My brother is an old-style print journalist. He works for a regional print newspaper that serves the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. His job hasn't changed much in the past twenty years. In fact, his job isn't very different from the way that journalism has worked for sixty years.
Chris and his editor decide on the article topics for the week. He goes to meetings. He talks to local officials. People call him to tell him local gossip. He goes to crash sites. He visits the growing conservative Jewish community to hear about their conflict with the old-time locals. He writes things up at the end of the day using the traditional journalism format of ledes and clean, sparse prose. Any opinions that he might have about a topic are hidden away.
I called him during the week to vent about the state of digital journalism. He didn't know anything about the discussion on the Internet about journalism, because he NEVER reads Twitter or blogs. He doesn't even have a Facebook account.
Digital journalism is another beast from the journalism that Chris does. Most of the job happens in front of a computer screen — monitoring hit counts, reading the gossip on the Internet, figuring out the next hot topic, turning a new study into a short, graphic article, writing as much as possible in the hopes that one of the articles/posts will go viral, and nurturing the article on social media to nudge those hit counts upwards.
Ezra Klein thinks that expert bloggers have undermined traditional journalism, because the sources now have their own medium. They don't have to wait for that phone call from the journalist. They can go to their own blogs to get their research and opinions heard. Or they can get a free gig at a digital journal that still has the reputation from its print days.
I think that Klein has part of the story. I made that same point in a comment section on another blog last week. There's more going on than that.
In the meantime, it's good news that old-style journalism still exists. It's still happening at the local, regional newspapers, which are surprisingly thriving. There is a demand for this kind of news, at least on the local level. Why are national papers and journals not able to replicate this success?
Apt. 11d 
There is a demand for this kind of news, at least on the local level. Why are national papers and journals not able to replicate this success?
I am assuming that the paper does not had a correspondent covering the White House, or Kabul, or Mexico City. How many reporters are there for a white house press briefing? Would the public be significantly less informed if there were 5 instead of 50?
Big papers focus on “breaking news” and claiming glory for reporting it first. As if, it that paper hadn’t broken the news that the pope was retiring first, we would still be wandering around days later unaware. Sitting in front of a computer can get your blogger information, but is it going to get her information that someone else wasn’t going to find in the next hour or two anyway?
Your brother is reporting news from the Albany City Council (or wherever) that otherwise wouldn’t be reported. That information is hard to get, and therefore more valuable to the people who want it. But the Washington Post doesn’t give me anything that I can’t get from the New York Times or USA Today or — more often — Google News.
I don’t pay for any daily news anymore. I subscribe to 3 weeklies (The New Yorker, the Economist, and New Scientist) and the reason I pay for those is that they give in depth analysis that, if I didn’t subscribe, I wouldn’t get anywhere else. If I lived in a small town that wasn’t covered by Google News, I may pay for daily news also. But now I don’t have to, so I don’t.
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First, I do love my local Patch, which gives me lots of hyperlocal news. I also subscribe to my regional city paper for additional local news. I get all national news from online.
I have old college friends who work for old journalism down in Florida (we were all on the college paper together). When I last saw them about 3 or 4 years ago, they were lamenting the new focus on numbers of “clicks” and how you get “clicks” because of salacious content, not the kind of in-depth reporting that newspapers should be doing. As an aside, they don’t have FBs or Twitters, either. It’s not just an old vs new journalism issue but also a “keep an objective public profile” thing.
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My local Patch is mostly worthless. The main local paper has commenting enabled by Facebook and is therefore my main source for both local news and reasons to loathe humanity.
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FWIW here’s what I posted at TNC’s:
Those people who can afford to offer their work to The Atlantic at no additional cost are making a living from somewhere and something. What is it? It might be that they are professors at land-grant institutions, whose knowledge has in some part been paid for by the public, and the dissemination of which may in some sense serve the public good. It may also be that they are in the pay of, say, the Malaysian government, which wants certain stories spread for its own reasons. It may be that they have inherited great wealth, perhaps consider themselves gentleman farmers, and are free to spend their days as they please. Whatever the reason, if The Atlantic is taking work without paying for it, the people working for the institution are putting their audience, themselves, and The Atlantic’s reputation on the line for whoever is really paying the bills.
On the reader’s side, this comes down to trust. I trust Fallows, I trust Coates. I didn’t trust McArdle, but that distrust arose before she came to The Atlantic, so I never read her here. I sorta trust Richard Florida, over at Cities. It’s probably good stuff, and it probably mostly comes out of the research he is doing anyway in his academic work, which he is up front about. On the other hand, it tends to read the same, so I think it’s students or assistants dong the work. That leads me to trust it less.
On the writer’s side, sometimes a work-for-free opportunity can be a good idea (as has been said often enough on these two threads). It can be a good thing while “has written for The Atlantic” still has cachet. It can be a very good thing if you have a day job and have a great story to tell (or, more pejoratively, if you have an agenda to push). It can be good if you’re an expert looking to reach a new audience. But if you’re a writer with credibility but without a different day job, a one-time expert slot is not going to do you any good. Thayer is right to call this out, and he’s especially right to call it out at a marquee name like The Atlantic.
Because it isn’t happening just here.
There’s a similar scuffle going on over in science fiction book publishing, where Random House has launched an eBook imprint that is offering contracts that not only give authors no advance but also attempt to move almost all of the costs of publishing over to the author’s side of the ledger. (A new Random House imprint for mysteries is attempting to foist a similar contract on unwary authors.) The Science Fiction Writers of America have already declared the eBook imprint a non-qualifying market (equivalent to a vanity press). They are also threatening to de-list Random House in its entirety if similar provisions appear in other contracts.
One of the English-speaking world’s great publishing houses is offering writers no payment, because people who work there think they can. The Atlantic is offering some of its freelance writers no payment, because people who work there think they can. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but Thayer is certainly right to call the practice out.
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I think Doug said this in another comment, but I do think the issue of who pays the journalist is becoming an issue with what we expect from our news. As an example, I no longer trust David Pogue (and, perhaps with stronger reason, Manjoo, and with even stronger reason, Lehrer, who crossed ethical lines). The bottom line, though is that all of them are not really making their living from the writing I read. If Pogue’s major source of income is his appearances with tech companies, why should I trust his columns? Disclosure just isn’t good enough.
I think it’s interesting that old-fashioned journalism is thriving anywhere. In our neck of the woods, the main newspaper (which is not hyperlocal, so is not the same niche) is struggling. We have online neighborhood sources, which are hyper-local, but they do not do “serious news” (for example, investigative reporting, like the reporting at the LA times that broke the Bell corruption story).
And I worry about loosing that part of old-fashioned journalism — not the crazy race for “breaking” news — which is indeed old-fashioned and not relevant in the age where information travels nearly at the speed of light, but the investigative stories and the independence that I expected from newspapers.
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One of my dad’s very good friends is the publisher of my hometown’s local (and still daily) newspaper. My dad, in fact, is their lawyer, the guy who defends them from libel cases, enforces sunshine laws, etc. And yes, that was dinner table conversation when I was a kid. When I was home recently, the publisher picked my brain a bit about the online world. They, too, were looking for clicks. While the area skews old (average age is above 40, iirc), they know that skew won’t last as there’s been a revitalization.
Interestingly, I think design is as important as content. Both my hometown paper and my current local paper have the crappiest design I’ve ever seen. It’s cluttered, not laid out like a paper at all. There are a gazillion ads everywhere and for my current local paper at least, the RSS feed doesn’t work 90% of the time.
I did some writing for free a couple of years ago. Interesting (I got to interview Anne Burrell, which was fun), but not really going to catapult me to fame. Of course, when you think about it, most (all?) academic writing is basically for free–or at best, an indirect payment.
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“Whatever the reason, if The Atlantic is taking work without paying for it, the people working for the institution are putting their audience, themselves, and The Atlantic’s reputation on the line for whoever is really paying the bills.”
That’s a very good point. Maybe unpaid content should be marked, just like ads are?
It sounds like there are three kinds of media content now:
1. ads
2. paid content
3. unpaid content
The danger for the publication is of accidentally publishing #1 while believing itself to be publishing #3. To much of that, and you’ll find yourself publishing a wordier version of the Pennysaver.
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“He didn’t know anything about the discussion on the Internet about journalism, because he NEVER reads Twitter or blogs. He doesn’t even have a Facebook account.”
I kind of worry about him. I don’t do Facebook (I hate how it seems to spark so many unnecessary arguments and so much ill-will in real life), but I’m not a local journalist. It seems to me that you could learn a lot from looking at local dignitaries’ Facebook presence and seeing who goes to whose soirees.
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“The danger for the publication is of accidentally publishing #1 while believing itself to be publishing #3. To much of that, and you’ll find yourself publishing a wordier version of the Pennysaver. ”
And there are a number of “newsey” sources that do #1 with #3 (i.e. the “business journals” that re-publish press releases, now available on the web, and that don’t, obviously, look like they are just press releases.) I’ve seen that happen on local news, as well,
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There’s an interesting trajectory where a daily currant (spoof site) article was picked up by a Austrian web site, which in turn was picked up by a financial news aggregator, which in turn was picked up by the Boston.com site, and ended up linked at the Boston Globe. And then, the editor of the Globe didn’t know how to make the link go away.
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