What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?

“I have a deep fear about what is happening to journalism. No one else is going to do what we do. In that way, we create a community. Television and radio only show up at the big things. They don’t show up at school-board meetings, the local drainage board. If your community is going to cut trash collection to every other week, television is not going to come.”

I was chatting with some friends in the newspaper business recently. They said, and I agree wholeheartedly, that local papers are not going away anytime soon. Denver media don't cover what happens up here day-to-day, not print or TV. If you want to find out what's going on with the local issues, you have to turn to your local papers. But, they do need to modernize with the times. They can't rely solely on print papers to cover their costs, they must incorporate social media and an increasingly online presence. They must adapt in order to better compete. We certainly need them around - they fill a vital role in our democracy and we've already seen the results - a profound lack of trust and confidence in our media as a whole. They are seen as shallow ("If it bleeds, it leads" and "what's the latest celebrity news"), melodramatic, ratings-chasers who don't do their due diligence and investigate thoroughly enough. It's no wonder, with that many now gone from the profession, and those pushed out being the most experienced.

It's a painful transition, one I hope the journalists and their employers work their way through sooner rather than later for we need them.

What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?
As newsrooms disappear, veteran older reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism — and democracy.
By Dale Maharidge | March 4, 2016

The term “seismic shift” is overused, but it applies to what’s happened to American newspapers. In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily papers; in 2015, there were 32,900, according to a census by the American Society of News Editors and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University. That doesn’t include the buyouts and layoffs last fall, like those at the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Daily News, among others, and weeklies and magazines like National Geographic.

And things may get a lot worse, according to former Los Angeles Times executive Nicco Mele. “If the next three years look like the last three years, I think we’re going to look at the 50 largest metropolitan papers in the country and expect somewhere between a third to a half of them to go out of business,” said Mele, now a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, in an interview a few weeks ago with the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

Part of the stated explanation for the exodus of veterans is cultural. Old-school journalism was a trade, and legacy journalists find today’s brand of personality journalism, with its emphasis on churning out blog posts, aggregating the labor of others and curating a constant social-media presence, to be simply foreign. And the higher-ups share the new bias. One editor of a major national publication, who himself is well over 40, confided to me that he’s reluctant to hire older journalists, that “they’re stuck in the mentality of doing one story a week” and not willing to use social media.

But the shift is also deeper and more systemic. Many older workers, not just journalists, are hurting. Amid the so-called recovery, some 45 percent of those seeking jobs over the age of 55 have been looking six months or longer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there’s one major difference between other workers and journalists — when the latter are laid off, the commonweal suffers. “You know who loves this new day of the lack of journalism? Politicians. Businessmen. Nobody’s watching them anymore,” says Russ Kendall, a lifelong photojournalist and editor who is now self-employed as a pizza maker.

There are still print newspapers — and news websites — producing heroic local journalism. But it’s clear that the loss of a combined several hundred thousand years of experience from newsrooms across the country is hurting American democracy.

So if you read through the article, they address that very point FH.

But the times could at last be shifting. As digital journalism finds its place in the new-media landscape, helped by a crop of new web-only publications, younger journalists are beginning to demand the kind of work protections, decent wages and newsroom solidarity that many of their older counterparts once enjoyed. In the past year, workers have voted to unionize at Gawker, Vice, Salon and ThinkProgress, affiliating with the Writers Guild of America East, AFL-CIO. In January, The Huffington Post’s management voluntarily recognized the WGAE to represent 262 employees. The union negotiates “compensation, benefits, and job security” for its members.

The NewsGuild represents the digital newsrooms of The Guardian US and, until it folded last month, Al Jazeera America. People organizing at digital-media outlets are doing so for the same reasons that people did a generation ago, said Gabriel Arana, a former senior media editor at The Huffington Post, who was involved with the union drive. “A lot of these new-media companies feel like tech companies. But at a certain point, having free snacks at work means less than having a retirement account or a decent salary that you can raise a family on. Digital media is maturing. People in it want the stability to be able to make a career out of it.”

So Gawker, Vice, Salon and ThinkProgress are now going to become your news outlets. Perhaps even places like Mother Jones (if not already).