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duaneodavila · 6 years ago

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The “Existential” Problem of Digital “Journalism”

Dead tree newspapers have been dying for year, but then who touches paper anymore? After all, we now have the internet, and all the news that fits to . . . oh wait. There’s infinite space online, so how can we not have an embarassment of riches in journlism?

There’s a curious thing that happens when some kid gets a job writing for a major soapbox. If some 23-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in humanities stopped you on the street and said, “hey, do you want to spend ten minutes of your life listening to my opinions about issues in the news,” what are the chances you would? And yet, these are the people whose words you read. At Buzzfeed. At Huff Post. On most online media outlets.

Jimmy Olson is no longer the cub reporter, but your thought leader.

These pundits gather tens of thousands of eyeballs. They are heroes on social media. They are given respect by the groundlings, their ideas bronzed for placement on the lintels of serious looking buildings. And in a few years, their names become household words. Imagine wielding such power at, say, 25 years of age? Some of us have shoes older than that.

But their passionate voices are no match for economics, and over the past week, catastrophe struck.

CORNISH: So tell us about the scope of this latest round of layoffs. How significant are they for these companies?

LEE: So the first company to really sort of get into here is BuzzFeed, I think. They announced laying off 15 percent of its workforce – a little over 200 people. That’s pretty big for them. Verizon Media Group, which owns AOL and Huffington Post, they also announced a significant layoff – about 8 percent. But that’s, like, 800 people. So that’s a lot of people there. Gannett took a bunch of cuts as well, but they’ve been cutting for years now. So this is a little less – I don’t want to say less significant, but it’s more par for the course for them.

As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic. A lot of online writers got the unceremonious boot this week, with some more coming over the next week as well. Why them in particular? No doubt there were many reasons, from some failing to gain a following, to some being slackers, to some being better friends with their editors to some being a pain to their boss. And some excellent writers lost their jobs and were reduced to begging for work.

I know some of these people. I’ve read the work of many of them. And I feel badly that they thought they had a niche, a future and were doing great work. Some were. Others overestimated the value of their writing, their thinking or both. Nonetheless, the loss of a job is a huge blow, both to the pocketbook and to self-esteem.

Young people need jobs, even if they mistake the credibility ascribed to them by dint of standing on someone else’s big soapbox for their own importance. It’s brutal to learn that once the soapbox is pulled out from under you, no one cares about your opinions anymore. It hurts to learn is was never really you, but the soapbox upon which you stood.

Why this happened is fairly obvious. Employees need to get paid, even if only at the wages acceptable to 23-year-olds.

CORNISH: Are we looking at a situation where these companies are actually not profitable or just not profitable (laughter) to their shareholders?

LEE: The situation is that some of these companies are not profitable, and they need to become profitable – BuzzFeed, for example. Other companies like Gannett have decent profits at a lot of their papers, but they’re shrinking. They’re just getting smaller. And I think that’s the hard thing to sustain. So in either case, the future of business is a little bit in doubt. And so cutting staff relieves some of the pressure as terrible as that is with people losing their jobs.

At the same time, these “newsrooms” were unionizing, as the kids had gotten past the initial glow of getting a job and were reaching that stage where it occurred to them that they were being paid squat for their work. As brilliant as these baby pundits believed themselves to be, economics is not a required course for gender studies majors. There is no shortage of space on the internets for every voice, but whether there is money to pay writers a living, no less a decent living, remains an issue.

When I started Fault Lines, I hoped there would be enough traction to turn it into a self-sustaining venture, with writers who knew what they were talking about because they did the work. Defense lawyers. Cops. Prosecutors. Investigators, Academics. Judges. These weren’t 23-year-olds, but the real deal, bringing together the myriad perspectives of criminal law. It failed to gain that traction. I wanted nothing more than to pay these writers for their words, but the internet wasn’t going to make that happen. They deserved far better.

There is much wrong, much to be criticized, about what passes for online “journalism” these days, and I’ve never been reluctant to say so. But each of these writers is suffering now, losing the future they thought they had, learning that they aren’t the cat’s meow of cutting edge thought. It’s soul crushing to lose a job when you haven’t done something truly awful to deserve it, and they didn’t deserve it. It happened. Bad stuff just happens sometimes.

I hope they land on their feet. I hope they take away from this nightmare that life isn’t fair, that bad things happen to good people and that no one is immune from the viscissitudes of life. I hope they appreciate that the nightmare they’re going through is one that many others go through, including those they called deplorable, and will give the same empathy to others that they want for themselves should they get a new gig on another big soapbox. I wish them the best.

The “Existential” Problem of Digital “Journalism” republished via Simple Justice

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