In the 90s, I worked for the biggest business news publisher in the world, our profit ratio was over 30%. The biz model was simple, hire 24 year old journalists who had been trained by a couple of years at a local paper. Turn them into industry’experts’ with six months intensive focus on a business niche, pay them low wages, tell them they are lucky to have a job you can use an English degree in. Watch them leave at age ~30 for jobs they don’t like in corporate communications for the niche industry they had reported on, but now that they have babies and mortgages so they need the money. Rinse, lather, repeat. Later I started my own niche biz news company, but changed the model by paying more as reporters grew in experience. Our profit ratios were equally strong and it was easier to compete because turns out readers and advertisers preferred great, trusted content created by experienced journalists. When we finally sold the company, the new owners promised they loved our model. Two years later they gutted journalist roles and salaries. Because the false idea that journalists don’t bring value is too ingrained I guess?
An old reporter friend once told me “there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of reporters with families.”
It’s not just that the pay sucks (it does) but the schedule is punishing because newsrooms fail to hire enough people to do the work. It’s one of those jobs (like teaching) where there’s a lot of cultural pressure to work overtime without pay.
As a consequence, not a lot of people with institutional knowledge are left in local newsrooms, which makes coverage worse and leaves communities vulnerable to bad actors.
I don’t have any solutions just echoing what you’ve seen about the dearth of 30+ year olds in the industry.
Punch in the stomach! That was me in the 90s. I was a foreign correspondent in newly-open Central & Eastern Europe and had a good life, as long as you didn't think about saving for a pension or having a family. (note on that: agency offered me Moscow, but for far less than my predecessor-- male, married, one child-- was earning. I said I wanted "the family package" or it was no go. "But you don't have a family," I was told. "And I never will at this rate." I did not go to Moscow, a fact for which I may be grateful today since my former peers were all run out on a rail over the past year and a half.) I was in my mid-30s when I leapt to corp comms, kid and mortgage followed. After 15+ years and a couple burnouts, I had seen enough. It breaks my heart to see that there is still so little value – or no value– placed on good journalism.
Yup. We do this, accepting things change and not always for the better, but new challenges can be invigorating. Plus, staying in one place runs the risk of becoming the personality cult you either had to repair when you first arrived or always sought to avoid.
Reading your original bit definitely resonated. We are all in that era of derivative-slicing profit-per-square-inch dehumanizing assholes lurking right around the corner, and it should be the deep aching regret of our entire species that we cannot imagine any endeavor outside the boundaries of the "business model" framework. We will continue to answer for that willful stupidity, well, for a long time to come. Today, though, we must ask ourselves: what have we done to make a billionaire more comfortable? And why don't we knock it the hell off?
Who are the last-century "big" newspapers for...? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution needs to be killed off faster, not slower, and I say that with high regard for the few local reporters they still employ at whatever forsaken model of compensation. Yes, there was a lovely and fitting extra-long farewell section in last weekend's edition for Rosalyn Carter (you know that obit has been in the can for a while) but any pleasure I had was dashed by the full-page hijack of the op-ed section by the AJC publisher. He made it explicitly clear that the editorial belief of the newspaper was pro-Cop City (no duh) and, sure, probably prevented only lesser pro-Cop City pieces from appearing that day, but subtlety is dead and the homogenous metro newspaper needs to die with it.
I type this as a last-century old myself, with an employment history and a college degree (minor) in journalism. This plantation system for manufacturing consent is bad for employees, bad for readers, bad for genuine civic discourse, and bad for historians who might one day wish to re-read this mess. Good for billionaires, though, which is the same as the contemporary definition of the public good. I'll see myself off to the gulag.
But before I go... hot peppermint tea or very VERY cold V8. Don't cross those streams, though.
This is how I feel about the last "big" newspaper in my metro area-- the San Francisco Chronicle. It's been a shell of its former self for over a decade now. Plunging ad revenue didn't help, but also the dearth of reporting issues of importance to locals--other than the homelessness crisis, anyway (and there is a ton of bias in those articles!)--is directly tied to the gutting of their newsroom & over-reliance on running AP, UPI, & other wire press articles in lieu of local ones. I only see the physical paper when I visit my parents--they still subscribe to it--and it's a travesty of typos and questionable grammar on the regular (guess they fired proofreaders and copyeditors too). And a lot of the actual "reporting" by the few remaining reporters is sometimes not reporting at all. Case in point: their education reporter was tasked with covering a budget crisis at City College, San Francisco's community college. Instead of real reporting and trying to find out *all* the causes of the crisis, she re-purposed a press release the college administration put out and called it a day. You could look at the press release and her article side-by-side and there was no mistaking it! Yeah, she's still employed there. But all the good reporters are gone, and I think it's by design.
Ouch! Even the Chronicle is doing this? I think reporting on higher education nationwide relies far too much on press releases from university PR departments. They should not be publishing the PR spin, but rather digging into what is really happening The public knows there are issues in higher ed, but they do not understand what the real issues are because the press covers it so poorly.
I'm sure it's not enough, but I hope Kelly Yamanouchi is doing okay for herself. Not nearly enough people covering airlines/aviation at the level she is.
The not elusive enough double dingus! Frankly, we have been boycotting WaPo for a while because of their rightward tilt in the editorial department. Also, my Amazon shopping has declined precipitously because I have no idea where those brands are from. It's the one place I am fussy about grammar - if it isn't right in your product description, I'm not buying.
My comfort hot drink is my extra strong coffee with 2% milk and Truvia, nauseous or not. It's also my wake-up juice. I buy good beans (Equator Coffee in Eugene OR), and I just bought an OXO 8-cup drip coffee maker plus a burr grinder (TY Black Friday deals) and they are on par with my pour-over system. I am getting hand surgery and will have to do everything with my non-dominant hand so this was in preparation.
Co-sign the Kelsey McKinney tweet, and yet until my current company that was not something I ever gave thought to. My hours recently got cut, but you know who got the first pay cut, months earlier? The company president. This should not be radical, but I suspect it is.
I am a producer for a sister station of an NPR affiliate, and while I am not a journalist myself, I can attest that radio news is much the same. People also don't really understand that we actually pay NPR for their programs and don't get any cut of any of NPR's money. Last year, a bunch of--surprise, millennial women in their 30s and 40s who have been underpaid and bouncing around to different stations/papers/etc. for the past decade--organized the effort to unionize. The company announced layoffs only a few months later, which fortunately we were in the position to negotiate with our union layers. These folks still lost their jobs, but they got really excellent severance and a more reasonable timeline that they might not have gotten without the union. We're currently working on negotiating our first contract.
Even and sometimes especially in the non-profit sector, the pay disparity is so vast between upper management and everyone else, but because it's a non profit, they get away with saying they just don't have enough money. And yet, people at the top won't take even a temporary pay cut to save a job or two.
Good luck with that! Seriously, glad you are feeling better and I add a cinnamon stick to my hot toddy, I am a spice girl at heart. Have a great weekend!
That NYT response letter is brilliant. Makes me feel better about continuing to pay for a subscription even after their poetry editor resigned over their war coverage in the most epic mic drop ever.
Comfort drink of choice is always herbal tea. I only add honey if my throat is sore, but not if I'm congested or otherwise feeling wretched. Right now I'm on a Celestial Seasonings Country Peach Passion kick. I drink it by the full-size Mason jar-full on the daily.
My son, newspaper journalist, left to edit a financial newsletter. My daughter's college friend, newspaper journalist, left to work for a business lobbying group. No shaming - she needs to eat!
Her friend, newspaper journalist, left to run a tribal newspaper.
Meanwhile, our local paper is struggling.
The model at the local level is completely broken.
I still subscribe to the Seattle Times and LA Times, the latter for their outstanding environmental reporting. That seems to be the minimum scale - for now.
In the 90s, I worked for the biggest business news publisher in the world, our profit ratio was over 30%. The biz model was simple, hire 24 year old journalists who had been trained by a couple of years at a local paper. Turn them into industry’experts’ with six months intensive focus on a business niche, pay them low wages, tell them they are lucky to have a job you can use an English degree in. Watch them leave at age ~30 for jobs they don’t like in corporate communications for the niche industry they had reported on, but now that they have babies and mortgages so they need the money. Rinse, lather, repeat. Later I started my own niche biz news company, but changed the model by paying more as reporters grew in experience. Our profit ratios were equally strong and it was easier to compete because turns out readers and advertisers preferred great, trusted content created by experienced journalists. When we finally sold the company, the new owners promised they loved our model. Two years later they gutted journalist roles and salaries. Because the false idea that journalists don’t bring value is too ingrained I guess?
ANNE! UGH!! I mean thank you for your work and I think you prove that it can be a good model. But how frustrating to see your work gutted like that.
An old reporter friend once told me “there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of reporters with families.”
It’s not just that the pay sucks (it does) but the schedule is punishing because newsrooms fail to hire enough people to do the work. It’s one of those jobs (like teaching) where there’s a lot of cultural pressure to work overtime without pay.
As a consequence, not a lot of people with institutional knowledge are left in local newsrooms, which makes coverage worse and leaves communities vulnerable to bad actors.
I don’t have any solutions just echoing what you’ve seen about the dearth of 30+ year olds in the industry.
Punch in the stomach! That was me in the 90s. I was a foreign correspondent in newly-open Central & Eastern Europe and had a good life, as long as you didn't think about saving for a pension or having a family. (note on that: agency offered me Moscow, but for far less than my predecessor-- male, married, one child-- was earning. I said I wanted "the family package" or it was no go. "But you don't have a family," I was told. "And I never will at this rate." I did not go to Moscow, a fact for which I may be grateful today since my former peers were all run out on a rail over the past year and a half.) I was in my mid-30s when I leapt to corp comms, kid and mortgage followed. After 15+ years and a couple burnouts, I had seen enough. It breaks my heart to see that there is still so little value – or no value– placed on good journalism.
Why did you sell the company, especially if the profit ratios were equally strong?
For the same reason many people switch jobs and careers, after more than a decade, it was time to move on and see what else I could do with my life.
Yup. We do this, accepting things change and not always for the better, but new challenges can be invigorating. Plus, staying in one place runs the risk of becoming the personality cult you either had to repair when you first arrived or always sought to avoid.
Reading your original bit definitely resonated. We are all in that era of derivative-slicing profit-per-square-inch dehumanizing assholes lurking right around the corner, and it should be the deep aching regret of our entire species that we cannot imagine any endeavor outside the boundaries of the "business model" framework. We will continue to answer for that willful stupidity, well, for a long time to come. Today, though, we must ask ourselves: what have we done to make a billionaire more comfortable? And why don't we knock it the hell off?
Jeff Bezos you do not need another rocket but your employees do need some therapy.
Solidarity ✊
PAY A LIVING WAGE FFS !!!
Jeffeneezer Scrooge.
Gesundheit!
Who are the last-century "big" newspapers for...? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution needs to be killed off faster, not slower, and I say that with high regard for the few local reporters they still employ at whatever forsaken model of compensation. Yes, there was a lovely and fitting extra-long farewell section in last weekend's edition for Rosalyn Carter (you know that obit has been in the can for a while) but any pleasure I had was dashed by the full-page hijack of the op-ed section by the AJC publisher. He made it explicitly clear that the editorial belief of the newspaper was pro-Cop City (no duh) and, sure, probably prevented only lesser pro-Cop City pieces from appearing that day, but subtlety is dead and the homogenous metro newspaper needs to die with it.
I type this as a last-century old myself, with an employment history and a college degree (minor) in journalism. This plantation system for manufacturing consent is bad for employees, bad for readers, bad for genuine civic discourse, and bad for historians who might one day wish to re-read this mess. Good for billionaires, though, which is the same as the contemporary definition of the public good. I'll see myself off to the gulag.
But before I go... hot peppermint tea or very VERY cold V8. Don't cross those streams, though.
This is how I feel about the last "big" newspaper in my metro area-- the San Francisco Chronicle. It's been a shell of its former self for over a decade now. Plunging ad revenue didn't help, but also the dearth of reporting issues of importance to locals--other than the homelessness crisis, anyway (and there is a ton of bias in those articles!)--is directly tied to the gutting of their newsroom & over-reliance on running AP, UPI, & other wire press articles in lieu of local ones. I only see the physical paper when I visit my parents--they still subscribe to it--and it's a travesty of typos and questionable grammar on the regular (guess they fired proofreaders and copyeditors too). And a lot of the actual "reporting" by the few remaining reporters is sometimes not reporting at all. Case in point: their education reporter was tasked with covering a budget crisis at City College, San Francisco's community college. Instead of real reporting and trying to find out *all* the causes of the crisis, she re-purposed a press release the college administration put out and called it a day. You could look at the press release and her article side-by-side and there was no mistaking it! Yeah, she's still employed there. But all the good reporters are gone, and I think it's by design.
Ouch! Even the Chronicle is doing this? I think reporting on higher education nationwide relies far too much on press releases from university PR departments. They should not be publishing the PR spin, but rather digging into what is really happening The public knows there are issues in higher ed, but they do not understand what the real issues are because the press covers it so poorly.
I'm sure it's not enough, but I hope Kelly Yamanouchi is doing okay for herself. Not nearly enough people covering airlines/aviation at the level she is.
But LYZ! You don't get to be a billionaire by PAYING PEOPLE.
Damn I'll never be a billionaire at this rate!
:D
I'll never even be a hundred-thousand-aire :-)
The not elusive enough double dingus! Frankly, we have been boycotting WaPo for a while because of their rightward tilt in the editorial department. Also, my Amazon shopping has declined precipitously because I have no idea where those brands are from. It's the one place I am fussy about grammar - if it isn't right in your product description, I'm not buying.
My comfort hot drink is my extra strong coffee with 2% milk and Truvia, nauseous or not. It's also my wake-up juice. I buy good beans (Equator Coffee in Eugene OR), and I just bought an OXO 8-cup drip coffee maker plus a burr grinder (TY Black Friday deals) and they are on par with my pour-over system. I am getting hand surgery and will have to do everything with my non-dominant hand so this was in preparation.
"It's the one place I am fussy about grammar - if it isn't right in your product description, I'm not buying." YES.
and just to emphasize, I teach college writing 😂
Your joke is funny.
And that link to the NY Times response was 13/10, no notes, chef's kiss all the way.
Hope you feel better soon!
I’m feeling so much better today. Thank you!!
Co-sign the Kelsey McKinney tweet, and yet until my current company that was not something I ever gave thought to. My hours recently got cut, but you know who got the first pay cut, months earlier? The company president. This should not be radical, but I suspect it is.
My comfort drink when sick is a hot toddy (hot water + lemon + booze + honey) which I think is just a good excuse for bourbon.
Love to see the band Low get some love!
Little Drummer Boy from that same album is fantastic.
Ted, don’t make me repost this newsletter https://lyz.substack.com/p/dingus-of-the-week-the-little-drummer
This is a fair assessment.
I love that someone else sees the Little Drummer for the gd nuisance that he is. As always, thank you for your service, Lyz.
Well if nothing else, this definitely explains that November op ed. The editorial board was clearly starving to death.
🤣
I am a producer for a sister station of an NPR affiliate, and while I am not a journalist myself, I can attest that radio news is much the same. People also don't really understand that we actually pay NPR for their programs and don't get any cut of any of NPR's money. Last year, a bunch of--surprise, millennial women in their 30s and 40s who have been underpaid and bouncing around to different stations/papers/etc. for the past decade--organized the effort to unionize. The company announced layoffs only a few months later, which fortunately we were in the position to negotiate with our union layers. These folks still lost their jobs, but they got really excellent severance and a more reasonable timeline that they might not have gotten without the union. We're currently working on negotiating our first contract.
Even and sometimes especially in the non-profit sector, the pay disparity is so vast between upper management and everyone else, but because it's a non profit, they get away with saying they just don't have enough money. And yet, people at the top won't take even a temporary pay cut to save a job or two.
Lastly, might I suggest: Bezo-neezer Scrooge?
Thanks for including the Low song ... extra poignant since Mimi's death.
I hope you are feeling better. Being sick sucks!
Yes, 100% better today. I think I just need rest and to never be around children and their little germs.
Good luck with that! Seriously, glad you are feeling better and I add a cinnamon stick to my hot toddy, I am a spice girl at heart. Have a great weekend!
That NYT response letter is brilliant. Makes me feel better about continuing to pay for a subscription even after their poetry editor resigned over their war coverage in the most epic mic drop ever.
Comfort drink of choice is always herbal tea. I only add honey if my throat is sore, but not if I'm congested or otherwise feeling wretched. Right now I'm on a Celestial Seasonings Country Peach Passion kick. I drink it by the full-size Mason jar-full on the daily.
Great commentary, Lyz. Huzzah!
My son, newspaper journalist, left to edit a financial newsletter. My daughter's college friend, newspaper journalist, left to work for a business lobbying group. No shaming - she needs to eat!
Her friend, newspaper journalist, left to run a tribal newspaper.
Meanwhile, our local paper is struggling.
The model at the local level is completely broken.
I still subscribe to the Seattle Times and LA Times, the latter for their outstanding environmental reporting. That seems to be the minimum scale - for now.