4 ms·

I feel like the conversation is lacking a journalist point of view so I'm going to pitch in :) I usually don't say anything in this kind of debate (especially o

by Knulp 7y ago

I feel like the conversation is lacking a journalist point of view so I'm going to pitch in :) I usually don't say anything in this kind of debate (especially on Twitter ;) ) because it's pretty useless, but I love reading the community here and it's the first time that a debate disppoints me. I feel like it's one sided and completly lacking the usual counter-argument and debate. Also, bear with me if I make english mistakes - I'm french and it's not my native langage. First I'd like to adress there's very different kinds of journalism, different set of skills associated with it and of course, a company they work for. As a job, working for the New York Times, for a local journal, for a tech magazine or for travel channel is completely different. I don't think people realise how different the job actually is from one media to the other. You can't say 'journalists' the same way you can't say 'engineers' because there's people doing software, people doing tests, people building machines, people advising companies and many other people doing many other things and having no idea how to do some other engineer job because it is... entirely different. We're not interchangeable and we don't all do the same job at all. All medias are also different. Which implies different owners, rules, and bosses. As a journalist, you're like everyone else : you're an employee. You can have ethics, you can have thoughts or a list of rules. At the end of the day, it's a job and if your boss asks you to do something completly stupid, you can either say no, loose that job and possibly die of hunger. Or you roll with it and hope very very hard it will not stay on the internet. (Spoiler alert : it will and you'll be ashamed of it all your life.) You do have rights in some countries; but first, like many rights, not everyone know them; and second, those rights don't necessarily protect you. Maybe the media can't fire you right away or because you refused working, but a few months later, when they're considering reconducting your contract, you'll just get cut. It's just sad math. Not everyone can afford to be a hero.

Knulp 7y ago
Another point is that there's this image that being a good journalist means investigating. Movies or tv shows never mention the actual money you're getting for publishing online. I often see discussion here on how much engineers make. Everytime I read those, I can't believe the numbers. So let's talk money. In France the middle ground for an online paper is getting paid between 40 dollars for a short piece and 120 for a long one. That's usually 8000 characters for long ones, so more or less 800 to 1000 words. If you want to do a good job, it requiries usually two days : you have to research, get people's contacts. Agree on a time for three or four interview which are going to last between 30 minutes and an hour each. Then if you have everything (rarely happens) you have to write. If no one answers or you realize the subject was actually much more complicated than you thought, it might take a week or a month. The nature of the job makes it hard to know how long exactly something is going to take if you want to do it right... But at the end of the day, the amount of money you get paid doesn't change and you might just get paid 100 dollars for two days work, and that's before taxes. I'll talk about my own experience as a freelancer for a year here, and I'm actually one of the very lucky ones because I had work. I calculated that this year, I often got paid 1 or 2 euro the hour. I earned 300 or 400 a month - well, usually it's more 1500 a month, then nothing for two month, then 200, then 600, then nothing again... Often I got paid four months after being published - and sometimes on Paypal. I also worked for a big American media and they pay you the same amount as in France - except at the end you get a check and your bank at home will also cut its own share of it and you'll end up with two times less money. I am absolutely not exagerating. Of course, I stopped being a freelancer because I couldn't make it work. Yes, my job was more interesting and I was travelling and getting to cover more exciting stuff. But it couldn't compensate the stress that came with having literaly no money and my savings going down and down and down and down. So now I have a job that is actually one of the rare ones where I can do a good job in France and get paid ok. I'll still never earn more than 20 to 25K a year after taxes. But I'm lucky. Really. So imagine how it is for mostly everyone else.
- Knulp 7y ago
  So I'd like to take the debate here where I think it should lie: with the companies' management. The problem isn't the journalists - there's good ones, bad ones like everywhere and they can't shoulder all the trust crisis that's out there. The problem is that no one is really checking who posts what online. Medias have had a history of having an article go through 3 to 4 people before getting okayed and being published. I actually hate that you only have one name on an article because it is really not a solo work (or at least it never should be). Often I have read articles I wrote and was unable to recognize them. Or they were cut of a part I though balanced the whole argument I was making. In those cases I feel like it's unfair only my name get written down because I'll get all the criticism. In other cases, we were really two working on an article and the editing work was formidable. But somehow in the end, I'm the only one getting the credit for it, which also feels unfair to my colleagues. All those problems are not easy to solve. They beg many questions : is there just too many people in journalism ? Should companies shrink so they finally get profitable again and the remaining staff can do quality work - at the expense of thousands of people that would get without a job ? Should there only be subscription-based info ? But then does that mean no one without money would get the right to good information ? Should every company sort out a way to be both a newsroom (one that doesn't make much money or even none at all) and develop multiple activities on the side like an ad company, so that they can stay afloat (some have succeeded that way but it's not a valid point for everyone) ? I don't have an answer and mostly every media is trying to figure out their way out of all this. The thing is it's easy to criticize from outside that the managment is shit... but the ships are sinking and when you're sinking, you're not thinking ahead as to which direction you're going to take, or what part of the boat you're going to make better. First you try to figure out how to get all the water out and keep all the people inside alive. It's not an excuse, just the context we have to deal with. Side note : there's also a problem of journalist schools. That's my own opinion, but I actually think they are very bad for the job - because you won't learn more than in a media, and it makes all the journalists come out very similar. Problem is, if you don't do them, you have no network and, at least in France, you actually can't intern in big medias. Twitter is a similar bubble to the bubbles school create. Twitter makes journalists feel like what they see or talk about has a bigger influence than it really has. But that's not a problem that's only with journalists. It's also with the platforms and it's been argued that it's all over the internet.
einpoklum 7y ago
> if your boss asks you to do something completely stupid, you can either say no, lose that job... Or you roll with it You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job. The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Unionization is not an absolute defense. Modern internet-era newsrooms have been unionizing recently and in at least a couple recent cases the response to unionization has been a large-scale gutting of the newsroom in order to replace them with non-union labor. Gizmodo, Gawker Media and VICE's news wings have all unionized recently as far as I know and that has not stopped ownership from making questionable decisions. Of course, labor law violations theoretically are punished by regulators, but that doesn't happen quickly - if at all - and in the meanwhile you have no job.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    It's true that unionization is not a solution to every problem; but what you describe is not the situation the GP post was describing: Pressure on an individual journalist to bend his/her professional integrity. With a union - at least, an independent and non-corrupt union (which is not a trivial condition by the way) - the employer would need to "go nuclear" in order to have his way; and the individual employee would not have to deal with it alone.
    - Knulp 7y ago
      That's true. Problem I think is that with the way organisations work (high turnover with short term contacts) it's hard to get a feel for this. There's also the problem that, once something is online... It's hard to have it disappear, independently of the media's will. I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.

by Knulp 7y ago

Knulp 7y ago

Another point is that there's this image that being a good journalist means investigating. Movies or tv shows never mention the actual money you're getting for publishing online. I often see discussion here on how much engineers make. Everytime I read those, I can't believe the numbers. So let's talk money. In France the middle ground for an online paper is getting paid between 40 dollars for a short piece and 120 for a long one. That's usually 8000 characters for long ones, so more or less 800 to 1000 words. If you want to do a good job, it requiries usually two days : you have to research, get people's contacts. Agree on a time for three or four interview which are going to last between 30 minutes and an hour each. Then if you have everything (rarely happens) you have to write. If no one answers or you realize the subject was actually much more complicated than you thought, it might take a week or a month. The nature of the job makes it hard to know how long exactly something is going to take if you want to do it right... But at the end of the day, the amount of money you get paid doesn't change and you might just get paid 100 dollars for two days work, and that's before taxes. I'll talk about my own experience as a freelancer for a year here, and I'm actually one of the very lucky ones because I had work. I calculated that this year, I often got paid 1 or 2 euro the hour. I earned 300 or 400 a month - well, usually it's more 1500 a month, then nothing for two month, then 200, then 600, then nothing again... Often I got paid four months after being published - and sometimes on Paypal. I also worked for a big American media and they pay you the same amount as in France - except at the end you get a check and your bank at home will also cut its own share of it and you'll end up with two times less money. I am absolutely not exagerating. Of course, I stopped being a freelancer because I couldn't make it work. Yes, my job was more interesting and I was travelling and getting to cover more exciting stuff. But it couldn't compensate the stress that came with having literaly no money and my savings going down and down and down and down. So now I have a job that is actually one of the rare ones where I can do a good job in France and get paid ok. I'll still never earn more than 20 to 25K a year after taxes. But I'm lucky. Really. So imagine how it is for mostly everyone else.

Knulp 7y ago
So I'd like to take the debate here where I think it should lie: with the companies' management. The problem isn't the journalists - there's good ones, bad ones like everywhere and they can't shoulder all the trust crisis that's out there. The problem is that no one is really checking who posts what online. Medias have had a history of having an article go through 3 to 4 people before getting okayed and being published. I actually hate that you only have one name on an article because it is really not a solo work (or at least it never should be). Often I have read articles I wrote and was unable to recognize them. Or they were cut of a part I though balanced the whole argument I was making. In those cases I feel like it's unfair only my name get written down because I'll get all the criticism. In other cases, we were really two working on an article and the editing work was formidable. But somehow in the end, I'm the only one getting the credit for it, which also feels unfair to my colleagues. All those problems are not easy to solve. They beg many questions : is there just too many people in journalism ? Should companies shrink so they finally get profitable again and the remaining staff can do quality work - at the expense of thousands of people that would get without a job ? Should there only be subscription-based info ? But then does that mean no one without money would get the right to good information ? Should every company sort out a way to be both a newsroom (one that doesn't make much money or even none at all) and develop multiple activities on the side like an ad company, so that they can stay afloat (some have succeeded that way but it's not a valid point for everyone) ? I don't have an answer and mostly every media is trying to figure out their way out of all this. The thing is it's easy to criticize from outside that the managment is shit... but the ships are sinking and when you're sinking, you're not thinking ahead as to which direction you're going to take, or what part of the boat you're going to make better. First you try to figure out how to get all the water out and keep all the people inside alive. It's not an excuse, just the context we have to deal with. Side note : there's also a problem of journalist schools. That's my own opinion, but I actually think they are very bad for the job - because you won't learn more than in a media, and it makes all the journalists come out very similar. Problem is, if you don't do them, you have no network and, at least in France, you actually can't intern in big medias. Twitter is a similar bubble to the bubbles school create. Twitter makes journalists feel like what they see or talk about has a bigger influence than it really has. But that's not a problem that's only with journalists. It's also with the platforms and it's been argued that it's all over the internet.

einpoklum 7y ago

> if your boss asks you to do something completely stupid, you can either say no, lose that job... Or you roll with it You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job. The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.

kevingadd 7y ago
Unionization is not an absolute defense. Modern internet-era newsrooms have been unionizing recently and in at least a couple recent cases the response to unionization has been a large-scale gutting of the newsroom in order to replace them with non-union labor. Gizmodo, Gawker Media and VICE's news wings have all unionized recently as far as I know and that has not stopped ownership from making questionable decisions. Of course, labor law violations theoretically are punished by regulators, but that doesn't happen quickly - if at all - and in the meanwhile you have no job.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  It's true that unionization is not a solution to every problem; but what you describe is not the situation the GP post was describing: Pressure on an individual journalist to bend his/her professional integrity. With a union - at least, an independent and non-corrupt union (which is not a trivial condition by the way) - the employer would need to "go nuclear" in order to have his way; and the individual employee would not have to deal with it alone.
  - Knulp 7y ago
    That's true. Problem I think is that with the way organisations work (high turnover with short term contacts) it's hard to get a feel for this. There's also the problem that, once something is online... It's hard to have it disappear, independently of the media's will. I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.