Twisted Ravings of an Unemployed Journalist

Over the past several days the nonfiction world has been in an uproar over  The Atlantic, one of the largest and most succesful media operations out there, attempting to get Nate Thayer, a respected journalist, to contribute a piece for free, or rather for “exposure.”

Thayer’s response was a great big “Fuck you” and I love him for that.

As I keep saying, you cannot eat exposure or use it to the pay the rent. Exposure won’t get you in to a big networking conference. It might get you invited to some parties and it might result in people mailing their feces to you, but it’s not fungible.

While the initial response was entirely favorable for Thayer, some like economist Matt Yglesias and now Reuters’ Felix Salmon, are coming down on the side of the cheap bastards at The Atlantic (who do a good job putting out content that’s usually above average).

Well, Mr. Harvard-educated-economist and Reuters financial blogger, this may surprise you, but there is a huge world of difference between “writing” that’s links and block quotes, which can be done in an idle hour and requires only functional literacy skills, and actual journalism, which requires a substantial investment of time and at least a little bit of intellectual effort.

Unfortunately, the current publishing model for the digital age requires quantity over quality. It didn’t start with the internet — acres of old growth forest were clear cut for newsprint used for the banal, the trivial and the inconsequential — but for the newspapers, even the banal, the trivial and the inconsequential involved original reporting. Journalists were expect to go places and interview witnesses, experts and PR people, even if the article was about Old Man Howard’s brand new fence blowing down in the big wind storm.

Churning out posts for the sake of churning out posts isn’t the activity of a company publishing journalism, but of a content mill. Worst of all, the model fails to recognize that at the bottom of the inverted pyramid, someone’s still got to do the reporting. 

Beginning around the end of last month, when the “2012’s best” lists started coming out, one of them mentioned everywhere was Buzzfeed, which also just secured millions of dollars more in start-up funding.

I had never heard of Buzzfeed before. Not from Poynter, Romenesko, UMass Journalism, Nieman, HuffPo, The Daily Caller, The Atlantic or any other website or organization I read or follow and then, suddenly, it was everywhere. Everyone was talking about it “inventing social journalism” and all sorts of crap like that.

I find this hype very amusing because 1) Not a single thing originating from Buzzfeed has ever been shared across my entire social network and 2) As far as I could tell, it’s The Huffington Post with a more annoying interface.

The way they fly under the radar doesn’t bode well for them, I think. 

I really really really really really really hate telecommuting. Isolation is desolation and it is not splendid. I am starved for human contact on a daily basis. It’s as bad as it was in Rutland, but at least I’m not swamped by despair anymore.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand why people want to work from home. 

DEAR GOD, WHY DOES MY LIFE SUCK SO MUCH? 

Last night I lost almost $20 playing Texas Hold ‘Em. It was a friendly game and I had fun, but it epitomized my experience of Boston: some good times, but all at a net loss.

Since coming here, whatever triumphs of reporting or writing have quickly given way to the reality that I’m still making absolutely fuck all, that I have had no success as a freelance writer — I can barely fucking find outlets that might just fucking condescend to pay writers, much less the fucking mythical opportunities pro’s talk about — and that I can’t fucking write anything longer than about 2,000 words.

Meanwhile I’m fucking cooped up all day in my apartment and as a result I don’t meet anyone and I’m paid such a fucking pittance that I can’t go out except to walk. The Bohemians of the Belle Epoque may not have had much either, but in those days a dollar went a lot fucking further.

I have never been the most social guy, but it would be nice to see friends more than once a month, or become a regular at a bar or meet a girl.

And you know something? I don’t have any other fucking skills worth a fucking damn. That’s not to say that I couldn’t do the jobs I’m not “qualified” for — a reasonably intelligent monkey could do some of them — it just means I can’t be considered for them because my BA is in journalism and I don’t have ten years of experience in marketing. Fuck ‘em.

“Other men sail through life, Biyalystock has struck a reef.”

Anger is good. Anger shows I’m passionate. I’ve just got to turn that passion into writing.

Having gone on for some time now about unbundling content and an iTunes-type model for journalism, Sandy’s unbridled fury that has, as my roommate put it, ended Western Civilization, also provided me with a good thought experiment. It is very important for any possible business model to be able to cope with emergencies and other forms of breaking news.

One reason that photographers, weathermen and other reporters are willing to go out in these storms, or war correspondents are willing to embed themselves with military units, is that they’re being paid a salary. Yes, I’m sure most of them love journalism and are very brave, but longevity favors the cautious.

Recent studies I’m too lazy to look up have even shown that traditional media are the go-to source for a lot of breaking stories. There are, of course, lots of reasons for that — a lot of new media and certainly smaller media simply don’t have access to press conferences and pools. I remember there was a bit of hoopla when The Huffington Post was granted a White House press room seat.

Traditional media also have better support resources — police scanners, multiple reporters covering a story and some larger companies, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, probably have back-up generators in their buildings, if not back-up newsrooms.

But all those resources are useless if the reporters aren’t going to brave storms or other dangers to get the story.  

The Nieman Journalism Lab’s Week in Review from a few weeks ago had a very interesting bit about how British journalist David Leigh proposed that newspapers be subsidized with a tax on broadband. Writers at Nieman and other observers rightly shot down the idea as dangerous to editorial independence and Mark Coddington, who put together the week in review, quoted a post by Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics:

” … it is vital not to equate ‘journalism’ with ‘existing news media organisations.’ Whenever an industry changes profoundly because of social and technological shifts, someone gets hurt.”

I left it in bold it’s so important. The horse-and-buggy industry passed quite unmourned when the automobile rose. Unfortunately the automobile industry isn’t as going so gently into that good night, with disastrous results for Detroit.

Coddington also mentioned that journalist Dominic Ponsford proposed an alternative: for news orgs to take themselves off Google and put together their own search engine.

Leigh’s proposal came because the paywalls aren’t working. Withdrawing from independent search engines like Google and Bing won’t help — especially since the cloud-based office tools being developed by Google are a huge boon to journalists.

It all comes down to what Paul Vidich said all those months ago: “Content wants to be unbundled.”

Putting up paywalls, blocking Google News and suing people for posting excerpts from stories or reposting video or audio clips is not only unhelpful, it’s actively counterproductive. You might as well quit smoking cold turkey — you succeed for a little while, but pretty soon you’re smoking more than you were before you quit. People want to be able to share fun or important stories on Facebook and Twitter. Blocking that is going to cut off readers and revenue.

The other counterproductive thing I see in journalism is the absence of an activity: there’s not really any innovation going on in the field, just at the front end. The content is the same, it’s just the packaging is different. Reporters have known for years that what is news-worthy for A1, above the fold status is just not what people want to read. They want to read the sports section, or about arts and entertainment. Some A1 stories are important enough that people will read them, but for the most part their newsworthiness is inversely correlated to their interestingness.

Similarly, newspapers are filled with stories that don’t tell you anything, like stories about gaffes or Politico on a Sunday. There are also stories in the business section, which are usually so full of jargon they can only be understood by workers in that sector.

Rather than confront this complacity and conservatism, it seems like most journalists would rather just prattle on about the importance of newspapers to democracy Walter Lippman-like.

But people want news; they just don’t want the product we’re putting out there.

It comes down to three things:

1) Content wants to be unbundled

2) Content wants to be shared

3) Content wants to be read

I can’t say I’m more prosperous than I was in Rutland, but living in a city allows for a lot of interactions and observations you don’t get in a town and these interactions can mean lots more ideas. This is, in fact, more or less the point of the city.

One of the observations I’ve had in Boston is that just about everyone has a Kindle, tablet or smartphone that they use regularly. I see more people reading with those devices on the train than I see people reading any of the free papers — The Metro, The Phoenix, etc. And I almost never see anyone with The Globe or The Herald.

You can get a Kindle subscription to The Boston Globe for $11.99 a month. A regular online subscription is $3.99 a week, or about $16 a month. The New York Times, on Kindle, is about $20 a month, with the range going from $15 to $35.

Meanwhile an awful lot of magazines are available on Kindle for less than $2 a month.

This gets right to the heart of the matter: publications like The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post don’t really get it. They have been hurt the most by declining ad revenue for a long time, so they focused on building that revenue up by getting more expensive ads from higher-end stores and other things that appeal to the upper middle class, they also focused their coverage on things that appeal to the upper middle class, which is why travel sections will have articles about renting beach-front cottages in the Carribean or the best out-of-the-way restaurants in some Tuscan hill village with a $2000 a night B&B. Hell, it’s why New Yorkers think Vermont is a nigh-untouched utopia of craft breweries, farmer’s markets and “traditional” villages surrounding Stowe.

The fact is, The Times and The Globe can’t compete anymore because they have so narrowed their target demographic that they lose all the gains that could be made from the fact that digital means decreased production costs. 

They have moved away from the idea of mass media even as its potentials in the internet age are still being explored. They want to be Walter Lippmann — high-minded guardians of culture, taking a patrician interest in democracy, but they’ve forgotten that Walter Lippman’s work was made possible not by the quality of his journalism (I don’t know that he did anything other than speculate on democracy) but by his connections with the powerful and wealthy and by the fact that other reporters were working hard on writing news with the goal of selling newspapers.

This usually meant producing stories that appealed to everyone — sometimes by using sensationalism — but it also led to things like newspaper comics. Novels used to be serialized, poems were published. Anything publishers could do to attract customers they did. And once upon a time even small towns had more than one paper and some large papers put out morning, afternoon and evening editions. 

“We’re going to continue doing it. We’re also going to continue all the contests, giveaways, pop-up shops, random mail orders, subscription services and manufacturing of insane new vinyl products and any other ridiculous idea that strikes our fancy. Why? Because we’re American. And Americans do crazy shit for capitalism. See you in hell.” — Third Man Records GM Ben Swank, in The Guardian via Pitchfork. H/t Lachlan Markay.

Journalists don’t do crazy shit anymore. I blame Walter Lippman. The man was the Jon Meacham of his time in that all his output seemed to consist of self-indulgent essays and books. I’m halfway there myself.

Anyways, while journalists had always been self-righteous, it was Lippman who elevated it into a professional quality. He wrote extensively on the journalist’s role in American society and democracy, believing that neither could function without them, and was especially influential in establishing “objectivity” as central to professional journalism. I use quotes because Lippmanian objectivity isn’t really that objective, it’s “he said, she said” stenography and it only works if everyone is telling the truth.

Before he professionalized the profession, crazy shit was the bread and butter of newspapermen because they understood that their jobs were to sell newspapers, not tell public interest stories that none of the public was actually interested in. Their prose was purple, their pens were poison and they were willing to go pretty far after a good story. From rooting through garbage to illicit surveillance to just plain fabricating stories, it may have been unethical by the standards of today (or even illegal), but they sold. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if at least one journalist in those days grusomely murdered a prostitute on a slow news day.

What’s some crazy shit journalists can do today?

My friend Pete Storey published his first book the other day, a collection of short stories entitled Human Nature. It’s really good — as an author, actor, adventurer and secret agent (probably), I wouldn’t be surprised to see him write, direct and star in his own biopic one day. You should go and buy it right now. Back? Good.

Anyways, he published it on Amazon for the Kindle and is selling it at the very reasonable price of $0.99. He didn’t need an agent or an advance. He just needed a publishing app and some friends to drum up some grassroots support. He also needed a day job to support himself until such time as he loses money from time spent not writing, but that’s not exactly unusual among authors.

Now, there are authors on Amazon who have made fortunes from selling 99-cent ebooks that never passed through a publisher’s hand. They probably aren’t the greatest authors ever, or even the most prolific, but if you’re trying to decide whether to read a novel or not, getting the 99-cent one instead of the $25.99 one or even the $8.99 is going to be more prudent.

These days, of course, it seems like you can barely give news away. My thoughts keep returning to iTunes, Netflix and Storyville co-founder Paul Vidich’s statement that “Content wants to be unbundled.”

All news is currently bundled content, except for breaking news tweets and Facebook shares. If you want to read about arts from the New York Times you have to buy the whole newspaper or an online subscription, which includes everything else, even the things you don’t want. This is like buying an album for one song or a DVD boxed set for one episode.

Currently news organizations are like record companies trying to sell albums. In many ways the extent of their digital transitions has been to selling CDs instead of vinyl. News organizations need to be more like bands, selling singles on iTunes and building a loyal audience.

Berkshire-Hathaway recently purchased a bunch of daily newspapers from Media General. In a letter to the publishers and editors, Warren Buffett wrote “I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future … a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce it’s readership … No one has ever stopped reading halfway through a story that was about them or their neighbors.”

While that is true, it’s also not the whole story. Communities are not geographic anymore. In some ways they never were, but technology wasn’t advanced enough to allow them to form over great distances. The news stories that get shared most often among my friends are rarely local pieces because we just don’t live near each other. We share national politics, viral stories, science and offbeat. I’ve lived in Somerville, MA since March and I don’t really have a damn clue what’s going on because Somerville really isn’t my community. I’m also part of communities of University of Massachusetts Amherst alumni, expatriate Vermonters, Red Sox fans, sci-fi/fantasy geeks, steampunks, journalists and others.

I’ve said before that it makes no sense for a lot of papers to carry national sports coverage and that division of labor is true for many other areas: a newsorg with a state-level focus only needs to worry about national, international or local news insofar as it affects the state, otherwise the media that covers those things best can handle it. Sure, there might be slightly less web traffic for a site like that, but scarce resources will be allocated more efficiently and thus be more valuable.

Despite my many exasperations over their content, Politico is one of the best examples of “band” journalism. Because they focus exclusively on national politics they’ve been able to build an audience of politics junkies and make enough money that you can get their print edition for free around Washington, DC and view their content for free online. They even make it easy to share. 

Basically, the problems of journalism boil down to one: utilty. People are willing to pay for information that’s useful to them. This is why The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Reuters are still profitable and other media orgs are going through reorganization, restructuring or out of business.

If journalists published more relevant news, the other challenges would be easy. Instead, we get more of the same sensationalist bullshit where the local papers try to outdo each other in portraying the gruesomeness of some crime and you turn on the TV news and same stories appear every night: fire, weather, crime, vehicular accident and “special reports” about the remote possibility that a common domestic appliance or accessory is deadly/connected to Satanism/could make the neighborhood attractive to minorities.

I recently had to cover the arraignment of a man accused of murdering his mother and grandmother. All the TV stations and tabloids were there, along with the local papers. After the arraignment concluded, I went outside the courtroom into the hall, hoping to ask the attorneys some questions about evidence and motives, etc. Instead, I was caught up in a human riptide and carried out of the courthouse as the camera crews competed among themselves to stick their cameras in the face of the suspect’s sister as she left.

Not only is this behavior extremely insensitive, it’s completely pointless. It added no information, contributed nothing to understanding and maybe got a few extra seconds of B-roll or whatever those mindless neanderthalls on TV call it. Had I been able to fight off the tide I would have discovered that even covering the procedings was just as pointless because of the way criminal court in Massachusetts works.

All the criminal cases start in district court, but only misdeamoners are tried there. Felonies, such as murder, have to get bumped up to superior court — but only after an indictment has been made by a Grand Jury. So until the indictment comes through the prosecution has to shuttle the thing through district court procedings because otherwise they would have to let him go. Even better, when it does get up to superior court the process starts all over with a new arraignment.

Head. Desk. Ow.

What’s really shocking about this great parade of idiocy that even Baldrick would find unbelievably stupid is that the state of political journalism is even worse.

The recent Cracked.com article 5 Ways to Spot a BS Political Story in Under 10 Seconds by David Wong described the problem pretty well. According to Wong, only 17 percent of politics stories are about policy, while the rest are targeted at people who view politics as entertainment. He writes ” … virtually all political news coverage is written to appeal to those people. They’re the most rabid ‘consumers’ of news, and their traffic is the most reliable, so the news is tailored to appeal to them.”

I disagree. They may have been the most rabid consumers of news at one point, but they’re not any more, which is why so much news targeted at them is produced — it’s editors desperate to catch a small slice of a shrinking pie, like how American car companies continued to make gigantic cars with the gas milage of a few feet per gallon despite the fact that less and less people were buying them.

Unfortunately, as business strategies go, that’s one of the worst. It didn’t work in the auto industry (twice!) and it’s not working in journalism.

The fact is that thanks to the Bush administration’s nigh-fascistic response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the yet-unresolved problems of network neutrality on the internet and its concomitant issues of online privacy concerns surrounding Google and Facebook, the continued economic problems facing the world and the apparent failure of people in government to agree on what’s for lunch much less a response to the country’s problems politics is being taken seriously by more and more people. We are starting to recognize that the decisions of 535 senile octogenarians have real consequences on our lives.

But as long as journalists keep trying to feed the public the same bullshit we will continue to lose money, continue to lose audience share to propaganda outlets like Russia Today and continue to be accused of being stooges in some New World Order conspiracy to brainwash the public.

The failure to provide relevant political journalism is an even worse trend, I think, then the tendency of political journalists to be stenographers for officials. Reporting uncritically can be problematic, but it’s better than reporting on irrelevant frivolity.