Is there any such thing as a career in digital journalism? | Fusion
"When you see a company like Vox Media investing millions of dollars in Vox.com, the youth of the founders is a feature, not a bug. When you see companies like Gawker Media or BuzzFeed building newsrooms of young people, that’s partly because young people are cheaper and hungrier, but it’s also because they’re better at doing these very new things than their more experienced colleagues might be.
On the face of it, that’s great, if you’re young. But look forward a couple of decades here – the best thing that happens to a young person is that she becomes an old person. And at the same time, while it’s impossible to know exactly what the future of digital journalism holds, the one thing we can be pretty sure about is that it’s going to involve a lot of change. Large chunks of journalism have already changed more in the past 10 years than they did in the previous 100, and that pace of disruption is not going to slow down.
In that world, what hope will there be for a 50-year-old journalist who grew up with the ancient skills needed in 2016? Right now, the future looks superficially bright for young journalists in large part because they’re taking jobs away from older journalists. Those dinosaurs. But the rate at which someone becomes a dinosaur is only going to speed up.
All of this is exacerbated by technology. We’re in the middle of what you might call the Platform Revolution. At heart the idea is that the real value, in a media company, lies not in the human talent, but rather in technology. The workers—the journalists—become easily replaceable cogs in the machine.
To make matters worse, there’s more competition than ever, in journalism: that’s part of why we’re living in a golden age. There’s been an amazing and wonderful explosion in the number of talented people doing great journalism online, and there are more and more people arriving in the field every day, from all over the world. And by the law of supply and demand, when supply increases, price goes down.
The fact is that, already, enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living at this game. Indeed, the exact same forces which are good for journalism and good for owners are the forces which are bad for journalists themselves. And while it’s one thing being paid relatively little when you’re young; it’s another thing being paid relatively little when you’re getting into middle age and you have a family to support."
"When you see a company like Vox Media investing millions of dollars in Vox.com, the youth of the founders is a feature, not a bug. When you see companies like Gawker Media or BuzzFeed building newsrooms of young people, that’s partly because young people are cheaper and hungrier, but it’s also because they’re better at doing these very new things than their more experienced colleagues might be.
On the face of it, that’s great, if you’re young. But look forward a couple of decades here – the best thing that happens to a young person is that she becomes an old person. And at the same time, while it’s impossible to know exactly what the future of digital journalism holds, the one thing we can be pretty sure about is that it’s going to involve a lot of change. Large chunks of journalism have already changed more in the past 10 years than they did in the previous 100, and that pace of disruption is not going to slow down.
In that world, what hope will there be for a 50-year-old journalist who grew up with the ancient skills needed in 2016? Right now, the future looks superficially bright for young journalists in large part because they’re taking jobs away from older journalists. Those dinosaurs. But the rate at which someone becomes a dinosaur is only going to speed up.
All of this is exacerbated by technology. We’re in the middle of what you might call the Platform Revolution. At heart the idea is that the real value, in a media company, lies not in the human talent, but rather in technology. The workers—the journalists—become easily replaceable cogs in the machine.
To make matters worse, there’s more competition than ever, in journalism: that’s part of why we’re living in a golden age. There’s been an amazing and wonderful explosion in the number of talented people doing great journalism online, and there are more and more people arriving in the field every day, from all over the world. And by the law of supply and demand, when supply increases, price goes down.
The fact is that, already, enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living at this game. Indeed, the exact same forces which are good for journalism and good for owners are the forces which are bad for journalists themselves. And while it’s one thing being paid relatively little when you’re young; it’s another thing being paid relatively little when you’re getting into middle age and you have a family to support."
