Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
December 18th, 2020
When I was teaching a class on opinion writing, I always ended the semester with a warning not to go into journalism. I felt bad about that, because I love my job, and wish everyone could have it. But I have spent my entire career watching the industry struggle with collapsing advertising revenue--half expecting an implosion at any moment, wearily unsurprised when it finally came.
Newsroom employment has declined some 25% since 2008; I expect it to fall farther still. So I can't in good conscience urge young people to commit their lives to such an economically precarious industry. I feel compelled to say "Run! It's too late for us, but you can still save yourselves!"
All that said, I do think there's a future for journalism. I just think it's going to be quite different from what we're used to, because the economics of the web, where all journalism will end up, can't support the old ecosystem with many hundreds of newsrooms, scattered across the country, and supported by advertisers who preferred the news to be as drily factual and inoffensive as possible.
The internet rewards scale, so I expect the number of newsrooms to shrink, while the size of the remaining newsrooms grows enormously. (My own employer just announced it will be adding 150 jobs across the organization, bringing our newsroom to a record size, north of 1,000 people). Those two trends will not counterbalance each other, however, so the net result will be a lot fewer people employed as journalists in ten years.
The internet also rewards a different kind of journalism. Some of those rewards are obviously desirable--we can do way more detailed dives into data than we used to, and write at whatever length the story demands; paper space was limited, but pixels are practically free. However, we at least have to ask whether the other changes we can expect will be quite as healthy--notably, a shift away from a model in which news was largely funded by advertisers, to one in which it's mostly funded by donors, or subscribers.
While advertisers preferred content that wouldn't actively anger any of their potential customers, subscribers and donors like their ideas about the world to be more actively flattered by the scriveners they're paying. That's not to say that great journalism can't be done on such a model--my husband works for a terrific donor-funded political magazine, and you work for another one.
But I'd argue that the donor-funded publications were the better for other publications that aspired to greater neutrality on the questions of the day, and a broader audience--as of course those publications benefited from the ideological outlets that forced them to reckon with the inevitable failures in that neutrality.
Even more, I'd argue that America benefited from having a mass media culture rather than a forest of paywalls. And while I am very glad for the paywall that helps pay my salary, I can't help but worry about what I, as a reader, am losing.
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