Finally the answer: Why Journalists deserve low pay

No need to get so upset about this. He's right. It just took him 6 pages to say what we already know -- those of us skilled enough, talented enough, to write the in-depth features that are entertaining from word 1 to word 10,000 make way more money than those of us covering games and generating 400-word blurbs.

 

I try to keep my steady stream of fungible blurbs to around 325 words if I can.

 

I love a faceplam thread as much as the next guy, but I'm pretty sure the Capt. Picard one is /thread.

 

"Average journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories."

That's funny. I was just pointing this out today. Boss asked me how my profile was coming.

"Well, I've only seen this girl play once, and I had time for a 10-minute interview because you wanted this turned around in one day. So, this should be as bland and uninspired as everything else we do."

I do believe that I'm just an interchangeable cog, based on the level I'm allowed to aspire to at my paper. They want things done cheaply and quickly. Quality is not up for debate. There is not one good writer in the newsroom. At least I don't think so. No one has a chance to dig into something. It's not just sports. So when I leave, if I'm even replaced it will be by someone who will be paid a little more than two-thirds of my pay. It is what it is.

 

I'd love to visit your newsroom a week. It'd be eye-opening. Sounds like a hellhole.

 

This guy could use a low-paid editor. I went cross-eyed by page 2.

 

I'm a doctor, not a journalist.

 

Well, it's good to know my skills are basically worthless in today's economy. I'll buy a large box marked "Maytag" tomorrow and go about living out the rest of my days in it. Do be kind and drop a couple pennies in the box when you walk by.

Seriously, though, this is pretentious, pompous twaddle of the highest order. Yeah, we all know that the business plan of the organizations we're working for is going straight to hell, but to suggest that there is no value in what we do because so many people can do it? I reject that out of hand. This ISN'T a job just anyone can do well, just as there are only a certain number of people who can perform technical duties or frame a house. Yeah, our job doesn't require us to be an expert in any one area, as he says, but we ARE the ones who bring all the data from those experts together into something people can actually read without getting lost halfway through. There is value in that.

 

One point he made was that there's so many ways for Average Joe to get information, our work is devalued.

I'd argue the opposite is true. There's so much information wafting out there, nobody has time to look at it all. Our job is to pare it all down into easy reading - something the fellow who wrote this high-falutin' tripe clearly has no sense of.

 

This is not new. Nor is it wrong. Newsroom wages are low, by and large, because management believes anyone who passed high school English can come in and do an acceptable job. Management likes paying low wages, because the turnover it creates has a self-perpetuating monetary effect. Quality journalism, or what most of us see as such, is not a primary concern. It's a happy side effect when they get it.

 

Why would they want us to do that for them, with or ethics and mass-production, when they can either do it for themselves with a few web bookmarks, or simply find a like-minded blogger or two that will feed their own biases?