The price of good journalism
Earlier this week, American journalists put together and circulated a spreadsheet of media salaries in Google Sheets. This kind of thing is becoming a lot more common: see previous Google Sheets on general salaries from Ask A Manager and this one on software salaries.
Looking through the list, I was struck by just how little journalists make, compared to the salaries at high tech companies. For example, an editor-in-chief in Canada makes $63k. A staff editor for the New York Times with 20 years of experinece, living in New York City, makes $120k. In today’s New York, that’s barely livable.
Many general reporters are making around $60-$70k living in major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where it’s almost impossible to make less than $90k as an individual and not have roommates. This fixation on locality, even for non-beat journalists, is ironic given that most journalism is now based on reporting things that happen online. (I have many more thoughts on this after reading this fantastic book by journalist Christopher Ingraham recently, about how he moved his family from the DC suburbs, to rural Minnesota, and I’m hoping to get to this book in a separate edition.)
Hacker News got wind of this article, and of course, commented that they could build a newsroom in a day.
Sure, but journalism is a low ROI product, and some say that the news is just a loss leader for the media and the political establishment to have influence. The vast majority of news stories are read for a few hours and are forgotten about. Most news is junk that most people(rightfully) don't want to pay very much for, even when it's not junk.
Both the state of journalism as well as what journalists get paid is pretty sad, but they might as well be shouting at the clouds.
Here's how I think of it: I have no doubt that anyone could take a room full of software engineers and start a functioning news organization the next day. I doubt that anyone could take a room full of journalists and have them writing production ready code in under a month. (I worked with journalists for over 3 years and only knew of 1 who knew how to code)
I had to laugh. Because it’s so wrong.
In theory, it’s correct: You can’t take someone that knows how to write zero code and have them writing code in a day. Learning to code is hard and takes upwards of a year before you become really good at it.
But you also can’t learn to be a good journalist in the course of a day. I know this for two reasons.
First, I was a writer for my high school newspaper. There, I learned numerous things over the course of three years: You need to get out of the newsroom and talk to people to find things out. You need to call people and be transferred to different departments. People might not want to give you quotes. The hardest part is that you might not use any of those quotes for your story - they might all be purely background. Second, you need to draw people in with your lead. Third, you need to cut down on the words because no one cares about your writing for the most part. The hardest lesson I had was when our editor-in-chief did the layout of the newspaper on our Macs and my piece didn’t fit, so she just ended up slashing the last three paragraphs. All that work, just to be cut for a week.
And second, writing this newsletter has been a tremendous exercise in journalism. I’m not calling people for quotes or running big exposes on Facebook every week, like Judd Legum is, for example. It’s still me mostly Googling stuff to find interesting ideas. So it’s not purely a journalistic undertaking.
But Normcore is not purely a blog, either. For each article I put out, since I now have a sizeable audience, I have to make sure I’m writing accurate statements, particularly in cases where the article might, through the ethers of the internet, reach a certain company or a person (as was the case for my Kafka piece.) And that means I’m asymptotically approaching something that requires journalistic best practices.
Probably the hardest piece I’ve written so far was the one on Siraj Raval. It was an important piece to write, but I also realized that he might read it. So something more than a mocking high-level write-up was needed. I ended up rewriting that post 3 times.
I try to be skeptical but honest, critical, but even-keeled. In today’s knee-jerk-reaction world particularly online, it’s really, really, really hard to not turn out something that comes across as sarcastic and like you’re dunking on someone, just for likes. It’s also hard not to offer hot takes, and to really think about the issue from different angles. And, I also try to be funny, because reading boring stuff is a slog.
Probably most importantly, I have to make sure to write on deadline, since I have a standing commitment to write this newsletter twice a week. So I’m always thinking of ideas and always starting a draft of something. I’ve joked that I had two babies this summer, my son and Normcore, and both need to be fed to grow healthy and flourish.
There’s no way you could learn all of this in a day. I’ve been writing online for ten years and have only recently gotten the hang of it.
And, for me, this is just a passion project (for now), and an independent one, at that, so I have the luxury of writing mostly whatever I want. But all of these are extremely high expectations for journalists that make $65k with a $2.5k rent on an apartment somewhere in the Financial District with two other roommates, very little health insurance, and are under pressure to turn out pieces that perform well according to some arcane set of OKRs that an editor turns out.
So not only do you need time to become a journalist, these days, you also have to be one under extreme economic duress, in a market where fast clicks and hot takes are more important than empathy, consideration, picking up the phone and connecting to people.
Good luck turning all of that out in a day.
Art: The Smolensk Newspaper, Chagall, 1917
What I’m reading lately:
Please read the piece I wrote for Stack Overflow on Python 3! I’m so excited about it!
So excited to be writing for the Stack Overflow blog today about the ongoing Python migration (or not). Have you/your company migrated yet? Python 2 EOL is mere less than 2 months away. 🐍IBon voyage Python 2. All hail Python 3. But not for everyone. Here's why. https://t.co/NvbstKkD1u
Stack Overflow @StackOverflowThe online ad bubble is slowly being unravelled
This was a very, very, very cool project! The first Normcore-inspired development, I believe!
"I absolutely love when I find a new author or book that I had not considered or heard of."
This book that I mentioned: If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now
About the Newsletter
This newsletter is about issues in tech that I’m not seeing covered in the media or blogs and want to read about. It goes out once a week to free subscribers, and once more to paid subscribers. If you like this newsletter, forward it to friends!
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I spent $1 billion and all I got was this Rubik’s cube· Die Gedanken sind frei · Neural nets are just people· Le tweet, c’est moi· The curse of being big on the internet· How do you like THAT, Elon Musk?·Do we need tech management books?
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Imgur is bad now · Eric Schmidt and the great revolving door· No photos please · Deep thoughts of Cal Newport
About the Author:
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. Most of my free time is spent wrangling a preschooler and an infant, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.