Dead tree newspapers have been dying for years, but then who touches paper anymore? After all, we now have the internet, and all the news that fits to . . . oh wait. There’s infinite space online, so how can we not have an embarassment of riches in journalism?
There’s a curious thing that happens when some kid gets a job writing for a major soapbox. If some 23-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in humanities stopped you on the street and said, “Hey, do you want to spend ten minutes of your life listening to my opinions about issues in the news,” what are the chances you would? And yet, these are the people whose words you read. At Buzzfeed. At Huff Post. On most online media outlets.
Jimmy Olson is no longer the cub reporter, but your thought leader.
These pundits gather tens of thousands of eyeballs. They are heroes on social media. They are given respect by the groundlings, their ideas bronzed for placement on the lintels of serious looking buildings. And in a few years, their names become household words. Imagine wielding such power at, say, 25 years of age? Some of us have shoes older than that.
But their passionate voices are no match for economics, and over the past week, catastrophe struck.
CORNISH: So tell us about the scope of this latest round of layoffs. How significant are they for these companies?
LEE: So the first company to really sort of get into here is BuzzFeed, I think. They announced laying off 15 percent of its workforce – a little over 200 people. That’s pretty big for them. Verizon Media Group, which owns AOL and Huffington Post, they also announced a significant layoff – about 8 percent. But that’s, like, 800 people. So that’s a lot of people there. Gannett took a bunch of cuts as well, but they’ve been cutting for years now. So this is a little less – I don’t want to say less significant, but it’s more par for the course for them.
As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic. A lot of online writers got the unceremonious boot this week, with some more coming over the next week as well. Why them in particular? No doubt there were many reasons, from some failing to gain a following, to some being slackers, to some being better friends with their editors to some being a pain to their boss. And some excellent writers lost their jobs and were reduced to begging for work.
I know some of these people. I’ve read the work of many of them. And I feel badly that they thought they had a niche, a future and were doing great work. Some were. Others overestimated the value of their writing, their thinking or both. Nonetheless, the loss of a job is a huge blow, both to the pocketbook and to self-esteem.
Young people need jobs, even if they mistake the credibility ascribed to them by dint of standing on someone else’s big soapbox for their own importance. It’s brutal to learn that once the soapbox is pulled out from under you, no one cares about your opinions anymore. It hurts to learn it was never really you, but the soapbox upon which you stood.
Why this happened is fairly obvious. Employees need to get paid, even if only at the wages acceptable to 23-year-olds.
CORNISH: Are we looking at a situation where these companies are actually not profitable or just not profitable (laughter) to their shareholders?
LEE: The situation is that some of these companies are not profitable, and they need to become profitable – BuzzFeed, for example. Other companies like Gannett have decent profits at a lot of their papers, but they’re shrinking. They’re just getting smaller. And I think that’s the hard thing to sustain. So in either case, the future of business is a little bit in doubt. And so cutting staff relieves some of the pressure as terrible as that is with people losing their jobs.
At the same time, these “newsrooms” were unionizing, as the kids had gotten past the initial glow of getting a job and were reaching that stage where it occurred to them that they were being paid squat for their work. As brilliant as these baby pundits believed themselves to be, economics is not a required course for gender studies majors. There is no shortage of space on the internets for every voice, but whether there is money to pay writers a living, no less a decent living, remains an issue.
When I started Fault Lines, I hoped there would be enough traction to turn it into a self-sustaining venture, with writers who knew what they were talking about because they did the work. Defense lawyers. Cops. Prosecutors. Investigators, Academics. Judges. These weren’t 23-year-olds, but the real deal, bringing together the myriad perspectives of criminal law. It failed to gain that traction. I wanted nothing more than to pay these writers for their words, but the internet wasn’t going to make that happen. They deserved far better.
There is much wrong, much to be criticized, about what passes for online “journalism” these days, and I’ve never been reluctant to say so. But each of these writers is suffering now, losing the future they thought they had, learning that they aren’t the cat’s meow of cutting-edge thought. It’s soul crushing to lose a job when you haven’t done something truly awful to deserve it, and they didn’t deserve it. It happened. Bad stuff just happens sometimes.
I hope they land on their feet. I hope they take away from this nightmare that life isn’t fair, that bad things happen to good people and that no one is immune from the vicissitudes of life. I hope they appreciate that the nightmare they’re going through is one that many others go through, including those they called deplorable, and will give the same empathy to others that they want for themselves should they get a new gig on another big soapbox. I wish them the best.
…I’m trying to make peace after a long night of pretend, I need a pawnbroker or moneylender…
About a decade ago during the ’07-08 crash, I wrote that American Exceptionalism relies on some magic force that rescues us from ourselves. It’s always happened in the past and gotten us where we are today, but what if we’ve run out of luck and it doesn’t happen again? Are we really exceptional or just lucky? Up to now, at least.
” Are we really exceptional or just lucky?”
Maybe just exceptionally lucky. More likely, it’s the hubris that comes when you have enough exceptional ones, who, having very large coattails, provide many seats for the unexceptional to ride upon.
The unexceptional have always ridden the coattails of the exceptional. They really gonna hate it when all they’ve chased all the exceptional people away.
We’ve pretty much used up our magical exceptionalism. Times change. Things happen in one’s lifetime that have never happened before, such that one realizes ( or maybe unfortunately doesn’t) the magic is just bullshit.
In my narrow field, this is why the broad consensus one should buy the S&P and hold it forever because it’s always risen over longer periods is a magical delusion. It’s also why drawing lines on charts isn’t a substitute for many hours of research .
Sorry for digressing.
They kept telling laid off coal miners they needed to learn to code.
Time to take their own advice.
That’s the empathy gap.
I scoff when people say X is THE problem but the empathy gap is A problem. Moving forward, I join your hope that journos (and others) have more empathy & close the gap.
It irks me as well. But you knew that.
Is there still the option of becoming what newspaper used to yearn to be?
Don’t beat yourself up too much about not being able to pay FL writers. I’m still getting some use out a couple of the items from that lovely gift basket from Christmas 2016.
There were t-shirts to be sent out for Christmas, 2017, but somebody never got around to it because squirrel.
These weren’t 23-year-olds, but the real deal
[thinking emoji]
*Terms and conditions apply.
Not really sure what “journalism” is supposed to be today, but given what it claimed to be most of my life it sure isn’t whatever it used to be.
The things I know a lot about are almost uniformly gotten wrong by these journalists. Why should I believe anything else they write about?
Unfortunately, what seems to be taught to aspiring “journalists” (in my case by the “Comms” division of the English department) is that all you need to do as a “journalist” is have an opinion on any subject and be able to write relatively coherent sentences.
While all reporters have an opinion, which seeps into their writing whether they want it to or not, they used to try to keep it out and report rather than opine. That’s not only no longer a virtue, but makes one complicit as a journalist, who see it as their duty to not only inform, but to inform in such a way as to convey the “truth” to the unwitting masses.
I think this is what is being described as the problem right here. The “unwitting masses” just don’t know what is good for them and, as yet, journos haven’t figured out a way of getting their money out of them because of the free will they are incorrectly using. If only they knew who their betters were and subscribed an appropriate fee every month for the feeding of righteous knowledge. At least churches had a closed door behind you before the offering plate came around.
This is why they need to find jobs at sites that are in it to convey the “truth,” and not to make a profit. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be enough of those sites to hire them all.
The mainstream media has a bigger issue – in that they also don’t report facts or investigate anything anymore, they just report “both sides” and then stop. So if, say, some politician says that the sky is purple, instead of going outside and looking at the color of the sky, they instead go to the opposite party and report that while one party reports that the sky is purple, “critics” say that the sky is “blue” and then end the article, instead of going outside and saying, look, the sky is blue, the first person was either lying or an idiot, and the second person spoke the truth. (Though really, shouldn’t need to talk to the second person, should instead just go outside and look and report the facts.)
You think they report “both sides”? What country to you live in?
Were they writing stories about the factory workers, farmers and miners who been laid off the past 30 years, some of whose were within just a few years of retirement? No–in fact I read a lot of commentary from “reporters” in this cohort saying they hoped “those people” would “get what they deserved” by “electing Trump,” which is a hopelessly ignorant and arrogant view to have of flyover America.
I feel for the Ganett people, who were real and experienced journalists working for a genuine news organization that were cut merely so their new billionaire hedge fund owners could make an even greater profit. The Buzzfeed and Huffington brats, however, I have zero sympathy for.
Be better than them. They may be pompous, self-important little shits, but they’re people. Just like the guys in the rust belt trying to feed their kids.
The funny thing is the intellectual dark web news and opinion sites seem be flourishing and hiring new staff. Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Steven Crowder seem to have the profit thing figured out. I am just a working stiff lawyer, but that seems like irony to me.
Otherwise I take no joy in someone losing their job. But, as a Verizon shareholder I am pleased with their share price and dividend.