Why I left news
allysonbird.com
allysonbird.com
I loved journalism, and I continue to love journalism, so it was really difficult to leave it as a _vocation_. But it was not very difficult to leave it as a _business_.
Now that I'm doing full-time software development, it's easy to see that it was the right choice for me and my family. The salary and benefits are significantly better, as you might expect, and so is the morale and the job security.
I might have stuck it out longer if I had any confidence that the people who handle the business end of the journalism world had a decent plan to become profitable again as print dies out (or at least becomes permanently crippled). But I never heard or saw anything, internally or externally, to give me that confidence that there was a workable plan.
(As it turns out, I have been able to continue writing, not only for my employer but outside of work -- I have a book coming out in the fall and another in the works. That's helped to satisfy my writing itch, and my full-time job has helped to satisfy my "pay the bills" itch.)
I have a suspicion that what newspaper companies want is not what is taught in journalism school.
You are correct, but not in the way that you intend. Journalism schools are even slower moving than the news industry. There are pockets of the news world who realize they need data analysis skills and programming talent (at prices they can afford).
Journalism schools, by and large, have no idea what to do about this, even if they recognize the need, and few plans on how to bridge this gap.
The Knight Foundation & Mozilla are making an effort to recruit programmers to the news world through efforts like Source (http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/ ) and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellowships (http://www.mozillaopennews.org/fellowships/ ).
(In fact I'm one of the earlier programmers insnared by their machinations, and i now work on DocumentCloud at the journalism non-profit Investigative Reporters & Editors)
What does the "afford" part mean in this context?
There are hundreds upon hundreds of think tanks, bloggers, academics and NGOs who all do deep policy work, lengthy investigations into issues and opinion-making. The problem is they just aren't all in the one place. You can't simply try to put them in one place under a for-profit model because sooner or later an editor is going to look at the accounts and say 'hyperbole pulls in 100x the clicks compared to the NGO report .pdf'. There is simply no way to avoid that in the end, even with a slight detachment from the ads and cross subsidisation inside a corporation like Google. Google had to shut down Reader for exactly this reason, it wasn't good for ads.
Basically my argument is we need to replace greedy and/or partisan editors with content aware programs, and redefine what we think of as a journalist to include people from think tanks, NGOs, academics and bloggers. I've made a start with a prototype at jkl.io, but I have the same problem as Ms. Bird in that there is no interest/money in it so I might well be forced to do other things.
Newspapers and other MSM outlets are one of the last places this is happening. I don't think we'll miss newspapers when they finally disappear, but we're sure as heck going to miss editors.
My actual point is that for better journalism to happen (what you call better editing), it needs to be incentivized. I am still hopeful that somebody will figure out how to build a successful journalism platform, probably based on micropayments, that incentivizes good journalism.
I'm not sure if PG listed this in his essay from a while back about great world-changing startup ideas, but I think it would qualify.
I don't feel there is that much of a distinction between editors and journalists. What I'm saying is basically that by allowing instantaneous publishing, the web is allowing journalists to "go to press" in 3 seconds. There doesn't have to be much thought given to rewrites, or sourcing, or flow, or editorial content. In fact, I'd argue that the more time the modern journalist spends doing these things is a disadvantage.
Of course the web eventually sorts it all out: it's wrong a bunch but the correct story eventually makes it. But we're losing something. This is very similar to the comments made by old-timey C++ programmers looking at modern OO IDEs. Yes, you can do things really fast, but you're also losing an important part of the craft by doing it this way.
In my opinion these two roles, which of course could be performed by the same person, are separating. Long-format, well-edited work is going down a separate path than what we would consider traditional journalism. Beats me where it ends up. I don't think there will be a journalism platform built. This isn't a money problem. This is a structural problem. Technology has pulled apart the instantaneous recording of events from the polished presentation of "news"
YC has even funded a number of startups some of which have folded in spectacular style.
As for micropayments & kickstarter there is/was http://spot.us/ which was purchased by Minnesota Public Radio and has been neglected a bit.
Part of the problem is that the journalism business model uses the value of eyeballs to advertisers as a proxy for writing quality, so editorial decisions are driven by what advertisers want, not what readers want.
Meanwhile, the advertising revenue pie is shrinking and news publications are forced to cannibalize themselves to cut costs, with the result that writing (and particularly manager-editing/copy-editing) get worse instead of better.
Back 10-15 years ago, a newspaper could break a story, and no other newspaper would be able to cover it til the next day! There was financial benefit to breaking news stories. Now, with the Internet and 24 hour news on every channel, when a newspaper breaks a story, it's posted in 10,000 other places within 10 minutes.
You have to distinguish between reporters who should be out in the field — political and crime beat reporters, for example — and those whose field actually is their desk. There's no reason for many of the reporters at Mashable and TechCrunch to leave their desks. They're writing about hardware and software. They need to be there to test and use the tools in order to write about them. How is visiting a grieving mother going to help with that?
There's something else about technology reporting that people should keep in mind before they criticize: The industry is secretive. Except when you have access to inside, quasi-legal/ethical/reliable information sources, you as a reporter have no way of knowing the news until the company or researcher is ready to reveal it to you. That usually coincides with a press release, but that doesn't mean the work is merely regurgitating a press release. Every story means learning the tool; having the ability to learn quickly is not a negative. It's the result of an inquisitive, focused, interested mind capable of grasping the arcane and translating that into something meaningful for people who are counting on you to help them get their work done.
I'm a tech reporter and a subject matter expert in a few specialized areas. I would put my expertise against anybody in my field, and I'm certainly more knowledgeable than the PR people who put out corporate releases rife with technical inaccuracies. I didn't get this way by chatting up CEOs or interviewing the man on the street. I got this way by setting up my autism station and plugging away at it day and night, weekday and weekend, holiday or no holiday, asking questions of engineers when I stumble, then writing about what I learned in a way that people can understand.
My readers benefit from that. That's what matters.
As a result of the oversupply everyone's profits have drastically declined, and to make up for that they have moved into more garbage and less journalism. Because garbage sells really well. Great journalism is important, but people don't pay as much for it.
It's very disappointing to hear stories like this from people that care deeply about their profession, but it's how economics works. Supply is too great, so the amount of money each supplier gets goes down. So some suppliers see that its not worth it, and stop supplying things. At some point the market reaches equilibrium and the amount of suppliers becomes stable.
Eventually, the market will shakeout and the profits will rise to a sustainable level for those who are left. When this process finishes, hopefully we will be left with some great journalists not slinging garbage at us.
Just as the author pointed out, he loved his job at first, then it became demanding and he went through several rounds of burnout and then saw how the news cycle was changing and how politically slanted every story he had to write was.
He quit after 6 years and now just writes ad copy for a large marketing firm. He says its a lot less stressful and he also stopped reading the news since he "knows" how slanted and inaccurate the stores you read now are.
He still has some fascinating stories though. . .
Too bad this industry and good reporting died a long time ago.
Journalism has always been dodgy, it's just a lot more obvious these days.
The news is an important establishment and seeing it reduced to what it is is very disheartening. The fact that twitter is mentioned so often and seen as a fairly credible source to me just epitomizes just how far it has slid away from what it was.
I think this is a recent phenomenon. A friend who works in journalism said that the answer to "why do you want to be a journalist?" used to be "because I want to report the truth." At one point the answer changed to "because I want to change the world." The dividing point? Watergate.
Also, the attraction of journalism as a place for the kids of rich families eventually drove out everyone who used the job to support themselves.
Exactly. That's why what we got now is agenda instead of facts
In the multimedia department, I ended up teaching myself enough PHP and SQL to create online interactives such as crime maps and work on database reporting projects. I didn't like programming then but I'm fortunate to have found a decent niche where programming skills can be used to research and report out stories. But I still miss sitting in even the boring council meetings or visiting crime scenes late at night, and the discipline from the constant, unmoving deadlines (the paper can't go out with blank holes where your story should be). Reporting is a great experience for when you're young and wanting to understand the world. Unfortunately, news consumers lose out when reporting becomes little more than a character-building exercise for its practitioners.
It takes effort to learn new skills and is not what they were (incorrectly) told they would need to do at journalism school so they see it as "tech" work not journalism.
But in the end most of them people will be unemployed and complain about the industry and how it was impossible to find a job. Big data is a big deal in journalism, too bad they never gave it a chance.
I got to a point where my technical skills were out of date as I was working in a place focused on the same old same old. I left and co-founded a startup mediaspotme.com that will do more to support journalism than my work at a TV producer on a Charlie Rose type show in Toronto. I have already built lot of"tech" skills, before I was never on HN.
He also said most of the reporters have lost their jobs and only a tiny group remain. That makes sense, as the newspaper is now 20% the size it was ten years ago. There's maybe one or two 'investigative' articles each week and rest are AP news, local sports, or articles about local shops and what they sell.
I always had a couple side stories I was working on that would take a week or so, and now and then I'd go out to do a business profile, which tended to be something of an advertisement for the business in question. I'd interview the owner or president, look around the place, talk to a few employees. But at least it was something like journalism. But with the intense deadline pressure during my regular work day, I mainly did the work for these in the morning on my own time.
There were some fun times though. There was the night when our hometown team won the Superbowl, and all the reporters stayed late watching the results come in. That night I drove through streets packed with celebrating people to get photos taken by our man on the scene from the AP office across town. Election nights were great too, with free food in the conference room and the whole staff feverishly compiling results until the front page closed at midnight.
And there was a sense of power too. All I had to do was say "I'm a reporter for the XYZ Times," and the company president or the head staffer in the Congressman's office would be eager to talk to me.
Thirty years ago was supposed to be the glory days of print journalism, but already papers were closing and reporters losing their jobs. A running joke in the newsroom underscored our basic anxiety about the future: "What's a journalist? A reporter looking for work."
I lost my job after my mentor, the managing editor who shepherded me through the political minefield of the editorial staff, got sick and took a six-month leave of absence, leaving me at the mercy of the ambitious deputy managing editor.
One day the business editor, my immediate boss, called me into his office and told me I was being transferred to a sister publication of tiny circulation in another town, but that was actually a lie. The truth became apparent when I was called before the deputy managing editor. He actually ran the newspaper since the editor-in-chief was a figurehead hired for his name alone. The managing editor who had mentored me was long gone. "How does it feel to be fired?" were the first words he said. I gathered my stuff and walked out. I went back to school for a grad degree and never looked back.
Wow. I hope you said something along the lines of "Well, since it means I no longer have to work with assholes like you, it feels pretty fucking good."
There had been rumors going around the newsroom that something was going to happen, and I knew I was not one of his favorites, so the day before it happened, I asked my boss, the business editor, if I was doing OK. He said I was doing fine. "I especially like the way you've taken over supervising the layout," he said. He was really embarrassed when he called me in the next day, and I think that's why he came up the the story that I was being transferred. I think it was wishful thinking on his part, or he had pushed for a transfer when they told him, and they said "maybe."
I was a TV producer and can relate. Part of the attraction was to be where the action is, but increasingly main stream media is not that place. A byline does not necessarily equal impact.
I quit and co-founded a startup that will do more for journalism than my work in TV, but in a less public way that people can't relate to. Media Spot Me is for journalists to discover people to interview. Something that was a central pain-point of mine.
I still appreciate the possibility of the media but like you said it is not as sexy inside as it sounds when talking about it to others.
Craigslist single handedly wiped out the American newspaper's classified section, and with that revenue gone, pretty much shattered the business model of the vast majority of the dailies.
... but then again I'm kind of a romantic when it comes to the news.
But she misses two much larger 'stories': First, what's happened to the 'news' business is a short term disaster on top of a long term tragedy. Second, what's happened to the news business is one more case of what's happened to big parts of the US economy.
It appears that society has one need from the news business, and that business has one need from society: Society needs from the news business solid, useful, important information on government, foreign affairs, the economy, etc., and the news business needs from society eyeballs to get ad revenue. At this point, neither society nor the news business is getting what they need.
More generally, my view has long been that what society needs from the news business, "information on government, ..." is so important and has been so poorly provided that the news business is, may I have the envelope, please (drum roll), the most serious problem facing our country and our civilization. In simple terms, the norms of the news business just have not been to provide the information our society needs. There is a nice, not really comprehensive but still nice, view of what the news business has been doing in the OP -- next to nothing to do with providing the information society needs.
Instead of the information, for at least 100 years or so the main product of the news business has been just light entertainment. The 'story' telling techniques have been borrowed from formula fiction going back to the ancient Greeks -- a protagonist to identify with who has a problem, threats, evil (especially as in the morality plays), black/white hats, etc. Drama? Yes. Solid information? No.
Thus my view is that this lack of information caused, say, for just a short list of a few little things, The Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the wars in Viet Nam, The Great Recession, the devastation of the US 'rust belt', etc. That is, my solid belief is that with some solid information instead of just formula fiction techniques to tell dramatic stories for light entertainment, we could have avoided all those disasters.
For some evidence about my claims about the lack of solid information in the news content, the level of content featured on HN and in the comments is large steps above the standards of any well known news outlet -- magazine, newspaper, TV, or Internet.
Information quality? The news business has a tough time reporting percentages meaningfully: E.g., "up 5%". Okay a percentage change is a measurement a at time s and a measurement b at time t and then
100 * ( b - a ) / a
It goes on. The output of the news business is rarely significantly useful. Did I mention that their goal was just light entertainment?
Sousveillance of the powerful by all of us is necessary. And we, the nerds and geeks with the information machine skills are the ones to do it. If you're not thinking about this, you will suffer in the end. Look at what happened to Aaron.
No, not really! E.g., I wrote:
"Society needs from the news business solid, useful, important information on government, foreign affairs, the economy, etc."
So, that ended with "etc."
What happened to Aaron and why are right in there.
And don't read, object, and respond too fast to miss my
"Thus my view is that this lack of information caused, say, for just a short list of a few little things, The Great Depression, WWII, the Cold War, the wars in Viet Nam, The Great Recession, the devastation of the US 'rust belt', etc."
I'm not joking: For The Great Depression, that we were blowing a financial bubble based on thin margin from banks, a bubble that likely would burst (bubble bursting went back at least to the Dutch tulips) and wipe out the banking system should have been clear somewhere some months or years before October, 1929. With that information, we should have taken action to deflate the bubble slowly ("soft landing") and keep the banks from going bust. Next, the banks use 'fractional reserve banking' with a 'multiplier effect' that essentially creates money. So the bubble blowing creates too much money and causes inflation. Then when the bubble bursts, we get deflation. With a credit economy, tough to get out of deflation. We ruined lots of lives, killed lots of people in the US, during the deflation. We didn't get out of the deflation until we were willing to 'print' money again, i.e., when people started shooting at us 12 years later. With just decent information, not much more than the above, made authoritative and disseminated, we should have avoided most of the bubble bursting, all of The Great Depression, and likely WWII.
Now, move the clock forward to the housing bubble blowing and The Great Recession, same song, different verse. From 1929 to 2008, we didn't learn much. E.g., the 'news' had lots of 'stories' about house prices but next to nothing on the leverage at the banks and on Wall Street. So, when the bubble burst, we were well on the way to a second Great Depression. We were better at handling the problem than in the first Great Depression, but we still have fumbled for four years.
In the past four years the 'news' has just done their usual of light entertainment, emotionalism over rationalism, passion, pathos, and poignancy, people to 'identify' with in 'stories' about individual cases, with next to nothing, zip, zilch, zero, on the real causes and the real ways out. So, we have suffered massive unemployment, slow economic growth, and, no doubt, much higher rates of, let's look at the usual list, street crime, domestic violence, divorce, abortion, substance abuse, homelessness, clinical depression, suicide, little things like those. And, there's the devastation of the US 'rust belt' -- no excuse for that. We really can build cars in the US -- Honda, Toyota, BMW, etc. do it. Detroit could have, too.
Then coming at us like a runaway freight train is the high praise for 'free and open world trade'. Hmm. Guys, we don't have a 'world government' and, really, don't want one. Then 'free and open world trade' without a corresponding government promises significant economic instability, suffering, conflict, and maybe WWIII.
Then there is the reason given for 'free and open world trade', that in some work some other country is 'more productive' than the US so that we should 'trade' the results of where they are productive with where we are productive. I.e., all the textile workers in the US should get jobs in software. Instead we had to pay for the imported textiles and the 'safety net' for the US textile workers; many workers and their families were hurt as in the usual list above; the quality of the textile products went down; we wiped out some major US businesses; etc.
So, why'd we do that? Well, some importers make some money. But apparently the main issue was the US Foggy Bottom community that wanted to use access to the US markets as a 'carrot' to influence the foreign policies of some other countries. US voters were not informed about this 'swap'. Net, some foreign economies are going up, and our economy is going down.
Why, that is, what about the 'productivity' issue? That was always mostly a fraud. Sure, a big example is tin: We need some tin, and Indonesia has some. So, generally, in natural resources, trade is important. But in textiles? The textile workers over there have 10 fingers on each hand and can sew seams and buttons twice as fast? No. And they have less good infrastructure. The difference, instead, is foreign exchange rates.
Beyond the money, there is an issue of actual control of our country: Parts of the Mideast can pump oil for ballpark $1 a barrel and sell it for $100 a barrel. So, they get to dream of 'golden' cities and hire people to build them. Not so good but maybe okay so far -- we can set up Victoria's Secret stores there. But next they get to buy essentially all our country and, thus, control us. Bad.
And for what? Oil. But there's no need: Mostly it's about gasoline. But can make gasoline, and also get off a byproduct of some oxygen, from just coal, water, and some energy. For the energy, use whatever, wind, solar, if they are efficient, or coal or nuclear fission. I'd bet on the last as the most economic solution. South Africa does it. Hitler did it. It's doable. At one time there was an article in 'Scientific American' with an analysis that could make gasoline from Utah coal and put into a pipeline for 65 cents a gallon. Net, the US really should be largely or entirely 'energy independent' with relatively cheap energy. That we can do that, and how to do it, needs to get out so that we can come to a consensus and then do it. The 'news' didn't get that information out.
You mentioned the police. Okay. It's always dangerous to have a national police force, and in the US we tried to avoid doing that. Then the FBI was an exception. Now the Secret Service, another police force, does much more than look at counterfeiting and protect the president. Then we have the DEA busting down doors. And now we have the DHS with at least the Border Police. Net, we've got a lot of national police forces.
When a local police force messes up, the local people can get concerned and take action. So, local police forces are accountable. But if the DHS Border Police messes up, is that really going to swing a national election to clean up the DHS? Nope. So the DHS police force is not accountable. Bummer. Dangerous.
For more, long we let the states handle crime and sometimes didn't even pass federal laws against some major criminal acts. But now just ignoring the terms of service at a Web site can get the US DoJ all up on their hind legs, send in the FBI, and start talking felonies and years in jail. This national police force stuff is dangerous.
Finally, here's a pattern: People want 'security', see a problem or a threat and, then, can be talked into having the US Federal Government take action to solve the problem/threat from DC (now the third richest area in the country behind Silicon Valley and hedge fund CT). So, we keep getting a larger and larger Federal Government, and that's a threat to efficiency, freedom, and our whole country.
Net, as citizens, we need better information, and we need a 'news' industry that will provide it, maybe in addition to the traffic violations of L. Lohan, so that we can come to consensus based on good information and then authorize action.