NP Refugee

The Journalism Bubble

Again, Jeff--spot on. What you've left out of the equation is the effect and contribution to the demise the craft unions have had on the industry as a whole. Journalists do need a wake-up call. I knew many columnists who used to laugh about only producing two columns a week which took them all of two hours to write and then taking the rest of the week off. They got paid handsomely for their total of four hours they worked each week. It works out to roughly $350 for every hour they actually worked, by their own account.

My opinion is that the journalists who are committed to the trade will end up writing for suburban papers (for a fair wage) who will take on the traditional role of the metro paper, providing investigative insights into the communities where the audience is deeply passionate. That is fertile ground yet to be tilled. Suburban weeklies will become suburban 3-a-weeks. They will augment the chicken dinner, Eagle Scout award stories with investigative stories that seek to hold the powerful accountable and serve as a voice of the community in that which matters most because it's that which is closest to their homes.

I certainly hope I'm correct.

The point is, there is still a need for journalism, but it has to be fresh and insightful and not the run-of-the-mill regurgitation of someone else's insights and investigative work. So much material in a metro is a hodge-podge of syndicated, borrowed, nonfactual material that the newspapers come off as, frankly, lazy.

One colleague used to describe the newsroom as "the fat, dumb, and happy." I always used to say that they'd produce better quality journalism if one could find a way to compensate them on the basis of a "reader resonator meter."