Sunday Afternoon
Boston
I'm sitting at Logan Intl Airport, watching the snow coming down and hoping that my flight back home isn't delayed.
I spent part of this weekend at an excellent conference on journalism and trauma organized by the Nieman Foundation and The Dart Center. And while the discussion focused on how to report on such tragedies from Chile to Rwanda to Bosnia, it was the journalists themselves who seemed to be the most traumatized.
It felt like everyone was either getting laid off, was about to get laid off, or was trying to come up with a Plan B when the eventual layoffs come. The gloomy atmosphere was set by the continuing cascade of Bad Media News including the shut down of The Rocky Mountain News.
There's nothing much to celebrate here. But I'm not sure that any mourning is really very appropriate either. We have to distinguish between "disaster" and "change." There's often much overlap of both and one of these can often produce the other. In the end, you have to draw a balance sheet. Change always racks up a toll of victims and losers.
Likewise, we are now too often confusing newspapers with news. They overlap, for sure, but they are not necessarily the same thing. And, most importantly, I am in no way convinced that the latter is dependent on the former. It better not be, because the newspaper industry is now
permeated with the smell of death.
The future is not the past. Never was. Never will be.
These are tough, gruesome times for many journalists of my generation.
Some of us are luckier than others. Those of us who came up the hard way, who had to scrap and fight for freelance assignments and independent writing and reporting contracts --rather ironically-- wound up much better prepared to face these uncertain times. By contrast, those who at an early age who were swaddled into comfy corporate MSM newspaper or network jobs now find themselves at age 50, 55 and 60 booted into the streets with virtually no entepreneurial skills -- clueless on how you make a living as a journalist without a guaranteed weekly paycheck.
No doubt there's an element of tragedy here. But not by any degree greater than the pain and trauma inflicted on line workers from Maytag to GM to clerks at CitiBank who are suddenly cast off like a bad case of fleas and whose prospects go no further than working in the gardening department at the Wal-Mart. Maybe. At least the laid off newspaper hacks have a shot at hanging on to their white collars by doing some copywriting or PR flacking.
One great reward in teaching journalism is to be surrounded by a younger generation of reporters and journalists and writers. They are most certainly filled with doubt and trepidation (who isn't in these grave economic times). But they are not filled with the same sense of hopelessness, dread and traumatic shock that has gripped and shaken my peers. These younger folks know they have a future even if they are not quite sure what it will look like.
They know that journalism will, indeed, survive the death of our current journalistic institutions. Just as transportation didn't die with the displacement of horses and buggies and just how people kept on writing letters when the fountain pen was replaced with a ball point.
Denver has lost something, for sue, but the Rockies won't crumble upon the Mile High City because the Rocky Mountain News has folded.
To glimpse a taste of this generational optimism, albeit a guarded optimism, I point you to
two pieces written this week by
a couple of my grad student editors at our USC pub,
Neon Tommy.
I sense no trauma here.
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March 1st, 2009 at 3:51 pm
“Those of us who came up the hard way … wound up much better prepared to face these uncertain times.”
Amen, Marc.
I can imagine you’ve had to endure many a snub from lessers over the years who happened to have what they believed were essential roles at too-big to fail, read bloated, major metro newspapers.
Goodbye to all that, indeed. And good riddance.
March 1st, 2009 at 4:38 pm
By contrast, those who at an early age who were swaddled into comfy corporate MSM newspaper or network jobs now find themselves at age 50, 55 and 60 booted into the streets with virtually no entepreneurial skills — clueless on how you make a living as a journalist without a guaranteed weekly paycheck.
Forgive me my schadenfreude. I swear, whenever one of these darlings writes on a topic I actually know someting about, I invariably find the piece riddled with inaccuracies and an utter lack of understanding. (Since so many storiies are abiout health, I imagine doctors and nurses feel this the worst.) Still, they are the first to preen and preach about how businesses should be run. Fuck ‘em.
The idea of general journalism is rooted in hubris. You can’t send some j-school nitwit to an oil spill an expect him to know the first thing about driving tankers. But go they do, and then wonder why the “steering wheel” isn’t at the “front” of the “boat” where the “driver” can look out from the “cockpit” and see the reef.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Off topic, but I can’t take it: http://www.startribune.com/business/40562962.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUac8HEaDiaMDCinchO7DU
So what does that mean, that TCF was feeding at the govt. trough and didn’t need the money? That they just saw a free ride and took it, and that with, ahem, accountability, they just don’t want it any more?
I guess workfare is OK for the peons, but not for the gilded. God forbid that there should be limits on how taxpayer money is spent. Perish the thought.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
At least they’re not as dip-shitty and dishonest as these guys:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/03/every_day_now_i_see.php
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
On the topic, the SF Chron looks like it’s about to fold and I have to say, the sooner the better. Let’s get it over with and allow the next generation of local Bay Area journalism to take its place.
Hearst is losing a million a week on the thing – so its obviously an unsustainable business model. Had their heads been up over the past decade they could have probably evolved a Chronicle that folks considered indispensable, engaging reading. They didn’t. I know zilch about the business of journalism, but I’m dead certain that for a lot less than the million they lose each week I could hire the talent to put together a website that focused heavily on local stories and original commentary on a whole range of issues, arts, etc – maybe even tossing a Weekend print edition into the mix – that would serve the entire region a hell of a lot better than the Chronicle. I could probably find the next Armistead Maupin and serialize popular fiction that would get folks looking forward to the next edition, and I’d hire a couple of impolite, audacious voices just to feed the populist beast and keep pols on their toes. With the exception of one guy of, say, David Corn’s caliber in DC and a couple of strong Sacramento scribes, national and international news would be briefly noted and linked the same way Arianna does it.
That the Chron either hasn’t been, or isn’t in the process of transforming itself into something other than a mediocre version of a mediocre, increasingly archaic model is sad. Or it would have been even a few years ago when a news junkie such as myself was still reading it and could imagine it mattered. Now my attitude is “Get out of the way!” There will be some holes in local journalism for a while, but they’ll get filled by hungrier, smarter, more deserving voices – along with some of the Chron’s current crew who are creative enough to adapt.
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:02 pm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/03/prison-population-titan-jails
Dickens lives.
Jesus fucking Christ. When will the public understand the value of a nice “socialist” and civilized public infrastructure like maybe the one in Norway that has successfully reduced recidivism by treating criminals like human beings…and of course the percentage of the population that becomes criminal so much less because of their filthy commie socialist sense of implementing sustainable and civilized public policy initiatives.