The next generation of journalism students have no idea what's ahead | Hacker News Reader

The next generation of journalism students have no idea what's ahead

qz.com

32 pointssamsolomon18 comments

> Frankly, I think the incentive is born out of desperation. These are dark times. The current state of rapid media creation and frantic consumption is creating widespread stress and anxiety that’s no longer sustainable.

Journalism always was a low-paying field, but besides being satisfying, it still was a job you could retire in a decade ago. Very few of the young newspaper reporters I used to work with 10 years ago are still in the business, having gone into doing PR or government for saner work hours and much better pay. I can only think of one of my fellow interns who put her years as a beat reporter at a regional paper who successfully made her way to a national outlet. I made the jump myself but only because I was also a programmer. While there are new avenues into big journalism careers, such as blogging or getting your start at places like Vox/BuzzFeed...it doesn't seem like the career path from college to small to regional to national paper exists anymore (I've heard the freelancing route has been just as decimated), and the jobs created by online outlets are a fraction of what traditional news outlets used to have.

As someone who worked for the college paper and spent a large amount of time in journalism classes, I absolutely agree with you. Sure you learn how to write (which is incredibly important), but I think most papers and magazines prefer bloggers or people with established audiences compared to a student with a degree in journalism.

Many of my classmates have either joined public relations firms or completely switched careers.

> I made the jump myself but only because I was also a programmer.

I think having some experience in tech is going to be the norm alongside writing skills. My friend teaches at UNC and focuses on the tech side of things. Their students are learning JS, some Django (as of 2013, maybe something else now) and the basics of how the web works. I think understanding more of the medium might help prepare future journalists for what's common across the field.

However, coming from having worked at a newspaper, I don't think anything prepares them for the "rapid media creation and frantic consumption". It's amazing how ephemeral online media is yet how much effort still goes in to a lot of the content prep and presentation.

Interesting to learn that programming is being taught to writers. Perhaps it's a poor analogy, but the term Singer/Songwriter comes to mind when I imagine such a hybrid. Either one of the two component skills could earn a living; but the two together have greater potential for producing works of significance. Also, it reminds me of Scott Adams career advice[0], where he suggests being "good" at more than one thing.

[0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

Democracy needs journalism. It needs people out there looking under rocks for things someone doesn't want published. (If someone wants it published, it's PR, not journalism.) Journalism makes politicians afraid. Without that, you get Russia Today or China Daily or Outbrain.

We're losing that, in the name of clickbait.

Well, via the internet, we get whole communities of people looking for information that individuals, governments and special interest groups don't want published, and sharing said information in ways far more efficient than the old media. Just look at various bloggers investigating tech security issues and the NSA. Or Wikileaks. Or people sharing evidence of criminal actions by the police, the politicians, people with power, etc.

The real issue is that these people and groups and projects need to be protected in the same way as journalists for the mainstream media used to be.

And the driver of clickbait is our dependence on advertising for revenue.

Advertising totally subverts and corrupts the invisible hand. If that doesn't make sense, draw a diagram of the forces that move the invisible hand in a straight up consumer-producer relationship for your website. Now add in advertising into the picture. Note that consumers spend just as much if not more than before, only the cost of the website appears free, but is baked into an entirely unrelated product they pay for.

"cost of the website appears free, but is baked into an entirely unrelated product they pay for."

That cost may be substantial. There are many products whose marketing cost exceeds the cost of making and delivering the product or service. Movies, many prescription drugs, long distance phone service, soft drinks, vitamins, and many online services are mostly promotional cost. There's an argument for taxing advertising to push this down.

I've said this before in other threads but I'll say this again: THERE IS TOO MUCH NEWS. In any market as the quantity goes up (and the amount of news content has skyrocketed in the last decade or so) the value goes down. There are so many news websites out there, and I'm not even talking the niche ones that cover certain things, there are hundreds if not thousands of large general coverage entities online all vying for the same eyeballs.

When we hit a Paywall here on HN, we either use the Google link to get around it, or go to a different website offering the same content for free. There is no incentive for me to pay the New York Times 99 cents a month or whatever it is when there are a dozen parrot websites offering the same product.

The bigger institutions involved in this are getting drowned by parrot clickbait shitty websites for their "rapid fire" coverage. They should stop covering that kind of garbage and move purely to more thoughtful, innovative and interesting topics and just stop doing the rapid shit altogether. I would pay to read an NYT that had interesting a thoughtful content that I wouldn't be able to get at every other website.

In short: No one gives a shit if the New York Times doesn't cover the latest Twitter scandal: We know, we were on Twitter watching it happen, we don't need 5,000 articles from a thousand news sources about how horrible it was. Go find us something INTERESTING to read.

Of course we give a shit if NYT covers the latest Twitter scandal. Because if it is not, then that is not important. Thats we pay that 99 cents.

Thoughtful, innovative and interesting writing takes a long time and has only niche appeal. Clickbait can be written quickly and is massively lucrative.

Buzzfeed are doing some of the best investigative journalism in the world, because they can afford it. Their mastery of clickbait allows them to cross-subsidise the kind of quality reporting that many newspapers can no longer afford.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/jaw-dropping-investigati...

My father was a sports broadcaster for 30 years in one of the biggest and most successful sports markets in the United States and he just retired/quit his job a couple years ago because he couldn't take it anymore.

He said he made it through the golden age of TV but now things are different and he didn't enjoy his job anymore so he had to get out for reasons similar to those stated by the author of this piece.

Side note: I boycott a few websites that I feel have particularly bad, click-baity, cheap content.

Journalism ought to strive for compact, quality pieces that can be read at a fast pace. Many articles posted are much longer than they need to be, and their information density is not that great. It's not that it is never good, but rather that it is nowhere near the limits of what humans are capable of as far as communication goes.

Maybe the average article could be denser (though if you can give some examples of what you mean that might be more convincing). The "long form" piece is a rich stylistic tradition and it would be missing the point to try to compress it. Take John McPhee's writing, for one thing.

In general people don't know what's ahead regarding the rapid changes that will inevitably come,not only journalists

While there is a need for traditional journalism, I do believe that grassroots journalism by internet activists has its own value, so this shift in journalism is both positive and negative. For example, "responsible" journalists in Germany failed to report on the nature or extend of attacks by immigrants on German women during New Years Eve celebrations, e.g. in Cologne. It was only viral videos that brought these events to more widespread attention.

I suspect incidents like the one you mentioned might be one of the reasons why traditional journalism is running into trouble. It's completely lost touch with the public it supposedly serves, treating a significant portion of the mainstream with contempt and trying to foster narratives that a significant amount of people don't agree with (but which happily align with those of politicians or the current government). It's why only 40% of the American public trust the media as of 2015. *

Perhaps the one sided coverage of various issues, the refusal to cover certain issues and other such problems are why the news business is finding it so hard to keep afloat.

* http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/media/media-trust-americans/

Haven't read the article yet. But the same goes for most fields these days

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