The health of newspaper/print journalism merits a lively discussion on this site, with an eye to advising or consoling those students who feel it is their true calling but who wonder whether any jobs will be there for them.
I worked at four newspapers, and today I am inspired to start this discussion after reading two articles in this morning’s newspaper (The Star Tribune, Minneapolis), as well as one from Sunday’s. One of today’s articles described the push by a group of local and regional private news organizations to have Congress pass the Save Community Newspaper Act of 2018 which, if passed, would allow “community newspapers” to postpone making millions of dollars in contributions to their pension obligations during the next several years. That above-mentioned article cited that total employment in the newspaper industry has declined to just below 175,000 this year from more than 400,000 in 2008.
The second of today’s articles – a one-paragraph item – noted the Fort Wayne, Ind., News-Sentinel has cut seven of its eight newsroom employees. Keeping its one columnist, the newspaper will maintain its website as well as “a page” within the Journal Gazette. The article states “the cuts made Friday were ‘a business decision, based on the current state of the industry.’”
Sunday’s article was an opinion piece by former Star Tribune reporter Mike Myers, writing about how employers are failing to prevent the average worker’s wages from declining, when accounting for the effect of inflation. Instead, corporate counselors advise companies to increase employee job-satisfaction by making these employees “feel valued.” Myers then cites the following situation he experienced while working as a reporter:
“An editor at a newspaper where I once worked strolled over to a reporter and loudly proclaimed, ‘Quality work this morning!’ To which the writer brashly replied, ‘How about some quality pay?’”
I am semi-retired from 30 years of print journalism, a lot of that with notorious tightwad Gannett.
I would never encourage anyone to enter journalism in this day and age. It has changed, for the worse I believe. But it’s still the same crappy pay and bad hours. It’s never going to be what it was, or what it wanted to be. For every Pulitzer, there are local journalists moonlighting at Wal Mart to make ends meet (true story).
“An editor at a newspaper where I once worked strolled over to a reporter and loudly proclaimed, ‘Quality work this morning!’ To which the writer brashly replied, ‘How about some quality pay?’”
Maybe bigger bucks in salary lie in quality reporting. and then the newspaper needs to acknowledge it.
Just throwing this out there…
I don’t need to read a "reporter’s report " that sounds more like a personal blog post with more opinions than facts. I can give you a very long list of cancelled subscriptions based on that. It’s growing daily.
I can google too. I can get Buzzfeed-type poor commentary for free. It’s everywhere. So can everyone else.
Tell me what you know. Dig deep. If you don’t KNOW facts then tell me. And verify the ones you told me about.
People STILL want FACTS.
Not hearsay. Not some reporter’s opinion. Not what someone “off the street” thought (I have opinions too!)
I think there are still good jobs in publishing generally, for which a journalism degree can be useful training, but I agree that newspapers are an endangered species.
I happily pay big bucks to have two newspapers delivered every day, one local and one national. And read them cover to cover every day. I applaud the people who make journalism their life’s work and deplore the coming end of the print journalism era.
I was a loyal newspaper reader receiving 3 subscriptions until earlier this year. I have dropped two because the content was “old” and the rest was fluff uninspiring op-ed pieces. I get my news online and still read WSJ. I think there will always be room for journalism but it will be online. The biggest “downer” seems to be that much writing has become advocacy based and people tend to read what agrees with their POV where in the print days you got a slightly broader POV with the exception of the editorial page.
The WSJ, unfortunately, has been hoovered up by the Murdoch empire. I was a faithful reader for years. It’s a shame what happened to it.
A big thanks to the few still hanging in there doing investigative journalism. I have been a loyal print subscriber for a lot of years to the local paper and to several magazines, plus the monthly access to the NYT.
My biggest fear is the death of real, hard-news print journalism.
I think that taking the time to read a well-researched and corroborated news story is not replaceable by watching the TV news or even online news. With TV news, the actual story is often subservient to the video or audio available. And don’t get me started on “talking heads” on TV.
Sure, the “news” might seem old if you read it tomorrow morning. But in quality journalism you will be getting the back story, the quotes and responses, and some context. Impossible to do most stories justice in a 60 second stand-up.
Having said all that, it is a shame that many media outlets appear to have a bias or slant. And very few are practicing the sort of journalism you see if you want All The President’s Men or The Post. My father’s career was very similar to those journalists and I have huge respect for the things good journalists did (and do) to get the story correct and to do a service to the community.
Print newspaper subscriptions are lower than they were in 1940. Newspaper journalism as a career is dying, except for the lucky few who get jobs at national newspapers. Obviously, people who major in journalism may find careers not directly related to their major.
The industry has changed substantially at the hands of the internet, with the biggest drivers being lost revenue from classified ads and free news everywhere. In order to provide any value above the free stuff the papers had to produce more in-depth material while losing a lot of their income. (Cue ominous music…)
But there are still a bunch of jobs out there. Not nearly as many, and not in the same places, but people are getting paid. Some are in TV/cable, but most are moving to internet publications. Many of those are terrible, some are outstanding, but most need an angle to draw readers so they aren’t able to be bastions of journalistic neutrality. Read Politico and 538 and many other sites and you see some good work still being done. It won’t replace the quarter million jobs lost in the past ten years, and TMZ will never be a newsroom in any sense of the traditional word (you may even want to take a shower after work each day) but you can pay the rent. It’s just a smaller industry.
About ten years ago my old roommate quit his life-long dream career in the newsroom after a couple of wonderful decades. He was stressed out by Gannett’s management, the constant threat of unemployment and a bit of mid-life crisis, so he’s a nurse now. There are some days of nostalgia, but mostly it’s been a good move for him. I think his idea of Newspapers was so clear to him that moving to a model where he worked from his home and shared an online collaboration wasn’t going to feel complete. He still writes the odd piece for the MN Post (an online paper) but it’s a different scratch for a different itch (ie writing but not a career).
I pay for WaPo because I can’t afford a real paper more than a couple days a week. (Hello tuition payments!) I miss the feel and smell of newsprint on Sunday morning, and I am sad that so many people have lost their livelihoods in such a short period, but time is going to march on. It’s how things seem to work.
I miss the Sunday, LA Times. But the subscription became more expensive and wasn’t worth it. It was yesterday’s news. The travel section, which I used to enjoy, dwindled down to nothing. And there was too much slanted ‘journalism’ both in the point of view of the stories and in the types of stories the Times covered.
Yes, and all of those require a certain personality and look for which the vast majority of j/comm majors have no shot.
Indeed; and the lack of neutrality becomes a death spiral to journalism, IMO. If the internet publications need an ‘angle’ to draw readers, they mostly end up drawing their angle supporters and preaching the choir as opposed to attempting to report stuff unbiasedly. Sure, even if some of the articles are truly unbiased, they still have appearance of being tainted by residing on a site which itself has an angle.
Well I am pretty much old school. I grew up reading the Sunday NYTIMES as a kid and I remember every weekend looking for the Ninas in the Hirschfeld drawings. In the dark ages when I went to college, only one store in the college town carried the Sunday times and I would faithfully walk over and pick it up. Introduced DH to looking for the Ninas. DH and I just switched to NYTIMES Friday-Sunday with digital edition included. We both really miss reading the actual newspaper and will likely go back to 7 day a week home delivery of the print with checking the morning/evening daily briefing on my phone. I am one of those people who essentially reads the entire paper, all the news, all the opinion pieces, the letters the editor, sports news, business, obits so it takes me awhile to get through the Sunday paper and truthfully I do sometimes fall behind during the week however online only during the week makes me feel like I am missing something because I haven’t clicked on it. DH being retired enjoys reading the paper while eating breakfast and sitting in front of your computer is not quite the same experience. I also get daily briefings online from CNN and MSNBC and I read lots of articles from lots of other papers, magazines and sites from an app that came with my phone that is sort of a news round-up. We haven’t gotten the local paper in years, sometimes read it online for free.
We used to rent a condo every summer in NH and DH always enjoyed walking over to get the Boston Globe. Still enjoy that. He especially enjoys their sports. Whenever we visit our relatives who live outside of Providence we will always pick up the Sunday Globe which they never read, same when we visit relatives in Florida… so easy to get the actual NYTIMES, even if we can read it online.
I just spent a week at various places around Lake Superior with my husband and brother. It took some searching but my brother was able to find The New York times every morning of our trip. (He doesn’t consider reading it online equivalent to reading it in print.). The only place we couldn’t find it was Duluth. I’m sure it’s sold somewhere in Duluth but we couldn’t find it.
That’s my father’s legacy; he taught us to value print journalism.
Back in the old days, newspapers were written with a point of view and you subscribed to the paper that best matched your way of thinking. Most cities had a number of daily papers to choose from. When the market for daily newspapers began to contract, leaving just one newspaper in a community that paper usually had to become more balanced and confine opinion to the opinion pages.
When people write letters to the editor of my local paper accusing it of being too liberal, as they do with some regularity, I think well, why don’t you read the conservative paper. Oh wait, that doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m going to disagree with you @Wellspring. There are conservative newspapers out there still. Nationally the Wall Street Journal but locally the Grand Rapids Press IMO are pretty darn conservative. I’m sure there are others.
I’m very sad about the death of local journalism and what local newspapers have become. So many very good writers no longer are making a living writing for a newspaper.
Did anyone happen to see PBS’s Frontline this week. It is called “Our man in Tehran”? It’s about the New York Times correspondent Thomas Erdbrink look into life in Iran. I found it an utterly fascinating look into everyday Iranians. Sorry to go off topic but I love Frontline and the issues they cover.