Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.
Yes, but there are barely any of this type of journalist anymore, and barely any outlets for them to be published in.
What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs.
The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.
Oh, you mean other than about 90% of journalists in America.
I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not.
There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors).
That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.
> but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists
So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.
> and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work
This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
I don't see why you think "I worked around a newsroom for 13 years" is a good rebuttal to the fairly trivial claim that most professionals chose said profession because they wanted to do it.
Well, maybe it's because he replied to ME and I made specific claims that he decided to doubt. Now maybe in this brave new world, some people don't consider actual lived experience to be worth a whole lot, but that's not my problem.
The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events.
Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?
You're still missing the point that people tell almost identical stories for just about every profession in existence. The user that replied to you wasn't even doubting you, they were just saying that it's not special.
I was the lead developer for a custom CMS platform for a small company and literally sat in the newsroom with the reporters and worked with them on a daily basis. When I first started working for the company, it was directly after Hurricane Katrina and I did work directly FOR the paper as well as dev work because the COO had yet to justify to the CEO why they needed a full time developer, much less a team. The hours were long and the work sucked but I was hourly and got to experience their work habits and schedule.
I've done startups for 25 years which has included publishing, there's nothing special about the hours of journalists. Every profession thinks that they put in more work and hours than others. Ask anyone at a law firm.
Because digging up facts is very expensive, and not necessarily engaging to the public.
Ontario Public Broadcasting has this show 'The Agenda' with 'Steve Paikin' where he brings in mid-level and behind-the-scenes people from the bureaucracy people and they talk about granular issues of civic reform in great detail.
If you want to inform yourself on the nitty-gritty details of the new 'Subway Expansion' and why it's over budget, it's all right there.
But it's incredibly boring , and there's very little viewership.
Donald Trump put it really well when he said he would be 'great for news ratings'. It was rubbish, and a lot of people tuned in, it brought in a lot of money.
Add in the economics brought on by the Internet and we have a real problem.
I think it's written by human beings who have a limited subset of knowledge, many times because sources aren't forthcoming or verified, and that if we ever held developers to the same standard that we held journalists, that it'd be nigh-impossible to hire any of them.
