Jeff Jarvis: The days of "inflated paychecks" for journalists are over

[Wendy Parker]

As I noted in the comments, I was unaware they had even begun.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/05/20/the-journalism-bubble/

 

[mediaguy]

I got into this industry for the big bucks.

They're cutting teaching jobs in my area, and is that because they were overpaid?

I don't understand why there's an undercurrent of "they deserved it" coming out at journalists who have lost their jobs or at least the financial upside of their jobs. You can argue that the higher-ups at newspapers are responsible for not evolving to a more fiscally viable model, but the reporters and copy editors getting laid off are often doing their jobs as well as they did five years ago, if not better, by blogging and podcasting and doing other things to adjust to today's technology. Am I wrong?

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Obviously, someone never made $19,000 at a small-town daily.

Journalists are among the lowest paid college graduates. And this guy is saying we don't even deserve that?

You get CEOs who receive bonuses for doing little more than cutting jobs. Where's the CEO's value?

 

[TrooperBari]

Jeff Jarvis can bite my shiny, metal ass.

This is the same schmuck who, on the Guardian's first Media Talk USA podcast, spent nearly the entire show joining one of his Gnu Meedja colleagues in shouting down the evil MSM. The Guardian does good work more often than not, but his show just devolved into an echo chamber.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Jarvis, along with Jay Rosen and a few others, are the most noxious of the Messianic Web crowd who, I should add, seem to be making a pretty nice living.

 

[Stitch]

Do the 5-inch cops and courts briefs add value? Probably not if Jarvis' thinking is taken into account, but they are they most popular item in my paper.

 

[Johnny Dangerously]

Hey, Jarvis, inflate this.

 

[JayFarrar]

I swear to Tebow, if I was to meet Jeff Jarvis I'd punch him in the ****ing face.
Dude has made a fortune off telling people that print is dying. Huh, as an internet consultant who can make your shop ready for the future.
**** him.

 

[ArnoldBabar]

Jeff Jarvis can eat a ****. I worked a major beat at a major metro and made less than anyone I knew.

 

[playthrough]

Well, ****. I blew my last inflated paycheck on a used Chrysler a few years back.

 

[Joe Williams]

I'm with all of the above, and I especially agree that Jarvis and his ilk have a blatant vested interest in the collapse of print.

However... should any of us be surprised that journalists' pay has dead-ended and is going backward? We don't generate revenue in any direct sense, we use up money the company has to raise through others' labors, and the quality of what we do has little impact on the bottom line and is subjective to most of the folks who make the big decisions. At least that's how so many of the suits surely see it. So a greater surprise might be that we ever have been paid more than clerical or temp staffers in the first place.

I have long thought that our field ought to be more like pro sports teams, where it is accepted that the talent will be paid more than the managers. Most places I've worked, what drove the place was the quality of the reporters, photographers and line editors. But newsrooms traditionally are as top-down in culture and compensation as you'll find anywhere in the corporate world, from the don't-question-what-we-decide stifling of journalists' inquisitiveness internally to pay issues, which -- I think -- suffer because we don't have individual "sales figures" we can point to for our professional worth.

Getting into and staying in this business used to mean accepting that you'd never get rich. Now it means accepting that you're going to keep getting poorer.

 

[bmm]

^ Totally disagree. Advertising has to sell a paper that has readers, hence potential customers, for advertisers. Readers don't pay 50 or 75 cents to see ads. They pay that to see local copy about things they care about. It's a team.

 

[Joe Williams]

It's a team.

Fine. Then we are the utility infielders, the 12th men, the special-teams meat. Largely replaceable, halfway expendable and lucky just to be employed given current market conditions, as far as the honchos see it.

 

[JayFarrar]

Respectfully, people do buy the paper to see the ads. They also buy the paper to get the coupons. Read the comics and get a daily crossword/sudoko/word jumble.
They also read the articles.
But a purposeful (for lack of a better word) reader is entirely a different animal. Decision makers. Business leaders. People with a vested interest in a certain topic buy the paper to get and read and study the articles.
So you really have two different groups of readers and it's the second group, the people in the know, they are the ones you are trying to reach and that's how you prove your worth to the bosses upstairs.
I can make, right now, a compelling argument that the most-read, must-studied and most obsessed over regular item in the paper are the burglary reports that get printed.
If we were to eliminate that coverage, it might not be an immediate reaction, but when renewal time came up, the people who care, would cancel their subscriptions.

I kind of rambled, sorry, but, again, **** Jeff Jarvis.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I think someone ordered a big bowl of dicks.

 

[Jersey_Guy]

Hopefully that includes Jeff Jarvis, a guy who has NEVER ONCE accomplished anything noteworthy, yet has piled up huge consulting checks from newspaper companies including Newhouse.

And, no, I don't count "Buzz Machine", a website that is essentially a personal blog.

This is no bigger empty suit or paper tiger in media.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Jeff Jarvis, Mark Potts, Jay Rosen, etc., usually look at the very largest newspapers and then make their pronouncements for everyone else -- what applies to The New York Times applies to everyone else. Which is crazy and lazy, whether you're talking Web traffic or resources or salaries. None of them impresses me much with having done any homework.

In that rarefied air, some salaries can be shocking. An alt weekly in D.C. reported last year that a Washington Post copy desk chief was making $167,000 and that most AMEs made nearly $200,000. But to derive a blanket opinion from those figures would be silly.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=35661

 

[NoOneLikesUs]

I have long thought that our field ought to be more like pro sports teams, where it is accepted that the talent will be paid more than the managers.

Too bad we couldn't have an across-the-board union where each and every paper in this country had to negotiate with one sole Writer's Guild in order to score content for its publications.

 

[Diego Marquez]

Journalists ended up with a severely inflated view of their own value. It was a bubble that has now burst. That is why they are barking so loudly against the wind of change. Change isn’t just taking away jobs, it’s taking away great jobs: visible, self-important, well-paying, once-secure. Damnit, it’s ruining a good thing.

Is he talking about journalists, or the kid at the McDonald's drive thru? Under his terms, both are visible (look at me through the window, dammmmit. It's air conditioned in here), self-important (no ketchup for you), well-paying (OK, equal-paying), once-secure (actually, McDonald's isn't about to fold or go web only).

Target acquired. Preparing to launch F-bombs.

 

[albert77]

This clown can kiss my rosey-red ass.

I've been in the media in my small city for 25 years and I'll NEVER see the day when I make 40K a year.

I do what I do because I love being around young people, love being in the daily newspaper environment and I think I'm good at it. It also helps that I have a wife who makes about twice what I do. ::)