The girl down the street is clearly a very bright young woman. Her father is a college professor, her mother is a regular where I pour coffee and chat, and she is now a freshman at a liberal liberal arts university where there are several semi-authorized student newspapers. She was, as it turns out, editor of her high school newspaper (as was I, a million miles and years ago). Anyway, we hired her to babysit over the Christmas break, and she allowed our five-year-old daughter to tie her up and sacrifice her to the Roman gods; later, she and I chanced to talk about journalism as it slowly dawned upon her that I had not so long ago had a career.
I started to say what I have said, in various forms, to other younger writers over the last twenty or thirty years. And then...
...and then I remembered that I was mostly out of work. That most of the writers and editors and designers and photographers and illustrators I knew were out of work, or perilously close to it. One editor told me 20,000 of my professional community were out of work, and that number is growing.
(Journalism is not unique; it's just part of the great unraveling.)
Her question, initially, was social: She had walked into a meeting of the college newspaper staff and been intimidated. What my wife sometimes called "bumpkin angst," I think, for my neighbor's daughter is a freshman and comes from a small Appalachian town. I remembered my first meeting at the Daily, back, when? 1979? And they were an intimidating bunch, quite by design, by way of over-compensation. And so I told her, though I've not seen her writing, that she was as good as they were and not to let them bully her.
And along about there I realized everything else I knew or had known was irrelevant. Normally I have a Jimmy Cliff speach: You can get it/if you really want it. And if you don't want it enough to get it, you don't need it. (The Rolling Stones close, I suppose.)
Now, she has some advantages: She's young, she's attractive, she texts and twitters and all that unexplainable stuff. And she's bright, one of those kids you can tell quickly by looking in the eyes and listening to the words she chooses.
This is discursive. If you've read my posts before (both of you), you're used to that.
I was cleaning off my desk. Well, not exactly, but thinking about it. I found something I'd torn out of the Atlantic in December of 2006 (a primitive form of bookmarking, right?) titled "Get Me Rewrite" by Michael Hirschhorn, subtitled "A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age." He makes some astute guesses about the future of journalism, but, I think, fails to understand the marketplace. And there's this, bound to raise my bile:
...or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes)...
Nostalgic value? Did you ever EAT a real tomato that hadn't been shipped across the hemisphere? (Sorry, but we're planning our garden, and that has a lot to do with how I'm eating these days.)
His suggestion, anyhow, is this:
Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks.
...
Meanwhile, top reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employees. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper...It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don't need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperativs to financially support their independent efforts.
Two comments. First, the music industry is going through this same process. Artists who have benefited from major label imaging campaigns (millions of dollars) are able to sustain comfortable careers without the benefit of a label apparatus. Thomas Friedman has the benefit of his newspapers' brand, and of their imaging. The next generation -- my neighbor's daughter, say -- has none of those advantages if newspapers and magazines disappear.
Second, where does Mr. Friedman get his health insurance?
Look: Right now the web is a parasite, killing its host. I'd love to argue about the dangers of unmediated newsgathering, but nobody here cares.
The thing is this: Niche markets worked in print. You could sustain a nice little music magazine with 30,000 readers. And we did, for 13 years, supporting five staffers and helping to support dozens of freelancers. That's all gone. Niche websites don't work. The advertising isn't there.
All this citizen journalist stuff is lovely, except that it assumes that all writing is functionally the same, or that the web is a meritocracy, or that people will keep contributing for free because it's fun and they have nothing else to do. Which, in this economy, may be true, but I wouldn't want to build a long-term business model around that notion. The reality, online, is that 30,000 readers aren't nearly enough to attract the advertising one needs to sustain a paid staff. Add a zero to that, maybe two.
So...what did I tell my young neighbor? I vamped, based on something the former head of the First Amendment said during a presentation I once attended. "Look at pornography," I said to her. "Every major media breakthrough has been monetized first by the porn industry."
And then I turned on the TV a few days later to see that the porn industry had gone to D.C. looking for a bailout.
Ah, well. She has three more years.