Why Aren't Top Journalists Rich? | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren't Top Journalists Rich?

priceonomics.com

49 pointsmarban17 comments

The problem, as I see it, is that newspapers (print or online) operate very differently from other forms of media, like TV, radio and blogs, and make a very different product. Newspapers are the only media institutions that continually cover wide beats. They have a reporter in city hall whether or not something interesting is happening there, one in court, and one in Germany. This makes print reporters much more knowledgeable about their respective beats than other kinds of reporters, and that's why most breaking stories originate in newspapers. TV, on the other hands, is usually a secondary news collection organization. It often lets the newspapers break a story before covering it themselves. This means that they can afford to send a reporter to Germany only when something interesting is going on there.

Newspapers have been able to support this model because their customers buy a package. They pay the same price every day because they have to buy the entire paper, though they are likely interested interested in a different story each time. This means that when there's news in Iraq, people buy the paper for the Iraq story, and that day the Iraq reporter subsidizes the supreme court reporter.

But this model is a problem for online journalism, because revenue is generated only from the articles that are actually read, and obviously, a single article generates less revenue than a complete package.

Unfortunately, this would make it very hard to keep reporters on the ground that slowly get to know their beats and wait for something interesting to happen. Unless media comes up with a new way to support regular beat reporters, we will lose the most essential information-gathering mechanism we have, and the news will be even more controlled by PR than it is today (and even today a large portion of the news is spoon-fed to the few reporters left by PR firms).

"But this model is a problem for online journalism, because revenue is generated only from the articles that are actually read"

Not anymore. Paywalls are going up everywhere.

What's probably more likely is that nebulous publications might fail, and instead people may follow many smaller niche online publications. You might read about tech news, supreme court rulings, and something happening in Germany from three different, unrelated sources, but ignore local news about things happening in Amsterdam. These would be run by people with an interest in a particular topic, perhaps as a hobby part time. Hobby bloggers are really quite common so it's not impossible to imagine this.

But each of these publications won't make enough to pay good reporters to do a good job. Hobby reporting is a nice idea, but as a former journalist I can tell you that it's very hard to do serious reporting in less than full-time.

This is a really great & insightful comment. Thank you!

Is your point similar to the point that Chris Dixon made about cable bundling? http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...

It looks like the top journalists are rich. The article says Anderson Cooper is making $10 million per year just from his show and Fareed Zakaria is commanding $75K per appearance.

The article says they don't count because they aren't print journalists. Isn't that like a orchestra violist asking why top musicians aren't rich, but then saying Justin Timberlake and Rihanna don't count because they aren't orchestra musicians?

It seems like the big money in journalism is in video, not print. Just like the big money in music is in pop, not classical.

I suspect this is because it is easier for the casual viewer to quickly notice the difference between two people on screen compared to two people's writing. Being easier to recognize makes it easier to gain a following.

Artist =/= musician.

It was the article's idea to compare these two groups, not mine.

But is Anderson Cooper making that money as a journalist or as a TV personality?

I don't mean to demean him by saying that, as I'm not very familiar with his background or his career. I would question, however, whether he is paid that much because of the journalism he does or because of his status as a TV star.

Maybe there's currently a large market for TV personalities who talk about things that are new but not a large market for actually discovering and distilling facts about our world. Maybe appearance, not content, is where the money and market is.

I should add, plenty of print journalists move into some form of TV journalism - not only for wider exposure, but for the greater salaries.

I just wish they focused on profits per employee as a metric, or really any actually meaningful metric besides gross revenues. You can make anything impacted by technology look bad by looking at only revenue.

The music industry revenues dropped by half between 2000 and 2010, however it doesn't talk at all about how much costs dropped in the same time period. More specifically, the cost per artist brought to market (album creation to distribution). As long as more music is being created and making to listeners, then market demand is being satiated, and that is all that matters.

Author of the post here. I don't have any metrics like those up my sleeve, but I would encourage you to check out the Pew survey i mentioned which (in reference to print and tv) finds that:

"Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to."

http://stateofthemedia.org/

I always thought that the top ones were rich, they just made their money elsewhere, like books and TV. Am I wrong?

It’s worth noting that op-ed writers are generally the most well-known journalists. [Their] picture is always printed, they write with a signature style, and papers advertise their faces and perspectives. Reporters, in contrast, write in an anonymous “this is news” tone fitting an institution that did not introduce bylines until the 1920s.

This suggests a solution: print journalists' photos with their articles, so they can be recognized and remembered more easily. I'd wager that some newspapers would fight such a change, but it might actually be in the paper's interest for their reporters become draws in their own right, much like op-ed writers or reviewers like Roger Ebert.

> It's no secret that technology disrupted journalism’s business model, and it has yet to recover. What's puzzling is that the disruption seems to have created lots of losers but no new winners within journalism.

And I stopped reading...

drudgereport.com (~1.3M a year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge#Drudge_Report)

How is a news aggregation site considered journalism?

I would have a hard time calling the largely news aggregating Huffington Post journalism even though it has original content. Or at least serious journalism with some kind of journalistic integrity.

I try not to stop reading too early. Drudge is not a journalist. Indeed, I have seen at least definition of "journalist" (a "reporter who writes for an editor") that was described in the source I saw it in as an explicit exclusion of Drudge from the ranks of journalists.

A blog post, "Blogs lead in critical thinking, but newspapers still matter,"

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6083

submitted to Hacker News earlier today to no discussion,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907627

illustrates some of the reach that "traditional" journalism still has. The quality of professionally edited journalistic submissions to HN, as contrasted with the quality of many (although not all) blog posts submitted here, suggests that there is still a role for journalism in promoting more informed, more thoughtful discussion of issues we all care about.

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