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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.'"
Investigative journalism is dead.
The only thing left for journalists to do is put a little spin on corporate and government press releases.
I'm sure this "burnout" isn't confined to journalism. Virtually everybody I know who is shackled to a deskjob with an email account faces the same problem.
The electronic leash has gotten so tight nobody can breathe anymore. I know I can't.
No matter how "nice" the workplace, in today's "competitive" marketplace you've got to be first - and if the 20-somethings are feeling that put-upon think how a 50ish guy like me must feel!
Watch a week of The Daily Show. Watch how they compare current comments by politicians to past comments by those same politicians.
I don't think this is about the time-to-publish.
I think this is more about not having the depth or experience to dig into the background material. Reporters who really know their subject material will have no problem attracting viewers.
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.
"Young engineers once dreamed of hacking the globe in pursuit of a new invention, but the NY Times now reports that instead many are working shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh bug or try to solve some miniscule problem involving the smallest of system parts — anything that will impress executive boards and draw bonuses their way. Lockheed Martin, The Boeing Company, and Northrop Grumman all peddle very advanced defense technologies to the United States Government that require armies of engineers to aggregate existing subcomponents from other contractors in order to generate cost plus revenue on project contracts. 'At a [traditional] engineering company, your stress point is just before the design review with the customer, where you are trying to explain the solution to his problem with a last-minute presentation. '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 when one of your middle manager bosses comes knocking at your cubicle entrance for a surprise study of your progress.' The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at large engineering firms all over the nation. At all three major defense contractors, hundreds of engineers have been laid off due to contract cancellations resulting from schedule overruns. '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 [Random Engineering Professor] of the [Random Engineering College]. 'I worry about burnout.'"
Yup...it fits well enough. Burnout is what happens when retarded business majors and incompetent morons get promoted up the company power ladder for slightly increasing this quarter's profit. If you head up organizations with short term thinkers, then it is the grunt workers at the bottom that suffer in every industry. This is the result of living in a money-worshiping society that values the next dollar above all else.
You want to do your part to change the way things work in your industry young reporters? It's simple. Stop working for the large media outlets that treat you like a consumable resource. Instead, find a nice local newspaper that treats its employees with respect or, better yet, start your own independent blog. Will you make as much money? Nah. Will you live longer with more sanity? Probably. You can't have your cake and eat it to. Have enough respect for yourself to make your income a means to an end, rather than the end itself, and your employers will start to treat you with respect as well. If you are insecure enough in your persona to let a large company rape you up and down the halls in terms of stress and hours worked, then you are going to get stomped on throughout your entire career until you are finally subdued into a finally beaten pulp of what was once a human being.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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.
If you want to trot the world, see strange places and break that AWESOME story, then, well, you're going to have to take some risks. Get out from behind the desk. Actually see the world and ... GASP ... FIND SOME FUCKING NEWS TO REPORT ON OF YOUR OWN.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
Breakfast served all day!
It's the advertising model that's to blame. And the publishers are the ones who agreed to play this way, so you can point the finger there.
In the old days, a publication would go to advertisers and say, "We have a brand that's recognized blah-de-blah and we have a daily/weekly/monthly circulation of dee-da-dee, here are some studies that show who our average reader is, this is their purchasing power, do you want to advertise with us or not?" And if you were the New York Times, they would. No further questions asked.
I come from the world of trade publishing. You know those magazines like Information Week where you can fill out a survey and you get the subscriptions for free? That survey is what's paying for your subscription. That survey is what we take to advertisers to explain to them exactly who our readers are and how advertisers can expect to reach people in IT with purchasing power if they advertise in our pages. These "qualified circulation" magazines can often charge advertisers more than a regular, pay-for-subscription magazine can, because we know more about our readers (assuming the readers tell the truth, but ignoring that is a little game the entire industry agrees to play). Again, it's not about who the advertiser reached with an ad. It's about who they could reach.
That was the past.
Now, in a desperate bid to ignite the online advertising market, publishers have made a devil's bargain. Now they agree to turn over reams of Web logs for every page view they serve. The advertiser wants to know: Exactly how many times did you serve our ad? For what content? Who saw it? When was it served on a story that did well and when was it served on a story that nobody saw? How can we stop putting our ad on your boring stories and only put it on the stories that people like?
That last sentence is the kicker. You can see where it leads. More and more, the publication is compelled to stop running stories that aren't hits and only try to run stories that will be "viral" blockbusters. This pressure is incredibly difficult to ignore, but it's insidious. It erodes the judgment of the editorial department at any publication. It leads to the kind of story-chasing described in TFA.
And don't think blogs are going to save the industry this time. It's even worse at some unknown blog -- how are you ever going to get your voice heard if nobody visits your blog? So you need a headline. You need a sensational story. You'll do it just this one time, and everybody will keep coming back for all your other scintillating insights that aren't quite so sensational ... sorry, Charlie. It won't work. You'll end up doing it too.
The only way to fix it is for publishers to turn off the faucet. You want to see an exact breakdown of our Web logs and how your ads are skewing with what story, when and how? Fuck you. That's proprietary information that we don't release to our clients. Suffice it to say that we are a leading publication in our field. Take or leave.
But how likely is that?
Breakfast served all day!
This article states a truth which has existed for the better part of a generation. University for journalism is closer to an arts course than a science one; you can get through it with a good grade easier relative to other subjects like math or science which require a specific mind to get through and even then can prove challenging and time consuming.
As such graduates - which were never really 'taught' in a direct subject 100 years ago - emerge from university to a tough jobs market. Often they need work experience, plus a series of publications before say...a local newspaper will take them in as a low-level staff member. Due to constricting markets wages have fallen; graduates here in Britain are known to begin a job on as low a salary £11-12K (about $15-16K) per year with a slight rise when we enter the London Metropolitan borough.
Assuming you're 22, talented, and have enjoyed much of your degree and the possibilities it presents (perhaps being a young idealist you picture yourself as a roving reporter, or a foreign correspondant in exotic locales etc) - the reality is that you will, for years, have to sit in an office all day long and basically reword stuff coming in on the AP/PA/Reuters wire - all day long. Far cry from your modules which presented you with an adventurous trade. That's perfectly true; you can be sodding Tintin in this business but if you're like that then you aren't young because you wouldn't have the money to travel or do in-depth investigative stuff; not to mention that geniune investigative work is rare in the ink and paper side of the trade.
After a few months of copying out the wire, bored out of your mind, you've probably lost a lot of passion for the trade. You want out. The rose-tinted specs are off; and you are basically in a job where you are confined all day to an office with a huge workload that never ends because editors want the paper packed to the gills with stuff that's appearing in 10 other rags at minimum. If you have a bullying subeditor and/or editor it can be worse; the scare stories I've heard of breakdowns or young hacks in tears thanks to a dressing down in the ed's office are too numerous to all be fabrication.
I saw this crap early on, and was able to take up other work to supplement my freelancing which is a labour of love. I was saying to a Guardian journo the other day...I smile whilst out getting a story in the July sunshine and cool breeze, the greenery and ordinary folks going about their day - and then contrast it to vigil at the PA wire, lukewarm coffee and petty office politics that haunt young 'churnalists' whose talent is squandered under a constant flow of drudgery.
Would I trade my even-lower paid freelance job for £12 grand per year in the local press doing that? Not in this life.