police reports. He's taken "mundane" stories and turned them into WTF?! controversies (which they deserved to be) by doing that. To my knowledge, he rarely has to fight with other reporters over the same stories because, well, he actually **investigates** rather than do a few phone calls and call it a day.
Then watch the entire footage those "clips" the Daily Show edits.
I'm a Daily Show and Colbert fan, but please don't take them as real journalists. Even they themselves say that.
Any young journalist coming out of college in *ANY* era thinking that journalism is going to mean "trotting the globe in pursuit of a story" is in for a huge disappointment. Even in the heyday of journalism, very few journalists ever even left their town on city. For every Bob Woodward, there are about 1,000 local reporters whose most exciting story of the year involves an argument at a town council meeting.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Works for digg.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Today I've had to reread sentences 4 or 5 times to figure them out, and all but one has turned out to say what it means, albeit in a roundabout way. The rest were missing words, used the wrong word in the wrong place, or denotated the opposite of the author's connotation.
This is in maybe 8 or 10 different articles from different authors.
Editors are nonexistent, and authors have become incredibly sloppy and indifferent.
The headline has become the content, and the reward for clicking on it is a reduction in your knowledge of the subject...
Try The Economist. It's a weekly but it still does in-depth quality reporting plus good debatable editorials. See it's web-site www.economist.com
Here is the always working link on the actual Daily Show site: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-16-2010/an-energy-independent-future