Pay-Per-View Journalism Is Burning Out Reporters Young 227
Hugh Pickens writes "Young journalists once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story, but the NY Times now reports that instead many are working online shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google's algorithms and draw readers their way. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times all display a 'most viewed' list on their home pages; some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles. 'At a [traditional] paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you're actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,' says Jim VandeHei, Politico's executive editor. 'Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.' The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. At Politico, roughly a dozen reporters have left in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. 'When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who's been working for a decade, not a couple of years,' says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 'I worry about burnout.'"
It doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Investigative journalism is dead.
The only thing left for journalists to do is put a little spin on corporate and government press releases.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Or become real reporters. (Score:5, Interesting)
Watch a week of The Daily Show. Watch how they compare current comments by politicians to past comments by those same politicians.
I don't think this is about the time-to-publish.
I think this is more about not having the depth or experience to dig into the background material. Reporters who really know their subject material will have no problem attracting viewers.
I'm Feeling Bored and Creative... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup...it fits well enough. Burnout is what happens when retarded business majors and incompetent morons get promoted up the company power ladder for slightly increasing this quarter's profit. If you head up organizations with short term thinkers, then it is the grunt workers at the bottom that suffer in every industry. This is the result of living in a money-worshiping society that values the next dollar above all else.
You want to do your part to change the way things work in your industry young reporters? It's simple. Stop working for the large media outlets that treat you like a consumable resource. Instead, find a nice local newspaper that treats its employees with respect or, better yet, start your own independent blog. Will you make as much money? Nah. Will you live longer with more sanity? Probably. You can't have your cake and eat it to. Have enough respect for yourself to make your income a means to an end, rather than the end itself, and your employers will start to treat you with respect as well. If you are insecure enough in your persona to let a large company rape you up and down the halls in terms of stress and hours worked, then you are going to get stomped on throughout your entire career until you are finally subdued into a finally beaten pulp of what was once a human being.
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not a journalist, but I wonder if the solution to both of those problems is maybe to move back toward a periodical basis for publishing. Just because you -can- update a news website every minute doesn't mean you necessarily -should-, and I think in fact that just because every other website updates every few minutes doesn't mean yours needs to either per se. Maybe if you said "Okay, the front page is going to be updated once a day at noon, that's when the deadline is. A big story breaks an hour after noon, that gives you 23 hours to get the full story and make it coherent rather than publish bits and pieces in a stream of drivel."
It wouldn't get the first scoops, but how profitable is that anyway? Seems like most individuals still don't follow most news stories as fast as they come out, with the BP oil spill most people I know didn't seem to know until a few days after the story broke. It's not like people searching for news on a subject look for first-breaking story.
Heck, maybe people would even go there right after your daily publishing to browse rather than just going to google and getting the story you broke first without giving you any page hits.
Just throwing the suggestion out there. Again, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
wait, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
and political honesty it takes to be able to admit publically that you were wrong and you've changed your mind.
when have you honestly seen that happen? I've seen them change their minds left and right, but I've never yet heard one say they were wrong and why they have changed thir mind (the only time I've heard one say "I was wrong" was when they got caught in Italy with a rent-a-boy after trying to engrain anti-GLBT language into the constitution)
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:2, Interesting)
Ironic that just last night Sean Penn said almost the same thing on PBS Newshour while discussing the problems he faces getting funded for continued relief^^rebuilding efforts in Haiti.
Why burnout happens (Score:5, Interesting)
This article states a truth which has existed for the better part of a generation. University for journalism is closer to an arts course than a science one; you can get through it with a good grade easier relative to other subjects like math or science which require a specific mind to get through and even then can prove challenging and time consuming.
As such graduates - which were never really 'taught' in a direct subject 100 years ago - emerge from university to a tough jobs market. Often they need work experience, plus a series of publications before say...a local newspaper will take them in as a low-level staff member. Due to constricting markets wages have fallen; graduates here in Britain are known to begin a job on as low a salary £11-12K (about $15-16K) per year with a slight rise when we enter the London Metropolitan borough.
Assuming you're 22, talented, and have enjoyed much of your degree and the possibilities it presents (perhaps being a young idealist you picture yourself as a roving reporter, or a foreign correspondant in exotic locales etc) - the reality is that you will, for years, have to sit in an office all day long and basically reword stuff coming in on the AP/PA/Reuters wire - all day long. Far cry from your modules which presented you with an adventurous trade. That's perfectly true; you can be sodding Tintin in this business but if you're like that then you aren't young because you wouldn't have the money to travel or do in-depth investigative stuff; not to mention that geniune investigative work is rare in the ink and paper side of the trade.
After a few months of copying out the wire, bored out of your mind, you've probably lost a lot of passion for the trade. You want out. The rose-tinted specs are off; and you are basically in a job where you are confined all day to an office with a huge workload that never ends because editors want the paper packed to the gills with stuff that's appearing in 10 other rags at minimum. If you have a bullying subeditor and/or editor it can be worse; the scare stories I've heard of breakdowns or young hacks in tears thanks to a dressing down in the ed's office are too numerous to all be fabrication.
I saw this crap early on, and was able to take up other work to supplement my freelancing which is a labour of love. I was saying to a Guardian journo the other day...I smile whilst out getting a story in the July sunshine and cool breeze, the greenery and ordinary folks going about their day - and then contrast it to vigil at the PA wire, lukewarm coffee and petty office politics that haunt young 'churnalists' whose talent is squandered under a constant flow of drudgery.
Would I trade my even-lower paid freelance job for £12 grand per year in the local press doing that? Not in this life.
Re:I'm Feeling Bored and Creative... (Score:2, Interesting)
Stop working for the large media outlets that treat you like a consumable resource. Instead, find a nice local newspaper that treats its employees with respect or, better yet, start your own independent blog.
Find one first. Every newspaper within 150 miles of my house has been bought out by ever-larger conglomerates. Most then immediately cut the local field reporter jobs by about 2/3. After a few rounds of this, our "local" papers are owned by companies three states over, and reporting has been cut to the point where one reporter is responsible for at least 4-5 towns, and a couple of interns per county do filler stories like "Edna's thoughts on turning 103" and "Looka da cute fuzzy puppy!"
By the time I cut my subscription, the "local" section was a total of 10 pages long, most of it advertising or letters to the editor. There was, at best, one article that had anything to do with a town 20 miles from me, and that was usually a filler piece.
The "free paper" actually sends reporters to town council meetings and does more local reporting. It's chock full of ads, and doesn't have any Reuters or other non-local stories, but it's got a lot of local stuff in it, and it's actually not all that bad for being written by obviously inexperienced journalists.
Amen! (Score:3, Interesting)
If they're leaving journalism, maybe the next generation will learn form their mistakes, and avoid journalism degrees.
In fact, we've got very serious problems with journalist simply being ignorant buffoons today. All the real digging gets covered by a few well educated blogs by domain experts, like say 538. We must ensure those independent sources get legit information by protecting groups like wikileaks, zerohedge, etc.
Re:Welcome to the Digital Age! (Score:1, Interesting)
A very good point. I've always been 100% certain that carpal tunnel has nothing to do with the keyboard, and everything to do with the mouse.
People have been typing for well over 100 years, on hideously clunky keyboards that might have been designed by Torquemada himself, yet people have only been experiencing widespread carpal-tunnel trauma for the last twenty or so. Coincidence?
Re:Welcome to the Digital Age! (Score:3, Interesting)
People have been typing for well over 100 years, on hideously clunky keyboards that might have been designed by Torquemada himself, yet people have only been experiencing widespread carpal-tunnel trauma for the last twenty or so. Coincidence?
Well - for starters, if you look at the BIG picture, widespread carpal-tunnel does reflect the rise in personal computers. Now the question remains whether people typed as much before computers as much as they do now. And looking at a regular typewriter, I can say with 99% certainty, no typewriter was designed similar enough to a keyboard to replicate the suspected causes of carpel tunnel (resting your wrists or elbows on the desk, Typewriters are far more vertically inclined).
So - I mean really, how would you get Carpel tunnel in your left hand if you use the right one for the mouse?
Your argument holds very little water.
Supply & Demand (Score:2, Interesting)
Absolutely. The amount of reporters the average user needs relative to the amount of news they desire to consume is completely out of balance.