I am still struggling with the current decimation and carnage in the field of journalism, and it will never sit well with me. I've mourned the decline of this field since I was first released from J-School with my undergrad degree, right into the world of Reagan media ownership deregulation, the beginning of the end.
Historic 100-year-old papers started closing back then, in the late 1980s, bought up by chains, multiple-paper cities turned into media monopolies overnight. The Clear Channeling of the rural U.S., where I'd come from, was beginning, and it has taken all this time to penetrate to the biggest metropolitan news-gathering organizations in the country.
For a time, some things ran counter to the trend, idiosyncratic things. USAToday was founded, as if to thumb its nose at the decline, yet its modular design spread virally, literally vaporizing page real estate set aside for the work I did best: full page and double-truck photo essays and stories. I fled to grad school, fully aware I was being put out of business.
And Ted Turner, whom I got to meet in 1986, dared to open international bureaus, to populate the landscape with MORE news-gatherers while chain consolidation was reducing them. Fate favored Turner in the form of the Gulf War of 1991, vindicating his international coverage. Before then, people laughed at his staff-heavy spending as an indulgent whim of a boy-man who liked to race sailboats.
But Ted didn't work hard enough to fend off Time Warner, the chains bought up everything, profits rolled in at 20-30% for shareholders in those newly-public corporations, and the shareholders came to regard those kind of margins as a guarantee.
Much is made of the current debate about the newspaper numbers trending to zero. Much more of the debate between Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine and traditional journalists (on Christmas Eve, Jarvis proclaims: "No Hope").
[Pissing Match Links: Ron Rosenbaum Slate Salvo, Jeff Jarvis Snark Return]
I'm not surprised at the debate, just at its intensity. Clay Shirky reminds us that he predicted this vaporizing industry in the late 1990s. I was on the World Wide Web Artists Coalition listserv with Clay back at that time, and remember well when he was first making those arguments.
I did not dispute him then because of what I saw happening to photojournalism at that time: the value of my work, of most photographers' work, was trending to absolute zero, which also happens to be the value of poetry, another field in which I have a degree. Royalty-free CDs had already forced me to realize my copyright-based stock photos had just become worthless, because it cost me more to make the images than the market would pay, ever.
To paraphrase a familiar quotation: They came for the Image People, and the Word People said nothing. They were happy to let us fade away. More space in print for words (the more important bits, was their unspoken righteous assumption).
The Word People didn't want to see their own end coming. They didn't want to think that same trend would ever apply to them. But I was certain at the time that it would.
And then, in the early 2000s, the blog and citizen journalism movement arose, and I enthusiastically championed it, participated in it, and would again in a heartbeat. It was overdue. It was necessary. The gatekeepers HAD become drunk on their own power, not sloppy drunk, just too used to holding the keys to the kingdom. Ironically, I was by then working at CNN, covering another war in the Persian Gulf (from Atlanta), and building blogs for unembedded journalists on the ground in Kurdistan.
Now, the unthinkable is happening right before my eyes, the thing I have been preparing for for the last 25 years, and my heart just aches. I DO NOT WANT THIS FUTURE.
It was some of my J-School students at University of Montana who turned me on to The Spokesman-Review as a paper with an online site I really admired, ESPECIALLY because of the way it integrated photojournalism the way I remembered it, before images morphed off into newsprint postage stamps, like it used to be. I often linked to original reporting from there, once I started following the paper. It reminded me of the old Detroit Free-Press, had that same feeling in the online edition.
So I knew the name Steve Smith before encountering this story, just as I knew Clay Shirky online when he was making his prophecies. But it is Steve Smith who reminds me below why I am so heartsick, and why I will continue to fight against this watchdog-less future.
Smith's sad post below reminds me of why this will always be my life's work, no matter what I end up doing for a living. Go read the unexcerpted original, especially if this is or was your field too.
Link: Still A Newspaperman | A holiday wish…and reminder.
A holiday wish…and reminder
Good morning,
For all of the years I worked as a senior editor, I tried to end each calendar year with a memo to my staff thanking them for their hard work, reminding them of the good journalism we had accomplished and wishing them well for the coming year.
I have been struggling in recent days trying to craft a note from my voluntary exile, something appropriate for my former staff and, maybe, appropriate for others who follow this blog.
And I’m finding the words are not coming easily. Maybe it’s the bleak, snowy landscape in Spokane that has left me feeling so inadequate to the task. Or the knowledge that this holiday season has found so many of my former colleagues unemployed and struggling, sitting on the sidelines while our industry stuggles for survival.
[...]
But I am not, by nature, melancholy and certainly not so when I think about the profession to which i have devoted my life. I remain an optimist, if not about the future of newspapers, certainly about the future of journalism.
In struggling to find words for this post, I went back to a speech I gave some years ago to a convention of college journalists. I excerpted a portion of that speech for my farewell note to the staff of The Statesman Journal in 2002. As I re-read that excerpt this morning, I found it still conveys my core beliefs. It expresses my optimism as well as anything I could write today. And so I am going to plagiarize myself for this year’s holiday note.
This is what I wrote in 2002. I re-dedicate it to the staff of The Spokesman-Review, which is doing such good work during the current weather crisis, to my professional friends and colleagues and to the countless students with whom I have worked in the last year.
[...]
Several years ago, Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University penned a book titled “What are journalists for?”
What a terrific question that is.
Here’s my take:
Journalists exist to serve – not ourselves, not our bosses, not our friends, boosters, advertisers or benefactors.
We exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.
Let me say that again…we exist to serve citizens in the exercise of their citizenship.
And in serving citizens we adhere to certain core values:
Values of community
The marketplace of ideas
The First Amendment
Honesty and truth-telling journalism
Voice to the voiceless
Defense of the defenseless
And in all of this, we are fearless.That is our calling.
And it is a calling – I believe that with all my heart - a call to service.
If you pursue this calling, this is what you can expect:
Long hours
Low pay
Disappointed parents and frustrated lovers
Generally primitive working conditions in buildings you hate in cities where you’d never want to live.
Your friends will be people just like you, except there won’t be too many of them.
Public officials will distrust and despise you. But, not to worry, many of your loyal readers or viewers will distrust and despise you, too.
A good day will be one in which no one calls to scream in your ear – except that’s a bad day, too, because you obviously haven’t written anything important enough to arouse anyone.
Your spouse will wonder why you don’t know the meaning of a 40-hour, five-day workweek.
And your kids, should you be in a meaningful relationship long enough to have any, will describe you as a “writer” during their show and tell in the hopes classmates will think you do something respectable, like writing pornographic romance novels.
Statistics say you will experience divorce, alcoholism and heart disease at rates higher than the norm. You’ll probably smoke – or wish you could.
You won’t retire to a beach house in Florida. Hell, you probably won’t live to retirement.
But even knowing this in advance, some of you in this room, most of you I hope, are going to pursue the call to service. Already, you can’t imagine doing anything else.
And I am so grateful for that.
I am grateful for the people just like you who work in my newsroom. They are our best and brightest and I am proud every day to be their editor.
They have brains. They have heart. The have the fire in the belly and the courage of their convictions. They bring guts to the party. They work harder than sane people should work and then, on the day when something happens in our world that could change everything, when history hangs in the balance, they are there to write the story.
[...]
And by following in their footsteps, no matter the challenges, you are sustained, whether you work for The New York Times or the Statesman Journal or The Oregon Daily Emerald. You are part of a great tradition that stretches back 250 years. And while we are humbled daily in the practice of that tradition, we must also be proud and honored and steadfast as its stewards.
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