Why journalists deserve low pay | Hacker News Reader

Why journalists deserve low pay

csmonitor.com

68 pointssoundsop34 comments

Very good article.

It also neatly explains why certain magazines/papers, like, for example, the Economist, are doing fine even as the industry collapses: they provide hard, strong value in the form of unique insight and analysis communicated extremely clearly.

Perhaps "Why lazy journalists deserve low pay" would be closer to the mark. But that's less of a reader-baiting headline, common in much of today's journalism. Oh, the irony...

Well, I'd say it's more than that. It's a fundamental shift. We'll need fewer journalists (the lazy ones) to get the same quality of news we get today.

Not really. It's obvious that we don't need the "lazy" journalists, the kind who just repost press releases with little analysis. Those are bound to go.

But we actually need less "proper" journalists too. A dozen proper, independent news outlets are probably sufficient to cover most world news from every important angle. Why should we need that coverage to be repeated a thousand times, for every major city? Why does the San Francisco Chronicle need someone covering the war in Iraq? Why does the Tribune de Genève need to cover american politics?

There is no need for this duplication of (good) coverage by proper journalists, when global, instant distribution is essentially free.

That is particularly true when you consider that the leading paper's stories will anyway be duplicated a hundred times over by thousands of bloggers who will inevitably capture all the minority viewpoints.

I think you're underestimating how many of the writers out there may be freelancers/retained freelancers, rather than staff hacks. Eg the Islington Twaddler's Silicon Valley correspondent may just be a desperate stringer, flogging stories wherever she/he can...

Perhaps - are you saying that we need this person flogging stories?

No, more that that person needs to flog stories to whoever will take them, even if that means being an X correspondent in country Y, despite their being little link.

There's also a whole side-conversation about diversity of opinion and reporting being key, but that does rely on high quality reporting, which we need more of.

I agree more or less. I think it's important to have a regional view on events. For example, here in Quebec we have a couple of journalists in the mainstream media covering events in the United States. After the 9-11 attacks, all the coverage coming from US media was very patriotic and in a sense very biased where the coverage coming from abroad was more critical and factual. Even if an article reports only facts, it can still be biased depending on which facts are reported or how the article is framed.

I would say that the main problems with journalism these days are the reliance on pundits, commentators, the public and partisan organizations instead of analysts, good journalists and factually based editorials. In another life, I worked in a PR agency(not very proud...) and usually journalists(from reputable newspapers) would copy verbatim our press releases. The crap they publish is astounding...

Well that was quite a rant.

s/lazy journalists/stenographers/g.

Speech to text, or text-to-text, translation isn't worth much anymore. Journalists will have to actually report on what's really going on, instead of hiding behind objectivity.

This article is terribly confused. The declining state of media organizations has nothing to do with journalists and everything to do with the manner in which the businesses have been run over the past 20 years.

Really? What business practices would enable journalism to "survive" a transition to a world in which their product has no value? Perhaps their business decisions are all just whistling in the dark? If there are no paths forward for them, blaming them is counterproductive. I don't think "blame" can accrue where there were no good decisions to be made, even in theory.

(By "survive", most people mean that while it may shrink a bit or grow a bit, it's the same fundamental business doing the same fundamental things.)

This sort of analysis is critical. Frankly, I could sum up the article even faster: Journalism supply has shot through the roof. What do expect to happen to the price, given that demand can't shoot through the roof at anywhere near the same speed? What does that say about the probability of journalism "surviving"?

First of all, the article speaks of journalists as a homogenous group which is ridiculous since they are neither created equal nor do they act as a single group. It then describes only one aspect of journalism and devalues all roles journalists play based on that incomplete description. For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

From the article: Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.

This is a generally correct assessment of the current situation. Where it goes wrong is with the conclusion it draws: "Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

As long as there are businesses willing to pay for this type of content, there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.

> First of all, the article speaks of journalists as a homogenous group which is ridiculous since they are neither created equal nor do they act as a single group.

This is not ridiculous. I think it's perfectly valid to consider the question: "Why do journalists (in general) have low salaries?" -- More down below.

> "Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay."

> there will be people willing to fill those positions. It's not the responsibility of journalists to correct this situation.

I think the article is actually quite sympathetic to journalists -- the low pay is seen as a bad thing, and it raises the question of what journalists can do to be better-compensated.

> For example, there is no mention of the value of investigative journalism or the historical value of well-written, unbiased content.

I'm not sure what you mean by historical value, but the article was quite clear that deeply-researched, well-written, 'hard' journalism is rewarded -- because it has special value above and beyond the noise floor of the 'average' journalist.

I think that your position and the article's are actually quite close. There is a lot of 'average' journalism out there, and it does not provide much value in today's world. The exceptional journalists with an understanding of value _are_ being rewarded -- the investigative journalists you mention come to mind.

Below I have pasted what I believe to be the thesis of the article -- I don't think you truly disagree:

If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences.

I agree to the extent that the article argues that a higher quality product deserves a higher value.

I think the article is actually quite sympathetic to journalists

One of the reasons I said the article was confused is that it's not clear who the target audience is. If it was sympathetic to journalists, then why the accusatory title and overall tone?

I am not saying it is indisputable, but the article did a much better job of supporting its arguments and conclusions. I did not detect any confusion.

What is 'the manner in which businesses have been run over the past 20 years', why does it matter, and why does it trump the article's arguments?

One of the things I appreciate about HN is that once or twice a week, I come across a submission which is a journalistic piece that has truth and beauty in it. Whoever claims that journalists "produce only instrumental" and not intrinsic value lives in a universe different from mine.

Once or twice a week is pretty bad, considering that this industry probably produces hundreds of thousands of articles a week. I come across intrinsically valuable blog posts much more often than I come across intrinsically valuable news pieces, myself.

I agree with the general gist of the article, but I'm not sure I agree with this:

"Wages are compensation for value creation"

This implies that compensation in general (not wages in particular) is always relative to value creation, which I don't think is true for most definitions of value (other than monetary.) 'Wages are compensation for the creation of financial value' would be more correct.

Wages are expression of price for labour. What's your price?

Can't agree with you more. To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods.

Interesting, too, that the author pairs harmony and beauty as having "intrinsic" value. We might think of beauty as intrinsically valuable but, once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable. Which brings me to my next point.

To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?

I guess I'm not a big fan of moral philosophy.

"To create anything humans must utilize their labor. That is where the real value lies. The "market," "capital," and the "financial system" are nothing but totems (created by our labor) that we worship as if they were given to us by the gods."

Careful: this way lies Marxism. The value doesn't lie in the labor itself, because if the labor was just as valuable as the product of that labor then why not save the labor and sleep in? The value lies in what is produced. Which is why using less labor to produce something more useful is more valuable than using more labor to produce something useless.

"once you name any created object beautiful, that beauty is rife with cultural baggage that defines what is and what is not valuable"

You've gone through a loop and said nothing. I think a rainbow is beautiful because (by your account, which spuriously dispenses with the possibility of individual taste or universal beauty) my culture values pretty colors. But in what way does my culture value pretty colors? Answer: we find them beautiful. You basically said "we think things are beautiful because our culture defines what we think is beautiful", which is a simple, testable, false statement (some standards of beauty are shared across cultures, other standards can differ within a culture).

"To call one object beautiful necessarily means that other objects are not beautiful, or are less beautiful, or are beautiful in a different way. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing "harmonious" about this act. Thus, how can beauty and harmony be intrinsically valuable or "good" when beauty necessarily excludes harmony?"

You can have harmony without everything in the world being harmonious. By analogy, can't we only call a system or an interaction "harmonious" if it is something distinct from disharmony? Isn't there a difference between two instruments playing the same pitch (or harmonious pitches, such as the same note an octave apart) and two instruments playing completely disharmonious pitches? (The answer is yes, and this can be scientifically demonstrated.) Likewise, when a group of people act in concert to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts, is that not more harmonious than a group of people warring with themselves?

That labor has to create value, though, right? No one would get paid to dig a hole on Monday and fill it back up on Tuesday, ad nauseum...

I think it's the hierarchies between the journalist and the consumer that deserve lower (not low) pay. The journalists are doing all the work, they should be paid more.

The problem with journalism is that the customer of the journalists' publishers are not the readers of the articles, they are the advertisers that fill the publication. It is this mindset that has pushed news from one of providing information to the reader to one of providing entertainment.

Journalists then work for entertainment companies, not news companies -- there is a big difference. The Economist is a news company. The evening news is entertainment. This means news competes with every other form of entertainment and news just doesn't doesn't stand a chance.

Why? Because the news is supposed to have a standard. Look at what happens when standards are lost (cough, fox!). Look at how the Daily Show is more popular than the evening news -- because it is more entertaining, because it doesn't pretend to strive for ethics. These lies are transparent and the consumer knows the news is not the news, but one big advertisement for prescription drugs, politicians, and mega corps.

The journalists aren't making the decisions that are shaping this theatre, the bosses with the big wallets are and they are controlled by the advertisers.

How many journalists have been told to modify their stories to be more appealing to the ad market? How many embellish to win more viewers?

The downfall of journalism has less to do with changing technology and more to do with faltering ethics and diminishing focus on the end user -- that is, the reader or the viewer -- and more focus on the advertising they sell.

When the news industry begins to understand the product they are selling, things will change.

For the record, the ad based revenue model is failing on the internet too. Are we going to blame the internet for that?

While this piece focuses on the journalists themselves, the other aspect of the supply-and-demand perspective here is that society's requirements are shifting as well.

It could be that there simply isn't a widespread demand for the type of journalism whose decline we're observing. As generations pass, the older always seems to lament the loss of "quality and integrity" in their entertainment and news media.

I suspect those lamentations are largely due to a combination of selective memory and the spirit of the times. Getting back to journalism as an example, there wasn't much investigative reporting in American journalism before the Watergate scandal toppled Nixon's administration. It existed, but that's about all: most American journalists weren't Tarbells, Sinlairs, or Naders.

Before Watergate made it fashionable, most investigative journalists had strong personal motivation for their work. They would have fit right into the last election cycle as bloggers. I suspect that's also true of Bernstein, but under today's conditions Woodward might have chosen law or business.

After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet. Afterward it became apparent that this wasn't sustainable, and investigative journalism declined again. However, there will always be a certain number of motivated investigative journalists (or, if you like, muckrakers). With modern technology, they can publish their own work at a very low cost.

> Tarbells, Sinclairs, or Naders

Then there's the fact that many of these muckrakers didn't actually do good.

Take Nader. While the Corvair was made by "evil" GM, it was significantly safer than comparable cars of the same era, especially the VW bug/beetle. The bad publicity that Nader created out of whole cloth chased GM out of small economical cars.

> After Watergate, every journalism group seemed to jump into investigative journalism with both feet.

It's not so much investigative as "change the world". It turns out that journalists don't actually know better and are very easy to capture by folks who have their own agenda. As a result, journalists have driven their credibility towards that of used car salesmen.

Oh, and Watergate doesn't actually make journalists look bad. When "Deep Throat" was revealed, we found out that it was just revenge by someone a vindictive crank who thought that he should have been appointed head of the FBI.

Argh - too late to edit. I meant to write that Watergate doesn't look journalists look GOOD.

<blockquote>Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value.</blockquote>

I disagree. I've seen some journalistic writing and photography that I'd say qualifies as art.

Also: journalists have been poorly paid (excluding the national talking heads) for a lot longer than the Internet has been stepping on their turf. Terrible pay was one reason I left journalism.

Nowadays it's supply and demand, but it seems a bit like salt in the wound to say "they deserve it."

:D The reason journalists have low pay is the same reason you find ridiculously beautiful and over-qualified people running coffee at TV stations -- so many people want to work in the industry that employers have their pick.

My friend "W" is a PhD and former model. She tried for two years to get any job at all at Univision in Miami. She gave up and got a crap job at a newspaper in Colorado. Another friend "J" is a fiber optic technician who's constantly bothering his cousin to get him an assistant gaffer job on local a game show.

This falls in line with common wisdom doesn't it? Specialists do better in the work force than generalists do...

The purpose of journalism is to monitor the sources of power. The people doing that job should NOT be low-paid.

They SHOULD be low-paid if all they do is act as a stenographer and just repeat verbatim what is said by the anonymous sources of power.

Yes, but that just means they aren't fulfilling their purpose.

I think we'd be in a lot of trouble if most traditional journalism disappeared, so much blog information is just opinion on news generated by traditional journalism or opinion pieces.

While in the web company area that hacker news covers this may not be the case a lot of blogging is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com