Jeff Jarvis, Please Return to Reality
I’m usually not one to call out individuals, even if I find their views grating. In my opinion, calling people out on the Internet is just asking for a pissing contest. In this case, however, I’m moved to do so by sheer astonishment at what Jeff Jarvis wrote yesterday about Robert Picard’s column claiming that journalists deserve low pay:
When I decided to go into the news business, we took a vow of poverty, or at least acknowledged that we’d never be rich. I chose not to go to law school and instead transferred to j-school and did so in the full awareness that I’d never be well-paid.
Wrong. I ended up being very well-paid because I worked in news in the last gasp of its century-longer monopoly bubble, which ironically came to a climax at the same time as the short-lived tech bubble. Before 2001, metro newspapers still made tens of millions of dollars in each of the classifieds categories, plus retail, plus circulation revenue. Magazines were still blockbuster businesses worth risking tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. TV will still a star medium where so-called talent was worth big money.
Journalists ended up with a severely inflated view of their own value. It was a bubble that has now burst. That is why they are barking so loudly against the wind of change. Change isn’t just taking away jobs, it’s taking away great jobs: visible, self-important, well-paying, once-secure. Damnit, it’s ruining a good thing.
Umm … ok, Jeff. Ask around and see if anyone familiar with the industry actually thinks the words “journalists” and “well paid” ever exist in the same sentence (unless it’s with “are not” tucked in between them). Hey, I’m sure there are some editors and management types somewhere pulling in big bucks, but for the overwhelming majority of journalists, especially those working in newspapers, a big pay check (or in some cases, just one that you can actually live on) is a pipe dream. The fact that newspapers were cashcows obviously didn’t translate into high salaries for journalists.
Now, for a more realistic view of how “well” journalists are paid, see this post by Mindy McAdams about what journalists make. Make sure you read the comments for some horror stories. And if you want more first-person views about journalists’ salaries, check out this thread on sportsjournalists.com. Or this.
Hey, journalists have many flaws and are many things, but being overpaid is not one of them for most. If Jarvis wants to make that ludicrous claim, then please back it up with some facts and numbers. Of course, all facts and numbers relating to journalist salaries would indicate that they are, for the most part, anything but well paid. Whatever the reason for some (or many) journalists’ inflated sense of the value of their work, money wasn’t it.
As for Picard’s argument that journalists deserve low pay because they don’t possess unique skills or knowledge and their products don’t offer unique value, my response to that is that while I see some logic to that argument to a degree, unique skills or unique value aren’t a direct corollary to pay. What’s unique about the ability to do your taxes? Who can’t follow the step-by-step directions on a tax form? Yet how much do tax accountants get paid to do elementary school-level math? What’s so special about standing up in front of a classroom and boring the hell out of a bunch of students that make a professor deserve a high salary? Oh, what’s that? There are more to what tax accountants and professors do than that oversimplified description I gave? Well, the same is true for what journalists do.
- Also, here’s a much more eloquent rebuttal of Picard’s column.
I do believe that journalists need to create content that provide more value than just what, where, who, and when for their customers. I think they need to do so because it furthers their mission of serving the readers. However, I am skeptical as to whether doing so would lead to generally better pay for journalists. Also, while Picard piled on to the crowd clamoring for “more value”, he failed to address the real question: What kind of content qualifies as such. To me, that’s like shouting that the future of space exploration hinges on our being able to travel at the speed of light, yet not giving any ideas on HOW we can travel at the speed of light. Again, broad declarations are easy; it’s the nitty-gritty details that are hard. Let’s have more thinking about the latter and less of the former, please.
I shouldn't have put it in terms of "well" or "poorly" paid. My point is that the market value for journalism, for a journalist's work, likely won't be – or at least won't start – at the level where it was because journalists used to work for monopolistic money machines and now they will vie for advertising support in very competitive markets. As I said in my addendum, I hope journalists make bucketloads – and some have started (start with TechCrunch or Paidcontent). But the standard of the recent past – I did know metro journalists making six figures – is unlikely to be upheld in the new market. The discussion has been about upholding current standards. I harken back to a time when journalists were paid a lot less.
Thanks for stopping by and adding clarification, Jeff. If we are talking about the monetary value of journalism rather than the salaries of journalists, then yes, I agree that the market value for journalism is plummeting due to competition and the flooded marketplace of information. However, I don't think that the previous market value for journalism was "inflated". I think it was right for the time and circumstances, and I see the decreasing value now as the marketplace changing, not self-correcting. I see it as akin to paying $2,000 for a PC back in 1990 versus well under $1,000 now. Distributing information, like making computers, became much easier, thus increasing competition in the marketplace. Not every competitor in that marketplace puts out a good product, but the sheer number of competitors and the increasing ease of creating the product (be it computers or information) are enough to drive down the value of everyone's product.
As for the journalists making six figures, I know they exist, but they are also much more the exception than the norm when placed in context of the entire journalism workforce, so I don't believe they should be used as the current standard when discussing how much journalists deserve to be paid. They may not deserve six figures, but what about the $30,000 median salary? There's a lot of room between a six-figure salary and what the typical journalist is making.