Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!
They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.
So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.
First, to Robert Niles:
Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists
What's the value of journalism?The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.
Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.
[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.
While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg.
Maybe this is some kind of new idea for journalists to wrap their minds around (not to mention publishers professing new LOVE for subscriber-supported paywalls after growing fat on their advertiser monopoly subsidies for decades), but the marketplace of money, Adam Smith's newly-dead and brain-eating zombie "invisible hand of capitalism," the now-debunked automated "thermostat" of supply and demand NEVER fit well with the marketplace of ideas and art (New Gilded Age social capital collectors with more money than sense be damned).
Those who have faced structural unemployment due to forces outside their control ultimately run into this brick wall: if you depend on the marketplace of money to determine the value of your high level mastery of Skill X or Y, you might as well go live in a Unabomber cabin and eat worms.
Did the fact that steel jobs shipped overseas, creating the U.S. Rustbelt, mean the world no longer needed steel, or the skilled work to produce steel? Did textile jobs moving permanently to Asia suddenly mean people no longer wore clothing or didn't have a need to cover their bodies with art and style?
Or did the introduction of steel-reinforced building frames and concrete forms mean that a master bricklayer was no longer a master bricklayer, just because there was much reduced demand for a master bricklayer's work? I mean, have you ever SEEN a master bricklayer work? Holy shit, they make something very difficult look smooth and easy. Let's all join the Freemasons and sing Kumbayah, eh? (CC Flickr image by Svadilfari)
We can bemoan the loss of the monk's skill in illuminating hand-copied manuscripts, a skill made obsolete by the very technology of printing that is now reducing the number of paid jobs for journalists to a single-digit fraction of what previously existed in the golden age of print media monopolies, but it begs the question that the value of ANY given work is ONLY determined by the marketplace of supply and demand. The thought is just silly. Not that Robert Niles is saying precisely that, but best not to even venture to close to that conclusion.
For a personal example, one I've used before, look at photojournalism (and rural radio, for anyone who remembers when it was actually staffed by people). The structural hollowing out of newspapers began for photojournalists long before the purging began for writers. You can point to different markers of when this was most dramatically felt over decades, but the decline has been largely gradual, concurrent with the increased use of wire copy and wire photos.
Local shooters were just far less necessary, and local image holes could be filled in other ways, with willing freelancers, for instance.
I tend to point to the Reagan media deregulation of the 80s as a dramatic decline point for photojournalism (It cut the number of papers in most mid-size media markets in half. The rise of chains and particularly the influence of Gannett and USAToday led to layout templates that vastly restricted creative use of photography and caused the disappearance of newsprint use of multi-image photo essays, let alone double-truck designed photo essay spreads with a single story, the kind of thing I specialized in writing, shooting, and designing).
The scope of work for newspaper photojournalists was reduced to postage stamps and a keyed color image on any given page.
When the thing you do best goes away, what do you do? Fall in love with shooting postage stamps?
Then something else happened, even before the Web appeared.
Royalty-free CD-ROMs of stock images came on the market. If you shoot for the Daily Fishwrap and your best work gets thrown away every day, one primary outlet for quality and sanity was to archive your best work and attempt to resell images with royalties in the stock or secondary markets. It takes a heavy investment in archiving and time to tap such markets. When royalty-free CD-ROMs started appearing, with thousands of images available for $9.95, regardless of quality, I realized that I could no longer produce images for such an evolving marketplace without resorting to schlock or volume sales, neither of which was appealing.
By 1992, I knew that the value of my best work as a photographer had been reduced to exactly ZERO. Forgive me if I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for print writers who are a bit late coming to this pity party. I know legions former rural radio jocks who could also cry some crocodile tears for the vanishing army of print reporters.
But one thing that helped is that I am also a poet.
In other words, I have a model for understanding that the best work one does need not have a monetary value at all, and yes, poets will stubbornly insist on an alternative scale of value, EVEN OUTSIDE the academic industry which seems to believe poetry really only exists to be taught, or to have academic papers written about it.
Poetry has a way of persisting through oral and written traditions, whether anachronistic or densely obscure. I can't tell you how often I see famous lines from poems showing up on random people's status lines on Facebook, for instance. Something about the intangible value of poetry seems to persist, all the way back to the fragments and reputation of Sappho.
So I'd ask Robert Niles, if writing skill is enough to sustain poets, why isn't it enough to sustain journalists?
I should probably give Niles more space to make his point, since I went way off on a tangent. Because he's got some REALLY neat points to make in that regard. Stuff I like.
[...]
But the Internet hasn't just created more advertising space, driving down its price. It's also developing millions of new writers, diminishing the economic value of writing itself as a craft.
Before the Internet, most people never wrote outside the classroom. A few might pen an occasional letter to distant relatives, or an annual letter with the family's Christmas card. Today, people are writing more than ever before - sending e-mails, updating Facebook pages, posting to discussion forums and blogs. Not just students, either. The Internet enables adults to continue writing throughout their lives, using the written word to inform friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about the goings-on in their lives.
Nor is our new era of hyperliteracy limited to the written word. The ubiquity of digital cameras (including those on cell phones), as well as video cameras such as the Flip, gives people the opportunity to develop unprecedented literacy in visual communication.
[...]
As the 21st century progresses, going to school to major in writing and shooting stories will become like going to school to learn breathing. What's the point? It's a ubiquitous activity that everyone learns on his or her own long before college. With so many more people getting their 10,000 hours of writing and shooting early in life, more people than ever are able now technically to report to others the news that they encounter.
What's the value in being a journalist when everyone is doing journalism?
[While that's an interesting question, Niles sidesteps the far more interesting question, of what effect all this increased distribution of writing as an activity like breathing (as Niles discusses later) has among a much larger population than had previously been empowered by greater engagement in writing and literacy activities (critical and creative thinking, reflection, shaping, editing, composing, delivery, use of memory).
I mean, think about this. The advent of movable type and the broader dissemination of literacy in the 1500s in Western cultures had a dramatic effect on the intellectual lives in those cultures, on Western social history in general. It was a watershed that overthrew the existing social order (Church and Aristocracy tumbled before a rising merchant class) and fed artistic and intellectual movements (Enlightenment, Renaissance, Romanticism, Victorianism, etc.).
So if people are writing more than ever before, the lack of demand for top-down, journalists/editors-telling-the-average-person-how-to-think-and-what-to-think ought to be the LEAST of our concerns.
I'm more inclined to wonder what sorts of social revolutions are reshaping our cultures RIGHT NOW. Talk about an exciting time to be alive! I mean, wouldn't you wish you could have been around at the birth of the Enlightenment (Steampunks R Us) or with all the social and class unrest that accompanied the Renaissance and all that came after?! Geez.
What is actually happening, if writing and the kind of thinking that precedes writing is actually becoming that widely disseminated an engagement in our cultures (think of Victorian Commonplace Books and their accompanying epistolary traditions, on speed in multiple cultures at once from South Korea to the U.S. to Kenya), the social effects, the social movements enabled, the intellectual and political movements enabled, will be dramatic, if not revolutionary, and will of course dwarf any structural unemployment issues of a relatively small class of professional journalists thrown out of work or doomed to chronic underpayment for the degree of intellectual preparation generally required to do that job as a professional class.
I'm just saying, "Hey, let's keep things in proportion here!"
We may bemoan the loss of the bricklayer's skillset, but would we give up our steel frame buildings just to keep a big class of professional bricklayers around?
Or, to remember the old problems newspapers had in some years ago, with printers unions and union rules, which were often too rigid to accommodate computerized typesetting, rules which are virtually erased in a world of non-paper distribution and delivery methods? Would we keep those old printing presses and their workforce if all future deliveries of news products could be accomplished electronically? Would you keep hand-typesetters working with lead type on staff if you no longer needed them?
Back to Niles:]
Yes, news organizations must find new production models that allow them to remain profitable in a competitive publishing market. But news publishers must also reconsider whom they're hiring. Journalism schools must also reconsider the instruction that they provide.
There's no longer any use in merely teaching people to write to a formula and conform to a specific stylebook. While those skills had enough value a generation ago for an individual to build a career, the new, hyperliterate media marketplace has rendered those skills - in isolation - as practically worthless.
Sure, such skills have value - I compared writing to breathing before, and just try to live without breathing sometime. But no one other than elite singers pays for breathing lessons, and no one pays anyone else to breathe for him or her.
[Think too of the more formulaic styles of journalism as socially-constructed forms that evolved due to the column inch real estate constraints of print. If those constraints no longer exist, what is the point of holding on to those forms? Out of tradition?
Yes, there are embedded value-systems that live inside things like inverted pyramid leads and other standard journalistic writing conventions, values like brevity, like "just the facts, ma'am, just the facts," like "cut to the chase" and valuing the economies of a reader's time, values that transcend print real estate limits. But those values ought to be allowed to evolve their own socially-constructed forms and conventions of writing and communicating (like Twitter!), rather than caught in some anachronistic amber of journalistic forms developed for other mediums and other times.
Ah, but to imagine that "hyperliterate marketplace"! I actually believe such a thing is much further off than Niles considers, but that's because I've taught writing to college students over a period of more than 15 years, and I've witnessed a widespread decline in literacy and long-form reading during our passive media, "secondary orality" television age. I'm not saying that decline is permanent, and I remain hopeful our new Internet life in the Cloud with this postulated hyperliteracy and constant writing and active and interactive thinking could be a factor that might reverse that trend. A "secondary literacy" (Moulthrop) to match Ong's "secondary orality."
But I won't believe it until the Internet and its online cultures and communities have been around as long as television and other mass media passive forms. I count my start date from 1993, and consider that a kind of equivalent of those early days of TV, with those first families who got the first black and white TV sets in their post-War, Levitown, Boomer baby burbs. (Neat slideshow on this topic here!)] I think that means we have to give the Internet the same 50 years TV had from 1950-2000, to undo the sense ratio shift (McLuhan) from passive TV media (McLuhan hot) to active Internet media (McLuhan cool).
Journalists who wish to continue earning a living from their work must bring something else to the table. For some, it might be superlative writing ability. Great storytellers always will be able to command income for their work, but let's not forget that there are thousands of starving would-be auteurs for every James Cameron.
Reporting skill and knowledge provide a more feasible route. While millions can write and shoot well enough to communicate with a broad audience, significantly fewer have the expertise to discover and analyze fresh information of interest to those audiences. Many folks will be able to report the news when it happens in front of them, but there remains great market value in knowing how to dig up news when it's not out in the open.
To do that, the stenography model of journalism must die. Many random people off the street will be able to paste together a "he said, she said" story. What the hyperliterate media marketplace needs are experts who can analyze, and advocate for, information in the public interest.
That demands journalists who have professional-level training and experience with the beats that they cover. It demands journalists who have the analytical skills, including training in statistics, to make sense of datasets and to find the stories buried within them. It will demand journalism schools to become significantly more selective in the students that they admit - choosing only those with the academic skills and performance to meet these new demands.
The era of the journalist as mere scribe is over. As we contemplate how the industry will endure as it moves from monopoly to competition, we ought to remember that fact, as well.
[There isn't anything listed here that I wouldn't applaud and hope for, especially the DEATH (as in DIE DIE DIE!) of the stenography model of journalism. I really see this model as a direct outgrowth of the corporatization of journalism with the late 80s Reagan-era deregulation.
My own opinion is that, despite strong intellectual leadership in the field paying lip service to NOT WANTING the stenography model of journalism to become a norm, market forces proved to be much stronger and better able to make it the dominant model BAR NONE.
To explain why I think this, consider what was really happening in newsrooms while thought leaders and J-school professors (I did it myself) were repeating the mantra that journalists must not be mindless stenographers to newsmakers, must instead apply critical discernment and fact-checking against our carefully tape-recorded interview notes:
Newsrooms were being rapidly de-skilled and hollowed out.
Expensive non-management staff (read "veteran journalists") were considered dead weight and offered early retirement incentives, buy-outs, or were just laid off or purged. What masqueraded under the guise of "economic adjustments to the realities of the marketplace" had a net effect on newsrooms that I've written about before on this blog. When experience was purged, management lost its intellectual rivals who had enough clout to stand up for journalistic standards. The net effect was a pogrom designed to surgically remove the strongest guardians of journalistic standards from the newsroom.
What remained were the greenest and cheapest staff the organization could afford (while siphoning 20-30% profits off to media-chain stockholders). Stenographers, in other words.
They were hired to be stenographers. Their pay was low because they were stenographers, space-fillers for the lowest possible amount of local stuff to fill the holes that couldn't be filled by higher pay-grade syndicated material or AP or other news service subscriptions.
It makes media lawyers break out in hives, the idea of such a low-level person standing up to mayors or city managers, potentially misquoting them, getting sloppy, running the risk of a libel suit.
If any from the stenographer class rose up to fact-check or use critical discernment on sources, to do non-stenographer-like things, the Earth shook, the Heavens shuddered, lawyers were called, all the big editors and higher-pay-grade folks were called in, and CYA began. Trouble, in other words.
Low pay grade journalists learn quickly that doing something other than basic stenography might earn you a big story once in a blue moon, but if you make the Earth shake too often, the lawyers and people who fear risk start looking for ways to make you go away.
It was an industrial assembly line model, after all, what mass media chain journalism had become. There was a class divide, of "worker bees," or basic assembly line workers who fill the shrinking news holes as surely as an auto worker attaches the same part to vehicle chassis all day. Then there's a management class of people who play ball and get along with the company so well they got to move up out of worker bee-land to be a trustee in the assembly line prison, so to speak.
What about the people who get to be the real truth-tellers and bullshit-callers? With their blessed fact-checking and lawyers at the syndication or wire service? Who were/are those people?
My sneaking suspicion (I could be wrong) is that most of them didn't come out of any journalism school or other journalistic prep program at all. Like with the NYC publishing industry (before the Great Recession), I suspect that most of them came out of a slick Ivy or near-Ivy club from the moneyed classes (with no student loans, in other words, because you can't stay in this field and expect to pay them back), and instead of or after law school, they maybe hit something like that master's program at Columbia, unless their connections were already good enough to get them into the right circles at the major publications on the East Coast, or thereabouts.
I did not come from those insider circles, so my outside-looking-in conjecture about them could be completely off, or slightly off, or somewhat off. Exceptions don't disprove the "closed club" rule any more than a massive blizzard disproves global warming data, and there are always exceptions, good friends I've known who work at the elite publications, same as worker bees same as at a regional daily in the hinterlands, some in more gate-keeping or powerful positions.
But journalists as Enlightenment high priests offering an informed populace transparent and democratized access to power, the ideals of the field from the Penny Press to "Woodstein," are a far cry from the actual entrenched class interests inscribed within the field's hiring practices and reflected in the dominant norm of assembly line, low pay grade journalist-as-stenographer.
Journalists became stenographers because they were required to be stenographers. Those who did not accept that requirement eventually stopped being journalists, by choice or force. Thus we have a norm.
And then, with the blossoming of the Blogosphere, a bottom up media revolution was born to stand against everything that norm represents. A return to fact-checking and analysis! Sweet!
Does that mean writing and literacy are becoming reinscribed as broad basic skillsets for a rising tide of the general populace? My jury is still out on that score.
But I DO believe it means that a lot of those hidden masses of people who were slowly and gradually eased out of the field of journalism (and other critical thinkers in general) are rising up again to reclaim their voices as truth-tellers, just as surely as poets did not vanish from the landscape just because there turned out to be, completely and utterly, no economic demand for poetry.
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