No, it's not any better on the other side of the Atlantic

TrooperBari · Sep 20, 2008

In case you were curious.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2008/sep/18/uk

I note that you've always said that society needs journalists, but it is looking increasingly unwilling to pay for them. I can see, from here, that national newspapers are beginning to head in the direction that local papers went 20 years ago, demanding levels of commitment - in hours and workload - that are unsustainable in conjunction with a normal family life.

In return, they offer salaries too low to support a family, especially in London. Just as local journalists had to head for the nationals or get a job in PR by the time they reached their 30s, I fear that in the next five to 10 years it will be very hard for any grown-up to sustain a career in journalism at all, unless they have a private income or a particular sense of vocation or ambition.

One of the (many) reasons why readers have deserted regional papers is that they feel that neither they, nor their communities, are properly reflected by the journalists who work for them. If national papers, already desperately London-centric, only want people who are prepared to work 70-hour weeks and don't care if they never see their kids, I can see them going the same way.

By the same token, as papers/websites etc use more and more content from citizen journalists/bloggers and others prepared to work for nothing, there is a danger that the only people with a voice will be those most desperate to be heard - and they are not usually the people you most want to listen to.

The growth of blogs and online communities seems to be contributing plenty in the way of opinion, of which there's already plenty and not much in the way of facts. This is creating a brand of journalism in which it doesn't really matter if you get things wrong.

Again, it's becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in. Facts are no longer the currency they used to be.

I don't have a particularly rosy view of the past and I am all too well aware that many of the things I've loved about papers, particularly the craft of putting them together, are becoming obsolete.

But I do worry that without the professionalism of the career journalist, society will be much less well equipped to hold the powerful to account and that serious and intelligent debate will be lost under a global shouting match between anonymous partisan supporters of particular opinions or interests.
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http://www.countervalue.com/2008/09/18/its-time-to-put-the-idea-of-a-shift-to-bed/

One of the most intriguing things that has struck me while interviewing for some new jobs at the Telegraph is how different disciplines within the journalistic family view something called “the work/life balance”.

During about 50 interviews, I must have been asked at least a dozen times what the shift will be for that particular job. Each time that question has been asked by somebody from a traditional sub or copy editing background - not by a reporter, a desk editor or one of the many “new” journalists with a primarily online background.

Having spent more than half of my career on a subs’ desk, I can see why the question is asked - subs are, generally speaking, the only people in the newsroom who, upon starting their working day at, say, 3.30pm, can confidently phone their partner and accurately tell him or her what time they’ll be home. That’s what they’ve grown used to and that’s what they’ve come to expect. It is, in short, a production line where you clock in and clock out.

This has never been the case for reporters who - particularly in the national press and agencies - have always been on call 24 hours a day. It ceased to be the case for news editors some years ago - many of them now work very long days indeed. In the integrated newsroom, there are reporters and desk editors now starting at 6am who should, if they took their “shift” literally, would leave the building at 2pm. But a lot of them are still there at 5pm with one or two masochistic souls choosing to see it out to early evening.

I’m not advocating the sudden adoption of 14-hour days but it is telling that the subs continue to work their shifted eight-hour days come hell or high water when the world around them operates on a completely different pattern.

This is not a pejorative post but it’s pretty obvious why this is - the job of the sub editor remains tied to the newspaper production cycle. A lot of a sub’s day is spent waiting for copy with the remaining portion spent editing it under ridiculous pressure before the first edition deadline. And, despite the extraordinary strides we’ve made on the web in the last couple of years, we still insist on putting papers together in the shortest and most pressured way possible.
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slappy4428 · Sep 20, 2008

Oh. The short way around the Atlantic. Not the back way that you're going...

TrooperBari · Sep 20, 2008

slappy4428 said:

Oh. The short way around the Atlantic. Not the back way that you're going...
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The Atlantic is sooo 20th century. The Pacific is where you'll find all the action.

Football_Bat · Sep 21, 2008

I can't wait until they build that tunnel under the Bering Strait and you can go from New York to London by train.

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No, it's not any better on the other side of the Atlantic

TrooperBari Well-Known Member

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No, it's not any better on the other side of the Atlantic

TrooperBari Well-Known Member

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