What it's worth

As a working journalist I check Romenesko about four times a day, and eagerly follow every letters-section dust-up, usually yelping my thoughts at one side or another. The latest interesting one is about journalist pay and what it is doing to the profession. This recent thread (it can be found here), reiterates a lot of the questions everyone finishing up their CSJ applications should be asking themselves.

Some of the postings I’ve noted include young journalists complaining that it is impossible to earn a living in this job, former journalists who loved it but left it for public relations, older journalists saying it has always been this way and you should do it for love and the Holy Mission of Reportage, and older journalists telling these worthless pups to zip it already because they had to walk uphill both ways to their first job etc. I’ve been in one of those moments where I’ve been thinking about these things lately, and not just because I just cut my monthly Big Check to pay for my fancy education (more on that in another post!). Just the other day I spent a few hours cruising around the website for The Oshkosh Northwestern because they had posted a job that I think I would like. It’s a fantasy of course: I’ve no ties to the broad middle of the country, and who knows what my wife would do out there, but that’s what journalism is all about nowadays. While it might not register the first time you hear it, but whenever I have doubts about journalism and whether it is worth it I turn back to Hunter S. Thompson. In December 1958 he was moved to write to Editor & Publisher in response to a column about – wait for it – how young journalists weren’t coming to the profession because of low pay.

“The reason for journalism’s shortage of young talent is just as obvious as the fact that most of the newspapers in the country today are overcrowded rest homes for inept hacks,” he subtly notes. “Burial grounds do not attract talent.”

And later…

“Journalism, for my money, has nearly tumbled head over heels in its hurry to toss away its integrity and compromise with the public taste, the mass intellect, and the self-sighted demands of profit-hungry advertisers. Now how in the hell do you expect to keep on attracting top talent? Sacrificing good men to journalism is like sending William Faulkner to work for Time magazine.”

That’s 1958 folks!

“A free press is not indispensable unless it makes itself indispensable,” he concludes. “So how about cleaning up your house and then bellowing about now one wanting to come in?”