22 ms·

The dangers of high status, low wage jobs

424 points by jger15 5y ago

iratewizard 5y ago
> And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class Did the author learn nothing from the recent Whoopi Goldberg incident? They don't want to be identified as white anymore, because they don't want lose status or oppression points.
kache_ 5y ago
Interesting article. A new manifestation of the priestly class that Nietzsche went on about in the Genealogy of Morality?
efields 5y ago
This reads like someone who just got dumped by a journalist living in Brooklyn.
asjldkfin 5y ago
Although I agree with the general sentiment of this article- journalists gravitates towards their career not for the job itself. I think he's making a pure speculation on the "journalists have rich parents" point. I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low". Of course, when the barrier to entry is low- and most candidates are indistinguishable- you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization.
- pmorici 5y ago
  There was a thread on Twitter a while ago pointing out a slew of journalists who frequently wrote articles attacking tech companies and specifically how each of them came from wealthy families. This idea that journalists are by and large people from well to do backgrounds is an idea that has been floating around for a couple years now. Edit: Here is a tweet in that vein Balaji in particular had a lot of tweets on the journalists are often from wealth idea. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    I love it when "critical" of tech companies is transformed into "attacking". The tech industry is now the biggest industry in the world, ranking billions in profits every year, having the power to influence elections, human rights violation, etc. Of course they should be criticized and not get a free pass. Too many years they were only reported as "startups" doing "good".
    - pmorici 5y ago
      People were specifically upset with unfair negative articles it wasn’t about factual criticism. The New York Times doxing a popular pseudo anonymous blogger for example Slat Star Codex, there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations just a lot of stuff that was more gossip and hit pieces injected with the journalist’s opinion and not news. Also articles dragging tech for not being “diverse” when journalism has a much bigger lack of diversity problem. https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diverse-than-tech/ https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diver...
      - sgift 5y ago
        > there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations You mean articles stating correctly that donations are not a sustainable way of financing and tech billionaires should instead pay higher taxes? Cause that's the articles I remember and that's not an unfair article. Just one you and others may not agree with.
        pmorici 5y ago
        Then why not write an article advocating a higher taxes policy? Taxing doesn’t magically make money multiply in fact a donation managed properly can endow a charitable organization indefinitely that is never the case with government taxation since taxes are always spent and never invested. Your argument makes no sense.
        5y ago
- iso1210 5y ago
  Here's a few from the UK, mainly on the Tech Side https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb2022/58 https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb... "Media and Journalism are essentially hobbies for wealthy, young people"
- dsign 5y ago
  > I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low". I have read enough bad documentation to know there is a hot market for documentation writers. Now, if only english-adjacent degree holders knew about ... well, the documented stuff.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    A lot of journalists and would-be journalists end up doing corporate stuff like tech writing, content marketing, PR, etc.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low" Y'know, maybe journalists should learn to code. Tim Apple said that learning to code is important.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  The barrier is extremely low; now anyone with a wordpress can call themself a “journalist” and there isn’t anything anyone can do to stop them. They really don’t even need the English degree although sometimes it can be evident when they do not.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization. This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry). Also "you hire people that don't make you uncomfortable." I strongly suspect that this also happens with software development. "Cultural outsiders" (like me), have a very hard time getting in the door. I am quite sure that one reason that many older folks don't get hired, is because CEO <= 30, and doesn't want people around, that make them even slightly uncomfortable. Since they're the boss; what they want, they get. In "classic" corporations, CEOs are generally in their 50s, or older, and don't feel particularly challenged by older folks. They have to hire younger folks; even if it makes them uncomfortable. I've learned the value of a "heterodyne" workplace. There is definitely friction, caused by clashing cultures, but the product is often wonderful.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry). I am somewhat familiar being on the board of a student newspaper. And it's extremely true in journalism. The students who went on to being journalists (or editors etc.) all did it through connections. You probably don't get a job on something like the editorial page of the WSJ by sending your resume around.
evancoop 5y ago
Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is little demand for published research in journals. As a result, journals demand payment from the writers themselves. While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly homogeneous views.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Paying for journals to publish your papers is a thing academia did to itself. Publish or perish, demanding papers in a few cherry-picked journals to continue your career, and basically funneling grant money into journals hands is something that can only be changed from within academia.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    Somewhat comparable to F/OSS, except without the grants.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      How is that similar to foss?
    - moffkalast 5y ago
      Ah yes just like every open source project must pay a grand to github to host their code. /s What are you even talking about?
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I don't have to pay anything to publish code I wrote. Peer review only happens in Linux distributions.
  - dmix 5y ago
    A lot of industries make sense in the context of their time, I'm sure having a few papers with esteem and influence as primary status indicators made a lot sense back in the day. There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the world. Just like how lawyers still use fax machines. It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out in those organizations. Which also relates back to the articles point about cultural insularity.
h2odragon 5y ago
Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc. The filtered bubble of their society becomes the pole star of their existence, and the rest of the world gets devalued. Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there would be a bar where the journalists hung out. Listening to the conversations there would tell you what the story was going to be, as well as how it differed from the facts. The audience that mattered was the rest of the media clique; the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I still remember the gamergate... The secret discussions and the amazing width of pushing the same narrative by publishing same story on multiple platforms... Still probably going on in many cliques...
- curiousllama 5y ago
  Can often see the same thing on Twitter now - it’s cool to see in real time
  - hguant 5y ago
    I went to high school with a guy who is big in the self described Left-wing journalist Twitter. I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period of about a month. What was interesting was that in his original article, the concepts he presented were presented as radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just intellectual folly. The conversation about these ideas had already happened on Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.
    - codechad 5y ago
      It is interesting to see the overton window slide in real time.
drnonsense42 5y ago
At the very start of the article, I was deathly afraid the author would conclude these people should be paid more. Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own; they’re just floating along with the cultural tide and trying to fit into the bubble. If they had their own money, they would definitely shut up more-whether or not they contribute anything to society and deserve more is a separate question.
- iqanq 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - drnonsense42 5y ago
    In this context, people born in the US who circle Caucasian when filling out their college applications honestly, and this Brooklyn white journo caste is typically middleclass+.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  > Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own and are just trying to fit into the bubble. Arguably neither do most of the Christians
  - drnonsense42 5y ago
    I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual. A Christian will hold a firm set of values for their entire life, whether or not they actually practice those values (not a Christian-specific problem). The average Brooklyn liberal will give Lindsey Graham or Biden a run for their money on flip flopping as the breeze changes.
    - kuhewa 5y ago
      The only value they necessarily hold is that faith alone yields salvation, i.e. fuck up all you want if you ask for forgiveness. maybe you can include some obvious ones like 'dont murder'.
known 5y ago
[dead]
insickness 5y ago
Journalists get caught in a local maximum: the more they move toward proclaiming loudly and fervently the most common narrative, the more success they have locally in the graph. But to achieve big success requires big risks outside the local curve exploring uncommon narratives. This may require a short-term loss of income/eyeballs that the professional journalist can't afford.
stdbrouw 5y ago
There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead to overly homogeneous groups with strong and at times bizarre in-crowd behaviors" to the idea that a majority or at least a very large group of writers and journalists are "a hilariously homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing little in the way of insight or information, surviving emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety", well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd. Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of capital. For example, you participate in the labor market, where you convert your education and know-how into liquidity. Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums. What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments". Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the participation that create their core value. They benefited tremendously through network effects, sending these profits mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree) I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by offering deals. We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do, so people react to the incentive and switch! If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.
richk449 5y ago
Is it true that a large amount of the journalists in the US live in Brooklyn? That doesn’t match my understanding, even at the “everyone knows …” level. When I think of the pundits, the Washington DC area comes to mind.
- jelling 5y ago
  The journalists with access to political power are in D.C. The cultural and business journalists are in New York and the entertainment "journalists" are in Hollywood. All speaking in the main, of course. I moved to NYC from Chicago, no cow-town, and there was a massive increase in the number of cultural journalists and writers I meet.
brian_herman 5y ago
I really like my low status high wage job!
csdvrx 5y ago
The only problem I see there is a missing market, or as explained in the article, "2. Status can’t pay the rent". But I disagree with the premise that you need a direct intermediary. Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs. Otherwise, these writers may go to those who'll pay them. Some may decry that, but I think it will incentivize both to behave. If you need fresh examples, I find Rogan tone regarding the whole Spotify thing very telling: he's as nice to them as someone who's received a $100M cheque :) And on the other side, how Spotify handled that despite the various pressures exerted, is also very telling: they're as nice to him as any pro-sports manager would be to a highly paid star player, who in the course of the contract is expected to generate way more revenue for the team that what they pay him (or... they would not pay him that much in the first place!) Both parties benefit tremendously from the deal, which gives a strong incentive for everyone to behave. The author has noticed part of the trend in journalism: the "extreme upper who’s public standing achieved escape velocity, allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly higher incomes". The only reason it's currently limited to the upper tail is due to frictions and transaction costs / legal issues etc. making it easier to pay $100M to 1 person vs $1 to 100M people. However, that's not set in stone. With the financial upheaval that crypto will unleash onto the world, I believe that status WILL end up paying the rent: reddit could certainly spin some coin to pay the people they value. Writers will moonlight under a nom-de-plume, until it starts paying more than their daily job. If it's not reddit, then some other company will.
- maybeOneDay 5y ago
  I'm not certain why crypto is hugely important here. Can reddit not just ask people to link a paypal/some other banal payment provider if they would like to pay content creators?
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    I see two huge reasons: 1. friction and legal issues when it comes to money being send to people 2. lack of a second market for current reddit badges etc. Now if said badges were say NFTs and could be traded for something else easily, I would agree with you.
carlmcqueen 5y ago
If journalism is similar to art, this seems obvious. When we consider the many classical periods of art, we see that the majority of the artists lived in the same location, knew each other, and had the same circle of funders for their work. It is essential to be able to compete with someone on your level.
alexashka 5y ago
Shrugs. Hasn't this always been the case? Some rich kids do drugs, some rich kids tweet. So, what? They are little puppets in a larger game. If you think these rich kids make any of the decisions that give rise to braindead quibbling over who can use which bathroom or what pronoun ought to be used for years on end - you are wrong. These are just distractions. The question to ask is, who is paying for these distraction generators and why? You can't get status from just living in New York and tweeting. You need to be part of an organization, that many people are funding, protecting and enabling. If you ignore it, it makes their entire effort futile. It is easy to do too - just find something that actually interests you instead. Don't fall for their cheap tricks and help your fellow friends/family do the same and it'll magically resolve itself, sooner than you think :)
- achenet 5y ago
  Uh, ad revenues? As far as I can tell, the NYT and Facebook have the same ‘share content, sell ads’ business model.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    The nice thing about one line answers to complex questions is how simple and short they are. The not so nice thing is how wrong they are.
bjourne 5y ago
What is the source for the claim that so many American journalists under 40 live in the area encircled in the map in the tweet? The source for wages in journalism having gone to hell? The source for unions restricting the supply of labor? If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages? I also think the author's characterization job status is wrong. Journalists mostly hang out with journalists so whether journalist is a high-status job or not is irrelevant since they are all journalists. Working for Google has high status in some circles but probably not among Google's own employees. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of all journalists write for the Washington Post or other recognizable papers. Not a lot of status in writing for marketing agencies or obscure trade press magazines.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages? They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy. Unions work best when (among other factors) everyone has a feeling that they are not better than the others and can substitute for each others. Writing fails this in general because writers want to have their own voice. You want everyone to know it was you writing, and a guest writer will have a different voice and different ideas. Note that in corporate writing the above doesn't apply and so unions are more likely to have a place (but corporate writing is mostly by marketing and probably better paid and so the union doesn't really have as much to do and so there is less reason to pay those dues)
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy. I think the bigger hurdle is that the people they'd need to convince, politicians, are by nature of their profession, very well versed in public messaging and "journalist adjacent" skills and deal with journalists on the regular and therefore very likely to say "lolno" to any request for a moat of regulatory capture. Plumbers and electricians would never have been able to get the regulatory capture they have if the people they needed sign off from had been equally well versed in their skills and exposed to dealing with them.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> I’m willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist community. I would not argue that, not among peers. Like any profession I suspect writer's peers may be jealous of one another's page views but are still going to be ultimately judged by the quality of their work. And their peers will likely judge better than most what is thoughtful, thorough, researched writing and what is hackish. > Status skews even less equally than income… > Status can’t pay the rent… > Twenty-two year-olds will often accept status in lieu of wages… I guess I don't see the world through status-colored lenses or know anyone who does so the rest of the article and its points were built on a premise foreign to me. The author also appears to misrepresent unions in my opinion, portraying them more as a "protectionist" mechanism for workers, a way to fend off other workers with lower skills. When corporations held (hold) all the cards a collective of workers was the only way the worker had any bargaining power.
lr4444lr 5y ago
This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here. I thought he was going to focus on roles like non-tenured professorships and post-docs, mid level non-profit jobs, and the clergy.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- ghaff 5y ago
  Oh there's clearly status to being a published author--at least in many circles. And I would say also an NYT or WSJ journalist.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    There is status to being a published author people have heard of or with some acclaim. Not really outside of it. Poets with published chapbooks, or novelists published indie, or even mid-list authors don’t really have much status. Also if you write romance, forget about ever getting respect from anyone, even other authors.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  > This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here. You and I don't think of them as high status. However there is a proportion of people that do pay attention to writers, these maybe TV, films, media, politicians that are all within the "Cathedral". You see this a lot of Twitter. Politicians pay a lot of attention to Twitter and tbh I doubt many normal people ever pay attention to what people see on twitter. Those writing jobs are seen as high status because you can be influencing on "important" things. If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on. Many of these are writers for smaller publications that are safe enough i.e. inside the Overton window to present "balance" or be presented as "experts". Simply being on TV for a few minutes is seen as a big deal (especially to older people 50+).
stereolambda 5y ago
One loose idea that I like is local community (the smaller, the better) hiring a journalist (or even better, a diverse group of journalists) directly. They would cover the local events and politics and maybe give some digest of the national/world level from other sources. Apparently in the US officials like sheriffs and school board members are elected, so maybe it could work in a similar way. This would probably need a bunch of stringent rules to ban collusions with politicians (which has been of course a problem even with commercial journalism).
flerchin 5y ago
I haven't left my house in over a week. The insulation is real.
giantg2 5y ago
Is this really a high status job? Or is it the journalism industry relies on internal status? If it is about general status, then these individuals should be able to leverage that status and connection into better jobs or wages, including outside of that industry.
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  High status to whom? Anyone not an east-coast academic or urban professional? I don't think journalism is widely-respected by the general population. Most local TV news anchors are an embarrassment because they to regurgitate Sinclair's "must airs" and bleeds/leads gore.
schnable 5y ago
The bigger problem occurs when the high perceived status/low wage folks decide they deserve a lot more than they have and foment revolution. Academics and those steeped in academia are more likely to lead this, but then the journalists quickly follow and amplify. Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista. This is a real problem for an entire generation. If those in power don’t wise up and listen they’re inviting “revolution”. I fundamentally don’t understand why the wealthy ruling class is unable to grasp that their long-term welfare is entirely dependent on the welfare of the working middle class. Unemployed and underemployed middle class people are a leading indicator that the system that props up wealth in America is buckling. Somethings gotta give. And yet our leaders ignore it.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I doubt that revolution this time will come from journalist or academic class. It seems they are currently against the working class which is important power behind such event. Just see how positive the messaging about protests by those are...
yazboo 5y ago
This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly? For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what constitutes "heresy": - Accusations of politicians and celebrities - Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house - Election conspiracy theories - A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid - Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations arm of the NFL, to take one example. I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no insight or information on the topic.
AlexB138 5y ago
I'm not sure I would consider being a journalist a high status job anymore. Trust in the press, and the prestige that goes along with it, has been in a nose dive for years. It may just be my own bubble, but even the old guard publications are seen as having barely more integrity than the tabloids these days, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status, and that is the mechanism that really matters.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  I think the article's points about 'status' apply more to 'status among your peers', yes.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Well it's no different now than it ever was. If you want free news, you could get that back in the day, there were these terrible free newspapers. If you wanted a real newspaper you had to pay. So can still get somewhat better news on the Wall Street Journal, but for a price.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  > I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status It's how that "high status" is quantified. A journalist might look at their twitter profile, see the blue checkmark, see their 50k followers, and see their inbox filled with the ire of those on the other side, and conclude they are "high status". Problem becomes, what is "high status" for one person is just "wasting time on twitter" to another person.
  - samatman 5y ago
    50k followers is elite tier, I can show you NYT journo bluechecks in the low four figures, who regularly get dragged by anonymous accounts with robot avatars. The difference between being high status and wasting time on twitter gets, extraordinarily, blurry.
- YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
  It has been in a nose dive for "everyday" people. But there is a whole section of society where they are treated as minor celebrities. The number of those people are shrinking (thankfully) but they are sizable enough for some journalists to break out and make bank through their substacks e.g. Bari Weiss is bringing in 800,000K a year via substack. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-weiss-breaks-the-rules-makes-a-mint-11629128876 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-wei... I don't think she is particularly interesting but a lot of people do.
cletus 5y ago
This is what a de facto aristocracy looks like. There are an awful lot of jobs and careers that are purely the domain of the wealthy. Unpaid internships and low wages are only part of the reason. Social connections are probably a far bigger factor (IMHO). Personally I don't care if fashion is dominated by trust fund babies. Politics however? That's a different matter. The dangerous part is how Ayn Rand acolyte billionaires have managed to dupe a good portion of the population to literally fight to the death to prevent Jeff Bezos and like 7 other people pay slightly more taxes and pay for the society that makes their wealth possible is the scary part.
grapescheesee 5y ago
We have nothing to talk about. When you have two options you have an illusion of choice. It is a duopoly in the corporate world. A 'competition' they love and enrich each other with. Just look at the way they have change labels on all sides. 'Far' right, 'Progressive', 'conservative', not worth a word more. It gives the two 'parties' more worth in the purpose their words have than trying to understand the inflections a dog makes as a complete sentence. Yes, ideas have meaning and somethings politicians say actually represent them. Apart from that nearly worthless sentance.. I can't tell you the last time I voted for someone and had a realistic means to contact them about some issue. The last time I contacted my senator was while I paid international call rates and when I asked for a reply on the issue the representative actually laughed at me and said no. We can't do that and this phone call has gone on three minuets longer than the average. I have many other people waiting sir! So what is the point? They literally can't pay staff to reply to my question. What is the senator view on issue X? Worthless elected leaders.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Oh is this yet another article about how writers make dirt these days? And then people wonder why journalism is going to hell while also loudly telling writers to stop whining about their pay and get a real job.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Journalism is going to dirt because it isn't practiced. Or to put it in a more honest way: newspapers don't want to, or cannot afford to, pay for it anymore. Easier to just repeat press releases, or report on the latest twitter nitwitting. Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist. She's paid over a $1k just to access court records in the last year, out of her own pocket. Investigative journalism is expensive.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    I'm a writer and blogger who doesn't make squat. My writing has repeatedly hit the front page of HN but it almost never gets submitted by anyone but me and then I get harangued for "self promoting." I write a great deal more than what I submit here and I submit a lot less than I used to. No, that hasn't caused other people to submit my stuff more often. People here don't want ads on your website. They use ad blockers. They don't want affiliate links. They don't want to leave tips or support your Patreon. They don't want your writing to be content marketing for some other means to pay your bills. They de facto expect writing to be unpaid slave labor and then bitch and moan about how much writing sucks these days. "You get what you pay for." I bitch less than I used to. It seems to only be an excuse to hate on me some more, not effectively move the needle.
Atlas667 5y ago
Ah, yes, private media and factual information. Like water and oil. Also the left is socialism and communism, not liberalism. Get it right, else youre feeding the culture war the politicians want us to keep fighting.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
I think one of the dangers is that it will ultimately lead to discontent, and all of the consequences of that.
bwestergard 5y ago
"If you’re curious why unionization has taken the journalism world by storm the last few years, you don’t have to look to politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there." This is a cute theory, and tickles some people's ideological fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union newsrooms is. In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone. They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group hiring practices common at non-union papers. Source: I'm a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company, not a newspaper. Take a gander at the NewsGuild president's twitter account and you'll see many examples of these campaigns: https://twitter.com/gaufre https://twitter.com/gaufre
- scarface74 5y ago
  Don’t you think you’re just postponing the inevitable? Newspapers historically made most of their money from the classifieds when most people are using Facebook and Craigslist and the like. Then you have the fact that “only old people buy newspapers”
  - mchanson 5y ago
    Everyone is always delaying the inevitable. It is the only thing anyone can do. None of us (or our companies) are getting out of this alive.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      The difference is that millions of people aren’t going to wake up one morning and say they want to start buying physical newspapers.
boyka 5y ago
I was wondering: is being an influencer a low status high paying job? Because that is who journalists are indirectly competing with if we funnel ad-spend through until it reaches media.
- ghaff 5y ago
  "Influencer" in the Instagram sense is probably very power law. I'm sure the vast majority make squat.
bertr4nd 5y ago
As someone with small children, I found myself wondering whether the parents of these Brooklyn writers have actually done their children a service or disservice by funding a financially impossible career. While there is something to be said for being able to follow one’s interests unconstrained by the need for money, it also seems like a hollow, grasping existence to chase status and popularity amongst a clique of likeminded fellows. I suppose one could say something similar for a career spent chasing money, but at least money sometimes vaguely (vaguely!) approximates creating value for other people.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I knew a few folks like this. 20 something, out of college, entry level job in some field that doesn't pay them nearly enough for where they are living. And mom and dad are subsidizing the apartment and lifestyle. When I talked to a few of them about the situation, my burning question was always "what is your plan". I think for many of those folks there was no plan, this was the plan, and your parents helping you out was just normal. Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to happen to all those people when the checks stop coming, when the credit card stops getting paid. Some of my less privileged friends hated that group for their privileged but I honestly just felt bad for them. I don't know when, but under this current system, at some point in the future, you are going to be royally screwed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DharmaPolice 5y ago
    They just join the labour force like everyone else. They'll just be 41 doing the job that other people did at 21. I have a friend whose family weren't wealthy but they tolerated him playing video games and bumming around not doing much else for 15 years after he finished uni. He eventually had to get a job. Sure, he's behind his peers in terms of salary/career advancement now but not by so much where I'm even sure he made a mistake by avoiding work for so long.
  - antisthenes 5y ago
throwhauser 5y ago
The author of the piece seems to be taking the tweet about half the journalists under 40 living in that area pretty literally. I don't know if the author of the tweet intended it that way (and if he was speaking figuratively I wouldn't fault him, it's just a tweet), but I don't quite buy that anyone could really estimate the number of journalists in an area drawn by someone else by eyeballing a map on Twitter. I also don't quite buy that half of the journalists under 40 live in a specific part of New York City, when Washington DC, Los Angeles and (for nerds) San Francisco also have their own share of that population.
dccoolgai 5y ago
This article is extremely on pointe with respect to insight... But missed the mark to the Northeast by a few hundred miles. Replace "New York" with "DC" and "writer/conspirist" with "legislative aid/lobbyist" and you begin to comprehend the true scale of this horror. Reporters are relatively insignificant by comparison.
kosyblysk2 5y ago
`journalists`? hahahaha i actually live in this area, they are mostly corporate sell outs or small time `progressive` emos/flakes the hood ain't cheap either.
woopwoop 5y ago
If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. When you pay journalists in attention instead of cash. When you pay politicians in power instead of cash. I think that in the case of journalism the problem is the hardest. I disagree with the author that the problem can just be solved by people doing local journalism. That pays less in both money and attention. The bottom line is that good journalism is a public good in an extremely strong sense, and is very unlikely to be provided by the market. But obviously the government employing an army of journalists is not any kind of solution either. Whereas we could much more easily implement congestion pricing, or pay politicians more money.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Let people crowdfund good-quality journalism/blogging/policy work. Patreon and GoFundMe are good first starts at the problem, but of course their political bias is highly problematic. If anything, it is all the more urgent to fund high-quality work on the other side of the political spectrum - surely they deserve way better than their current focus on Trumpism and anti-vaxx protests!
- Jiro 5y ago
  >Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a bureaucrat to siphon off a congestion fee to fill his own pockets or his friends' pockets, than it is to fill his pockets with "willingness to sit in traffic".
tharne 5y ago
My God, I wish I had read an article like this when I was 22. I started out in one of these high-status low-wages - HUGE mistake. I intuited some of the things the author is saying here, but it took many wasted years for me to be able to articulate these thoughts in my own mind and change course. Very impressive article that clearly explains the issue.
rch 5y ago
> a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are. Part of the problem in journalism is that someone motivated to share their core ideas should be an author, not a journalist. These are different jobs.
jrochkind1 5y ago
> There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are… The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market. I feel like there's something implied here that says we should be listening to those who have the most money. But in fact those journalists whose status/audience is out of proportion to their wages... are more representative of America than wealthier people. The median income of these journalists/pundits may still very well be higher than the median income of America. If they have a monolithically wrong idea of what is going on in "America" or are monolithically unrepresentative of America (I think that's the complaint?), it's not because they homogenously have wages lower than other "high status" people -- and it will not be solved by increasing the wages of journalists/pundits, and or changing the set of who is listened to, to higher income people. Some of the explanations in the OP are more interesting, like: > Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status. Chomsky and Herman's 1988 _Manufacturing Consent_ is about the pressures journalist have to just take the statements of powerful people (whether in government or industry) and report them as facts (or at best as the story) without doing more investigation. But it was written in a more innocent, pre-social-influencer era, where they never would have conceived that journalists or pundits were actually taking outright payment (which they would have called bribes) for this -- even though I don't think journalists made substantially more then. Rather, they explained and showed how it just made the journalists job so much easier. The journalist didn't have time to do actual investigation, it was so much easier to just go on press conferences and press release. Which is surely even more true today with newsrooms that have been (often literally) decimated since 1988. I think the OP is onto something... but I don't think it actually has much to do with journalists wages, the central thesis of OP. In general, if we were somehow able to magically shift the journalist/pundit class to be higher-income -- and thus even less representative of the country as a whole -- I don't see this leading to improvements in any way.
KoftaBob 5y ago
This idea is basically the background behind the recent "wordcel" term/meme that's been making the rounds. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Meh. A lot of the low-wage journos discussed in the blogpost are less "wordcel" and more like "word salad".
dnautics 5y ago
this is exactly also true for grad students in the physical and biological sciences.
- achenet 5y ago
  Really? I’d have thought they would be out there inventing the world of tomorrow. The entire clothing industry is applied biochemistry. Electronics is applied physics and chemistry. How can there not be a demand for that?
  - dnautics 5y ago
    yep. You get paid higher if: - you go straight out of undergrad to industry - you only do a masters - you "drop out" after a masters - you are sponsored by industry to take a 5-6 year "sabbatical" to get a PhD (which is status-driven, but still tied to "demand", as you say). - you go to industry without doing a postdoc If you are in the PhD program to get into academia, it is very much a status-driven, low-paid pursuit (I got paid 26k/yr for ~80h/wk average 6 years, probably generally was working 100-days-straight) and all of the problems in the article apply (including tendency to groupthink in the service of promotion, attracting status-seeking; stupid 20-something men). As a grad student, the undergrad "dishwasher" lab tech was getting paid more than I was (raw; not dividing by hours). Even for postdocs the misery is true. I gave myself a pay raise and hours reduction when I quit being a postdoc and started driving for lyft full-time ~50h/wk on the road, but carve out about 10-ish for like logging off to do social things with friends because I was "in the city anyways".
j7ake 5y ago
On the flip side, are there dangers of "low status, high-wage" jobs? E.g. certain blue-collar jobs can pay as high as any white-collar jobs. Another example would be programmers can be seen as a low-status, high-wage job. They are paid a lot and trusted to do their job, but the main high-level decisions are still made at higher levels above the programers.
dogleash 5y ago
A complicating factor that I hear from some of the disillusioned journos is that journalism works best when it's blue collar. Seeking status, and the kind of compromises made to maintain status contribute to the fact journalism is in the dumps. It's not my opinion, but it's an interesting one. Maybe the bottom needs to fall out for a few years for journos to get their act together. But signs point to that's exactly what's happening and all we got was a bunch of bitter and vindictive twitter addicts trying to hold onto what little glory they had.
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guelo 5y ago
Garbage article is just opinions based on broad stereotypes and the author's biases.
ouid 5y ago
>2. Status can’t pay the rent >Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status. This should be number 1, and probably the only item on the list. The word influencer should evoke in you a deep dread. Sure there's neo fascist authoritarians, but they aren't really the dangerous ones. It's the sales people. In order to convince a person that they need to buy something, you usually have to get them to believe something that isn't true. That's obviously not a stable system.
Sebguer 5y ago
Is this effectively the same reason so many crypto folks have consolidated in Miami?
dav_Oz 5y ago
> You want to get paid: move to cheap suburb of a medium sized city and start writing heresy, the more inflammatory the better. Accusations of politicians and celebrities. Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house. Election conspiracy theories and a new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid. Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out. Anything that someone is willing to pay you to write because nobody else will write it for free. This escalated quickly. I somehow expected a more nuanced take at the end than this rushed version paradoxically reinforcing a superficial stance critiqued before. Well, the overall point comes across and is an interesting take but fails to be substantial i.e. backed by some more convincing data instead of an initial gossip over the gossip.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
Chris Hedges entered the chat. Every public K-12 teacher entered the chat.
Animats 5y ago
The author has a very narrow focus on NYC pundits, but the problem is more general. Other high-status, low-wage jobs include much of Hollywood. If you've spent any time in LA, you've probably met actress-model-waitress types. Game developers are a somewhat similar group - too many people want to make games, and as a result salaries are low for the level of competence required. What else?
georgeburdell 5y ago
Really interesting piece. Without any particular evidence other than my own perception on the discourse of journalism over the last 20 years or so, I had come to many of the same conclusions as the author (the leftward shift in journalism is due to decreasing wages and so people who accept status or the projection of their own ideology as currency will disproportionately take those jobs). I think teaching (at various levels) has similar forces impinging upon it.
WhompingWindows 5y ago
I thought about teaching as a career. I'm passionate about science and math, I'm great with kids, I'm a decent teacher...but the stress was insanely high for the compensation and benefits. I was doing entry-level assistant work at age 22-25 to see if I liked teaching, getting paid $20k a year with no benefits to mostly deal with the 10% who are crazy bad kids every day...not worth it. One example, I had an 8th grader jump on a desk and scream "I LOVE TACOS" repeatedly. I told him to get down and be quiet, we're trying to learn about robotics. He then called me a racist (because I'm white and I don't love tacos? I do though). I talked to him after class, turns out his family life was in chaos and he needed help at home.
- nolroz 5y ago
  I would absolutely love to be a teacher but the compensation and horror stories about the administration and parents is very disheartening.
letmeinhere 5y ago
> [Unionization] will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there. Unionization leads to higher and considerably less stratified wages, which means that people from less means can afford to enter the profession. So, sure, the people who can afford rent in the cities where they work will have "heightened favoring" (aka better jobs), but they will be a different, more representative group.
crackercrews 5y ago
For a deeper dive on the topic check out the book Bad News. [1] The title references "woke media", which might turn some off. But it's actually written by a liberal, not a conservative out for blood. There is a lot of very interesting history, including a bit about how the Jewish publisher of the NYT insisted that "because Jews were not a race, Hitler's persecution of them was not a Jewish problem but "the problem of mankind"". I bet Whoopi wished she her crisis management team was aware of that quote last week! 1: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/dp/1641772069 https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/...
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424 points by jger15 5y ago

> And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class Did the author learn nothing from the recent Whoopi Goldberg incident? They don't want to be identified as white anymore, because they don't want lose status or oppression points.

kache_ 5y ago

Interesting article. A new manifestation of the priestly class that Nietzsche went on about in the Genealogy of Morality?

efields 5y ago

This reads like someone who just got dumped by a journalist living in Brooklyn.

asjldkfin 5y ago

Although I agree with the general sentiment of this article- journalists gravitates towards their career not for the job itself. I think he's making a pure speculation on the "journalists have rich parents" point. I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low". Of course, when the barrier to entry is low- and most candidates are indistinguishable- you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization.

pmorici 5y ago
There was a thread on Twitter a while ago pointing out a slew of journalists who frequently wrote articles attacking tech companies and specifically how each of them came from wealthy families. This idea that journalists are by and large people from well to do backgrounds is an idea that has been floating around for a couple years now. Edit: Here is a tweet in that vein Balaji in particular had a lot of tweets on the journalists are often from wealth idea. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616
- jeromegv 5y ago
  I love it when "critical" of tech companies is transformed into "attacking". The tech industry is now the biggest industry in the world, ranking billions in profits every year, having the power to influence elections, human rights violation, etc. Of course they should be criticized and not get a free pass. Too many years they were only reported as "startups" doing "good".
  - pmorici 5y ago
    People were specifically upset with unfair negative articles it wasn’t about factual criticism. The New York Times doxing a popular pseudo anonymous blogger for example Slat Star Codex, there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations just a lot of stuff that was more gossip and hit pieces injected with the journalist’s opinion and not news. Also articles dragging tech for not being “diverse” when journalism has a much bigger lack of diversity problem. https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diverse-than-tech/ https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diver...
    - sgift 5y ago
      > there were articles dragging people for making charitable donations You mean articles stating correctly that donations are not a sustainable way of financing and tech billionaires should instead pay higher taxes? Cause that's the articles I remember and that's not an unfair article. Just one you and others may not agree with.
      - pmorici 5y ago
        Then why not write an article advocating a higher taxes policy? Taxing doesn’t magically make money multiply in fact a donation managed properly can endow a charitable organization indefinitely that is never the case with government taxation since taxes are always spent and never invested. Your argument makes no sense.
        5y ago
iso1210 5y ago
Here's a few from the UK, mainly on the Tech Side https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb2022/58 https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb... "Media and Journalism are essentially hobbies for wealthy, young people"
dsign 5y ago
> I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low". I have read enough bad documentation to know there is a hot market for documentation writers. Now, if only english-adjacent degree holders knew about ... well, the documented stuff.
- ghaff 5y ago
  A lot of journalists and would-be journalists end up doing corporate stuff like tech writing, content marketing, PR, etc.
zozbot234 5y ago
> "journalists often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low" Y'know, maybe journalists should learn to code. Tim Apple said that learning to code is important.
suifbwish 5y ago
The barrier is extremely low; now anyone with a wordpress can call themself a “journalist” and there isn’t anything anyone can do to stop them. They really don’t even need the English degree although sometimes it can be evident when they do not.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to homogenization. This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry). Also "you hire people that don't make you uncomfortable." I strongly suspect that this also happens with software development. "Cultural outsiders" (like me), have a very hard time getting in the door. I am quite sure that one reason that many older folks don't get hired, is because CEO <= 30, and doesn't want people around, that make them even slightly uncomfortable. Since they're the boss; what they want, they get. In "classic" corporations, CEOs are generally in their 50s, or older, and don't feel particularly challenged by older folks. They have to hire younger folks; even if it makes them uncomfortable. I've learned the value of a "heterodyne" workplace. There is definitely friction, caused by clashing cultures, but the product is often wonderful.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry). I am somewhat familiar being on the board of a student newspaper. And it's extremely true in journalism. The students who went on to being journalists (or editors etc.) all did it through connections. You probably don't get a job on something like the editorial page of the WSJ by sending your resume around.

evancoop 5y ago

Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is little demand for published research in journals. As a result, journals demand payment from the writers themselves. While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly homogeneous views.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Paying for journals to publish your papers is a thing academia did to itself. Publish or perish, demanding papers in a few cherry-picked journals to continue your career, and basically funneling grant money into journals hands is something that can only be changed from within academia.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Somewhat comparable to F/OSS, except without the grants.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    How is that similar to foss?
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    Ah yes just like every open source project must pay a grand to github to host their code. /s What are you even talking about?
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I don't have to pay anything to publish code I wrote. Peer review only happens in Linux distributions.
- dmix 5y ago
  A lot of industries make sense in the context of their time, I'm sure having a few papers with esteem and influence as primary status indicators made a lot sense back in the day. There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the world. Just like how lawyers still use fax machines. It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out in those organizations. Which also relates back to the articles point about cultural insularity.

h2odragon 5y ago

Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc. The filtered bubble of their society becomes the pole star of their existence, and the rest of the world gets devalued. Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there would be a bar where the journalists hung out. Listening to the conversations there would tell you what the story was going to be, as well as how it differed from the facts. The audience that mattered was the rest of the media clique; the actual paying "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted.

Ekaros 5y ago
I still remember the gamergate... The secret discussions and the amazing width of pushing the same narrative by publishing same story on multiple platforms... Still probably going on in many cliques...
curiousllama 5y ago
Can often see the same thing on Twitter now - it’s cool to see in real time
- hguant 5y ago
  I went to high school with a guy who is big in the self described Left-wing journalist Twitter. I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period of about a month. What was interesting was that in his original article, the concepts he presented were presented as radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just intellectual folly. The conversation about these ideas had already happened on Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.
  - codechad 5y ago
    It is interesting to see the overton window slide in real time.

drnonsense42 5y ago

At the very start of the article, I was deathly afraid the author would conclude these people should be paid more. Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own; they’re just floating along with the cultural tide and trying to fit into the bubble. If they had their own money, they would definitely shut up more-whether or not they contribute anything to society and deserve more is a separate question.

iqanq 5y ago
[flagged]
- drnonsense42 5y ago
  In this context, people born in the US who circle Caucasian when filling out their college applications honestly, and this Brooklyn white journo caste is typically middleclass+.
heavenlyblue 5y ago
> Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don’t actually have any firm values of their own and are just trying to fit into the bubble. Arguably neither do most of the Christians
- drnonsense42 5y ago
  I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual. A Christian will hold a firm set of values for their entire life, whether or not they actually practice those values (not a Christian-specific problem). The average Brooklyn liberal will give Lindsey Graham or Biden a run for their money on flip flopping as the breeze changes.
  - kuhewa 5y ago
    The only value they necessarily hold is that faith alone yields salvation, i.e. fuck up all you want if you ask for forgiveness. maybe you can include some obvious ones like 'dont murder'.

known 5y ago

[dead]

insickness 5y ago

Journalists get caught in a local maximum: the more they move toward proclaiming loudly and fervently the most common narrative, the more success they have locally in the graph. But to achieve big success requires big risks outside the local curve exploring uncommon narratives. This may require a short-term loss of income/eyeballs that the professional journalist can't afford.

stdbrouw 5y ago

There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead to overly homogeneous groups with strong and at times bizarre in-crowd behaviors" to the idea that a majority or at least a very large group of writers and journalists are "a hilariously homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing little in the way of insight or information, surviving emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety", well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.

csdvrx 5y ago
> well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd. Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of capital. For example, you participate in the labor market, where you convert your education and know-how into liquidity. Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums. What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments". Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the participation that create their core value. They benefited tremendously through network effects, sending these profits mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree) I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by offering deals. We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do, so people react to the incentive and switch! If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.

richk449 5y ago

Is it true that a large amount of the journalists in the US live in Brooklyn? That doesn’t match my understanding, even at the “everyone knows …” level. When I think of the pundits, the Washington DC area comes to mind.

jelling 5y ago
The journalists with access to political power are in D.C. The cultural and business journalists are in New York and the entertainment "journalists" are in Hollywood. All speaking in the main, of course. I moved to NYC from Chicago, no cow-town, and there was a massive increase in the number of cultural journalists and writers I meet.

brian_herman 5y ago

I really like my low status high wage job!

csdvrx 5y ago

The only problem I see there is a missing market, or as explained in the article, "2. Status can’t pay the rent". But I disagree with the premise that you need a direct intermediary. Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs. Otherwise, these writers may go to those who'll pay them. Some may decry that, but I think it will incentivize both to behave. If you need fresh examples, I find Rogan tone regarding the whole Spotify thing very telling: he's as nice to them as someone who's received a $100M cheque :) And on the other side, how Spotify handled that despite the various pressures exerted, is also very telling: they're as nice to him as any pro-sports manager would be to a highly paid star player, who in the course of the contract is expected to generate way more revenue for the team that what they pay him (or... they would not pay him that much in the first place!) Both parties benefit tremendously from the deal, which gives a strong incentive for everyone to behave. The author has noticed part of the trend in journalism: the "extreme upper who’s public standing achieved escape velocity, allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly higher incomes". The only reason it's currently limited to the upper tail is due to frictions and transaction costs / legal issues etc. making it easier to pay $100M to 1 person vs $1 to 100M people. However, that's not set in stone. With the financial upheaval that crypto will unleash onto the world, I believe that status WILL end up paying the rent: reddit could certainly spin some coin to pay the people they value. Writers will moonlight under a nom-de-plume, until it starts paying more than their daily job. If it's not reddit, then some other company will.

maybeOneDay 5y ago
I'm not certain why crypto is hugely important here. Can reddit not just ask people to link a paypal/some other banal payment provider if they would like to pay content creators?
- csdvrx 5y ago
  I see two huge reasons: 1. friction and legal issues when it comes to money being send to people 2. lack of a second market for current reddit badges etc. Now if said badges were say NFTs and could be traded for something else easily, I would agree with you.

carlmcqueen 5y ago

If journalism is similar to art, this seems obvious. When we consider the many classical periods of art, we see that the majority of the artists lived in the same location, knew each other, and had the same circle of funders for their work. It is essential to be able to compete with someone on your level.

alexashka 5y ago

Shrugs. Hasn't this always been the case? Some rich kids do drugs, some rich kids tweet. So, what? They are little puppets in a larger game. If you think these rich kids make any of the decisions that give rise to braindead quibbling over who can use which bathroom or what pronoun ought to be used for years on end - you are wrong. These are just distractions. The question to ask is, who is paying for these distraction generators and why? You can't get status from just living in New York and tweeting. You need to be part of an organization, that many people are funding, protecting and enabling. If you ignore it, it makes their entire effort futile. It is easy to do too - just find something that actually interests you instead. Don't fall for their cheap tricks and help your fellow friends/family do the same and it'll magically resolve itself, sooner than you think :)

achenet 5y ago
Uh, ad revenues? As far as I can tell, the NYT and Facebook have the same ‘share content, sell ads’ business model.
- alexashka 5y ago
  The nice thing about one line answers to complex questions is how simple and short they are. The not so nice thing is how wrong they are.

bjourne 5y ago

What is the source for the claim that so many American journalists under 40 live in the area encircled in the map in the tweet? The source for wages in journalism having gone to hell? The source for unions restricting the supply of labor? If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages? I also think the author's characterization job status is wrong. Journalists mostly hang out with journalists so whether journalist is a high-status job or not is irrelevant since they are all journalists. Working for Google has high status in some circles but probably not among Google's own employees. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of all journalists write for the Washington Post or other recognizable papers. Not a lot of status in writing for marketing agencies or obscure trade press magazines.

bluGill 5y ago
> If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages? They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy. Unions work best when (among other factors) everyone has a feeling that they are not better than the others and can substitute for each others. Writing fails this in general because writers want to have their own voice. You want everyone to know it was you writing, and a guest writer will have a different voice and different ideas. Note that in corporate writing the above doesn't apply and so unions are more likely to have a place (but corporate writing is mostly by marketing and probably better paid and so the union doesn't really have as much to do and so there is less reason to pay those dues)
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy. I think the bigger hurdle is that the people they'd need to convince, politicians, are by nature of their profession, very well versed in public messaging and "journalist adjacent" skills and deal with journalists on the regular and therefore very likely to say "lolno" to any request for a moat of regulatory capture. Plumbers and electricians would never have been able to get the regulatory capture they have if the people they needed sign off from had been equally well versed in their skills and exposed to dealing with them.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> I’m willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist community. I would not argue that, not among peers. Like any profession I suspect writer's peers may be jealous of one another's page views but are still going to be ultimately judged by the quality of their work. And their peers will likely judge better than most what is thoughtful, thorough, researched writing and what is hackish. > Status skews even less equally than income… > Status can’t pay the rent… > Twenty-two year-olds will often accept status in lieu of wages… I guess I don't see the world through status-colored lenses or know anyone who does so the rest of the article and its points were built on a premise foreign to me. The author also appears to misrepresent unions in my opinion, portraying them more as a "protectionist" mechanism for workers, a way to fend off other workers with lower skills. When corporations held (hold) all the cards a collective of workers was the only way the worker had any bargaining power.

lr4444lr 5y ago

This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here. I thought he was going to focus on roles like non-tenured professorships and post-docs, mid level non-profit jobs, and the clergy.

alisonkisk 5y ago
ghaff 5y ago
Oh there's clearly status to being a published author--at least in many circles. And I would say also an NYT or WSJ journalist.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  There is status to being a published author people have heard of or with some acclaim. Not really outside of it. Poets with published chapbooks, or novelists published indie, or even mid-list authors don’t really have much status. Also if you write romance, forget about ever getting respect from anyone, even other authors.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
> This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here. You and I don't think of them as high status. However there is a proportion of people that do pay attention to writers, these maybe TV, films, media, politicians that are all within the "Cathedral". You see this a lot of Twitter. Politicians pay a lot of attention to Twitter and tbh I doubt many normal people ever pay attention to what people see on twitter. Those writing jobs are seen as high status because you can be influencing on "important" things. If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on. Many of these are writers for smaller publications that are safe enough i.e. inside the Overton window to present "balance" or be presented as "experts". Simply being on TV for a few minutes is seen as a big deal (especially to older people 50+).

stereolambda 5y ago

One loose idea that I like is local community (the smaller, the better) hiring a journalist (or even better, a diverse group of journalists) directly. They would cover the local events and politics and maybe give some digest of the national/world level from other sources. Apparently in the US officials like sheriffs and school board members are elected, so maybe it could work in a similar way. This would probably need a bunch of stringent rules to ban collusions with politicians (which has been of course a problem even with commercial journalism).

flerchin 5y ago

I haven't left my house in over a week. The insulation is real.

giantg2 5y ago

Is this really a high status job? Or is it the journalism industry relies on internal status? If it is about general status, then these individuals should be able to leverage that status and connection into better jobs or wages, including outside of that industry.

errcorrectcode 5y ago
High status to whom? Anyone not an east-coast academic or urban professional? I don't think journalism is widely-respected by the general population. Most local TV news anchors are an embarrassment because they to regurgitate Sinclair's "must airs" and bleeds/leads gore.

schnable 5y ago

The bigger problem occurs when the high perceived status/low wage folks decide they deserve a lot more than they have and foment revolution. Academics and those steeped in academia are more likely to lead this, but then the journalists quickly follow and amplify. Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista.

elliekelly 5y ago
> Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then being unable to get a job much better than barista. This is a real problem for an entire generation. If those in power don’t wise up and listen they’re inviting “revolution”. I fundamentally don’t understand why the wealthy ruling class is unable to grasp that their long-term welfare is entirely dependent on the welfare of the working middle class. Unemployed and underemployed middle class people are a leading indicator that the system that props up wealth in America is buckling. Somethings gotta give. And yet our leaders ignore it.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I doubt that revolution this time will come from journalist or academic class. It seems they are currently against the working class which is important power behind such event. Just see how positive the messaging about protests by those are...

yazboo 5y ago

This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly? For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what constitutes "heresy": - Accusations of politicians and celebrities - Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house - Election conspiracy theories - A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid - Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations arm of the NFL, to take one example. I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no insight or information on the topic.

AlexB138 5y ago

I'm not sure I would consider being a journalist a high status job anymore. Trust in the press, and the prestige that goes along with it, has been in a nose dive for years. It may just be my own bubble, but even the old guard publications are seen as having barely more integrity than the tabloids these days, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status, and that is the mechanism that really matters.

rossdavidh 5y ago
I think the article's points about 'status' apply more to 'status among your peers', yes.
daniel-cussen 5y ago
Well it's no different now than it ever was. If you want free news, you could get that back in the day, there were these terrible free newspapers. If you wanted a real newspaper you had to pay. So can still get somewhat better news on the Wall Street Journal, but for a price.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status It's how that "high status" is quantified. A journalist might look at their twitter profile, see the blue checkmark, see their 50k followers, and see their inbox filled with the ire of those on the other side, and conclude they are "high status". Problem becomes, what is "high status" for one person is just "wasting time on twitter" to another person.
- samatman 5y ago
  50k followers is elite tier, I can show you NYT journo bluechecks in the low four figures, who regularly get dragged by anonymous accounts with robot avatars. The difference between being high status and wasting time on twitter gets, extraordinarily, blurry.
YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
It has been in a nose dive for "everyday" people. But there is a whole section of society where they are treated as minor celebrities. The number of those people are shrinking (thankfully) but they are sizable enough for some journalists to break out and make bank through their substacks e.g. Bari Weiss is bringing in 800,000K a year via substack. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-weiss-breaks-the-rules-makes-a-mint-11629128876 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-wei... I don't think she is particularly interesting but a lot of people do.

cletus 5y ago

This is what a de facto aristocracy looks like. There are an awful lot of jobs and careers that are purely the domain of the wealthy. Unpaid internships and low wages are only part of the reason. Social connections are probably a far bigger factor (IMHO). Personally I don't care if fashion is dominated by trust fund babies. Politics however? That's a different matter. The dangerous part is how Ayn Rand acolyte billionaires have managed to dupe a good portion of the population to literally fight to the death to prevent Jeff Bezos and like 7 other people pay slightly more taxes and pay for the society that makes their wealth possible is the scary part.

grapescheesee 5y ago

We have nothing to talk about. When you have two options you have an illusion of choice. It is a duopoly in the corporate world. A 'competition' they love and enrich each other with. Just look at the way they have change labels on all sides. 'Far' right, 'Progressive', 'conservative', not worth a word more. It gives the two 'parties' more worth in the purpose their words have than trying to understand the inflections a dog makes as a complete sentence. Yes, ideas have meaning and somethings politicians say actually represent them. Apart from that nearly worthless sentance.. I can't tell you the last time I voted for someone and had a realistic means to contact them about some issue. The last time I contacted my senator was while I paid international call rates and when I asked for a reply on the issue the representative actually laughed at me and said no. We can't do that and this phone call has gone on three minuets longer than the average. I have many other people waiting sir! So what is the point? They literally can't pay staff to reply to my question. What is the senator view on issue X? Worthless elected leaders.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Oh is this yet another article about how writers make dirt these days? And then people wonder why journalism is going to hell while also loudly telling writers to stop whining about their pay and get a real job.

jonnycomputer 5y ago
Journalism is going to dirt because it isn't practiced. Or to put it in a more honest way: newspapers don't want to, or cannot afford to, pay for it anymore. Easier to just repeat press releases, or report on the latest twitter nitwitting. Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist. She's paid over a $1k just to access court records in the last year, out of her own pocket. Investigative journalism is expensive.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I'm a writer and blogger who doesn't make squat. My writing has repeatedly hit the front page of HN but it almost never gets submitted by anyone but me and then I get harangued for "self promoting." I write a great deal more than what I submit here and I submit a lot less than I used to. No, that hasn't caused other people to submit my stuff more often. People here don't want ads on your website. They use ad blockers. They don't want affiliate links. They don't want to leave tips or support your Patreon. They don't want your writing to be content marketing for some other means to pay your bills. They de facto expect writing to be unpaid slave labor and then bitch and moan about how much writing sucks these days. "You get what you pay for." I bitch less than I used to. It seems to only be an excuse to hate on me some more, not effectively move the needle.

Atlas667 5y ago

Ah, yes, private media and factual information. Like water and oil. Also the left is socialism and communism, not liberalism. Get it right, else youre feeding the culture war the politicians want us to keep fighting.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

I think one of the dangers is that it will ultimately lead to discontent, and all of the consequences of that.

bwestergard 5y ago

"If you’re curious why unionization has taken the journalism world by storm the last few years, you don’t have to look to politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there." This is a cute theory, and tickles some people's ideological fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union newsrooms is. In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone. They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group hiring practices common at non-union papers. Source: I'm a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company, not a newspaper. Take a gander at the NewsGuild president's twitter account and you'll see many examples of these campaigns: https://twitter.com/gaufre https://twitter.com/gaufre

scarface74 5y ago
Don’t you think you’re just postponing the inevitable? Newspapers historically made most of their money from the classifieds when most people are using Facebook and Craigslist and the like. Then you have the fact that “only old people buy newspapers”
- mchanson 5y ago
  Everyone is always delaying the inevitable. It is the only thing anyone can do. None of us (or our companies) are getting out of this alive.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    The difference is that millions of people aren’t going to wake up one morning and say they want to start buying physical newspapers.

boyka 5y ago

I was wondering: is being an influencer a low status high paying job? Because that is who journalists are indirectly competing with if we funnel ad-spend through until it reaches media.

ghaff 5y ago
"Influencer" in the Instagram sense is probably very power law. I'm sure the vast majority make squat.

bertr4nd 5y ago

As someone with small children, I found myself wondering whether the parents of these Brooklyn writers have actually done their children a service or disservice by funding a financially impossible career. While there is something to be said for being able to follow one’s interests unconstrained by the need for money, it also seems like a hollow, grasping existence to chase status and popularity amongst a clique of likeminded fellows. I suppose one could say something similar for a career spent chasing money, but at least money sometimes vaguely (vaguely!) approximates creating value for other people.

_fat_santa 5y ago
I knew a few folks like this. 20 something, out of college, entry level job in some field that doesn't pay them nearly enough for where they are living. And mom and dad are subsidizing the apartment and lifestyle. When I talked to a few of them about the situation, my burning question was always "what is your plan". I think for many of those folks there was no plan, this was the plan, and your parents helping you out was just normal. Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to happen to all those people when the checks stop coming, when the credit card stops getting paid. Some of my less privileged friends hated that group for their privileged but I honestly just felt bad for them. I don't know when, but under this current system, at some point in the future, you are going to be royally screwed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- DharmaPolice 5y ago
  They just join the labour force like everyone else. They'll just be 41 doing the job that other people did at 21. I have a friend whose family weren't wealthy but they tolerated him playing video games and bumming around not doing much else for 15 years after he finished uni. He eventually had to get a job. Sure, he's behind his peers in terms of salary/career advancement now but not by so much where I'm even sure he made a mistake by avoiding work for so long.
- antisthenes 5y ago

throwhauser 5y ago

The author of the piece seems to be taking the tweet about half the journalists under 40 living in that area pretty literally. I don't know if the author of the tweet intended it that way (and if he was speaking figuratively I wouldn't fault him, it's just a tweet), but I don't quite buy that anyone could really estimate the number of journalists in an area drawn by someone else by eyeballing a map on Twitter. I also don't quite buy that half of the journalists under 40 live in a specific part of New York City, when Washington DC, Los Angeles and (for nerds) San Francisco also have their own share of that population.

dccoolgai 5y ago

This article is extremely on pointe with respect to insight... But missed the mark to the Northeast by a few hundred miles. Replace "New York" with "DC" and "writer/conspirist" with "legislative aid/lobbyist" and you begin to comprehend the true scale of this horror. Reporters are relatively insignificant by comparison.

kosyblysk2 5y ago

`journalists`? hahahaha i actually live in this area, they are mostly corporate sell outs or small time `progressive` emos/flakes the hood ain't cheap either.

woopwoop 5y ago

If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. When you pay journalists in attention instead of cash. When you pay politicians in power instead of cash. I think that in the case of journalism the problem is the hardest. I disagree with the author that the problem can just be solved by people doing local journalism. That pays less in both money and attention. The bottom line is that good journalism is a public good in an extremely strong sense, and is very unlikely to be provided by the market. But obviously the government employing an army of journalists is not any kind of solution either. Whereas we could much more easily implement congestion pricing, or pay politicians more money.

zozbot234 5y ago
Let people crowdfund good-quality journalism/blogging/policy work. Patreon and GoFundMe are good first starts at the problem, but of course their political bias is highly problematic. If anything, it is all the more urgent to fund high-quality work on the other side of the political spectrum - surely they deserve way better than their current focus on Trumpism and anti-vaxx protests!
Jiro 5y ago
>Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion fee. On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a bureaucrat to siphon off a congestion fee to fill his own pockets or his friends' pockets, than it is to fill his pockets with "willingness to sit in traffic".

tharne 5y ago

My God, I wish I had read an article like this when I was 22. I started out in one of these high-status low-wages - HUGE mistake. I intuited some of the things the author is saying here, but it took many wasted years for me to be able to articulate these thoughts in my own mind and change course. Very impressive article that clearly explains the issue.

rch 5y ago

> a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are. Part of the problem in journalism is that someone motivated to share their core ideas should be an author, not a journalist. These are different jobs.

jrochkind1 5y ago

> There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are… The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market. I feel like there's something implied here that says we should be listening to those who have the most money. But in fact those journalists whose status/audience is out of proportion to their wages... are more representative of America than wealthier people. The median income of these journalists/pundits may still very well be higher than the median income of America. If they have a monolithically wrong idea of what is going on in "America" or are monolithically unrepresentative of America (I think that's the complaint?), it's not because they homogenously have wages lower than other "high status" people -- and it will not be solved by increasing the wages of journalists/pundits, and or changing the set of who is listened to, to higher income people. Some of the explanations in the OP are more interesting, like: > Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status. Chomsky and Herman's 1988 _Manufacturing Consent_ is about the pressures journalist have to just take the statements of powerful people (whether in government or industry) and report them as facts (or at best as the story) without doing more investigation. But it was written in a more innocent, pre-social-influencer era, where they never would have conceived that journalists or pundits were actually taking outright payment (which they would have called bribes) for this -- even though I don't think journalists made substantially more then. Rather, they explained and showed how it just made the journalists job so much easier. The journalist didn't have time to do actual investigation, it was so much easier to just go on press conferences and press release. Which is surely even more true today with newsrooms that have been (often literally) decimated since 1988. I think the OP is onto something... but I don't think it actually has much to do with journalists wages, the central thesis of OP. In general, if we were somehow able to magically shift the journalist/pundit class to be higher-income -- and thus even less representative of the country as a whole -- I don't see this leading to improvements in any way.

KoftaBob 5y ago

This idea is basically the background behind the recent "wordcel" term/meme that's been making the rounds. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...

zozbot234 5y ago
Meh. A lot of the low-wage journos discussed in the blogpost are less "wordcel" and more like "word salad".

dnautics 5y ago

this is exactly also true for grad students in the physical and biological sciences.

achenet 5y ago
Really? I’d have thought they would be out there inventing the world of tomorrow. The entire clothing industry is applied biochemistry. Electronics is applied physics and chemistry. How can there not be a demand for that?
- dnautics 5y ago
  yep. You get paid higher if: - you go straight out of undergrad to industry - you only do a masters - you "drop out" after a masters - you are sponsored by industry to take a 5-6 year "sabbatical" to get a PhD (which is status-driven, but still tied to "demand", as you say). - you go to industry without doing a postdoc If you are in the PhD program to get into academia, it is very much a status-driven, low-paid pursuit (I got paid 26k/yr for ~80h/wk average 6 years, probably generally was working 100-days-straight) and all of the problems in the article apply (including tendency to groupthink in the service of promotion, attracting status-seeking; stupid 20-something men). As a grad student, the undergrad "dishwasher" lab tech was getting paid more than I was (raw; not dividing by hours). Even for postdocs the misery is true. I gave myself a pay raise and hours reduction when I quit being a postdoc and started driving for lyft full-time ~50h/wk on the road, but carve out about 10-ish for like logging off to do social things with friends because I was "in the city anyways".

j7ake 5y ago

On the flip side, are there dangers of "low status, high-wage" jobs? E.g. certain blue-collar jobs can pay as high as any white-collar jobs. Another example would be programmers can be seen as a low-status, high-wage job. They are paid a lot and trusted to do their job, but the main high-level decisions are still made at higher levels above the programers.

dogleash 5y ago

A complicating factor that I hear from some of the disillusioned journos is that journalism works best when it's blue collar. Seeking status, and the kind of compromises made to maintain status contribute to the fact journalism is in the dumps. It's not my opinion, but it's an interesting one. Maybe the bottom needs to fall out for a few years for journos to get their act together. But signs point to that's exactly what's happening and all we got was a bunch of bitter and vindictive twitter addicts trying to hold onto what little glory they had.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

guelo 5y ago

Garbage article is just opinions based on broad stereotypes and the author's biases.

ouid 5y ago

>2. Status can’t pay the rent >Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to your status. This should be number 1, and probably the only item on the list. The word influencer should evoke in you a deep dread. Sure there's neo fascist authoritarians, but they aren't really the dangerous ones. It's the sales people. In order to convince a person that they need to buy something, you usually have to get them to believe something that isn't true. That's obviously not a stable system.

Sebguer 5y ago

Is this effectively the same reason so many crypto folks have consolidated in Miami?

dav_Oz 5y ago

> You want to get paid: move to cheap suburb of a medium sized city and start writing heresy, the more inflammatory the better. Accusations of politicians and celebrities. Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let your kids leave the house. Election conspiracy theories and a new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid. Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out. Anything that someone is willing to pay you to write because nobody else will write it for free. This escalated quickly. I somehow expected a more nuanced take at the end than this rushed version paradoxically reinforcing a superficial stance critiqued before. Well, the overall point comes across and is an interesting take but fails to be substantial i.e. backed by some more convincing data instead of an initial gossip over the gossip.

errcorrectcode 5y ago

Chris Hedges entered the chat. Every public K-12 teacher entered the chat.

Animats 5y ago

The author has a very narrow focus on NYC pundits, but the problem is more general. Other high-status, low-wage jobs include much of Hollywood. If you've spent any time in LA, you've probably met actress-model-waitress types. Game developers are a somewhat similar group - too many people want to make games, and as a result salaries are low for the level of competence required. What else?

georgeburdell 5y ago

Really interesting piece. Without any particular evidence other than my own perception on the discourse of journalism over the last 20 years or so, I had come to many of the same conclusions as the author (the leftward shift in journalism is due to decreasing wages and so people who accept status or the projection of their own ideology as currency will disproportionately take those jobs). I think teaching (at various levels) has similar forces impinging upon it.

WhompingWindows 5y ago

I thought about teaching as a career. I'm passionate about science and math, I'm great with kids, I'm a decent teacher...but the stress was insanely high for the compensation and benefits. I was doing entry-level assistant work at age 22-25 to see if I liked teaching, getting paid $20k a year with no benefits to mostly deal with the 10% who are crazy bad kids every day...not worth it. One example, I had an 8th grader jump on a desk and scream "I LOVE TACOS" repeatedly. I told him to get down and be quiet, we're trying to learn about robotics. He then called me a racist (because I'm white and I don't love tacos? I do though). I talked to him after class, turns out his family life was in chaos and he needed help at home.

nolroz 5y ago
I would absolutely love to be a teacher but the compensation and horror stories about the administration and parents is very disheartening.

letmeinhere 5y ago

> [Unionization] will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and using “semiotics” correctly in a sentence, but that’s neither here nor there. Unionization leads to higher and considerably less stratified wages, which means that people from less means can afford to enter the profession. So, sure, the people who can afford rent in the cities where they work will have "heightened favoring" (aka better jobs), but they will be a different, more representative group.

crackercrews 5y ago

For a deeper dive on the topic check out the book Bad News. [1] The title references "woke media", which might turn some off. But it's actually written by a liberal, not a conservative out for blood. There is a lot of very interesting history, including a bit about how the Jewish publisher of the NYT insisted that "because Jews were not a race, Hitler's persecution of them was not a Jewish problem but "the problem of mankind"". I bet Whoopi wished she her crisis management team was aware of that quote last week! 1: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/dp/1641772069 https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/...

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