Item: A young friend of mine is looking for a job in journalism. On his behalf, I reluctantly emailed a friend who works at a big company. He wrote back to say there are actually a lot of opportunities at his company, but they are of a new character, internet-related.
Item: A friend lately pointed me to this website dedicated to the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn. This blogger plainly loves Bushwick and covers it like a glove. Note the words at the top of his page: "Let's cover Bushwick. Now paying writers!"
There are a lot of smart journalists these days talking about the end of the newspaper and the end of reporting. Some of this opinion is purely generational and fearful: they fear they are going to lose their high-paid jobs. It is a completely legitimate fear (let me tell you; my own household is in media freefall), but what these journalists neglect to focus on is that a willing social transition is taking place to new forms of reading/writing, and with the proliferation of these forms, lots of journalists are finding work.
But they are finding work on new terms: shorter pieces, and a lot less money for them. As Michael Hirschorn wrote (in this piece that upset a lot of print journos), the age of public intellectuals sustained in "semi-charmed lives" by big media profits is over.
Part of the sadness here is that people of my generation may not be able to retrain themselves. Some are stuck in the old ways, and old habits of mind and professionalism. And so media shops will be hiring younger people on a preferential basis, because they are not entitled, and are more familiar with computers and cellphones. Yes, that is age-discrimination, which adds to the rancor.
The best response is wisdom that Graydon Carter, now editor of Vanity Fair, gave me years ago when he was the editor of Spy. I was asking for more money–it was when writers' fees were beginning to go up markedly–and he said, with a lot of amusing gesticulation, "You ought to learn from British journalists. They love to write. They go out for lunch and have a pint and come home and smoke a cigarette and bang out a story on a typewriter. They don't put on airs, and they don't expect more than $50! And their pieces are great."
Journalists should love what they do. It's true now more than ever.
I'd add that this industrial transformation is taking place on a democratic basis: readers are freely choosing these new forms of getting information. And more writers than ever are expressing themselves: elite barriers to entry to journalism mean less and less. Eric Alterman and Hirschorn both say that the sober, thorough newsgathering function of the old media is being taken away by the internet. I think this is debatable.
