Bit-stained wretches

Image by armadilo60 via Flickr

My former colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote about me for Sunday’s New York Times: Op-Ed Contributor – Have Keyboard, Will Travel. It’s a short read, but the gist is this:

Dozens of Web sites have correspondingly sprouted up, posting articles written for free or for a fraction of what a traditional magazine would have paid. Into this gaping maw have rushed enough authors to fill a hundred Roman Colosseums, all eager to write in exchange for “exposure.” Paul Smalera, a 29-year-old who was laid off from a magazine job in November 2008, is now competing with every one of them. And after months of furious blogging, tweeting and writing for Web sites, Paul has made a career of Internet journalism, sort of.

Sheelah goes into some details of my financial picture and what the various gigs I’m doing pay me. It’s not entirely pretty, especially when you’re nearing basically 30, but hey, it’s reality for me right now. While I wasn’t amped about the chance to reveal my credit card and student loan debt, and paltry paydays, I did so for a couple, (I think) important and well defined reasons:

1. I ask the same of my sources: I’ll be honest, I don’t know why anyone talks to the press. As Janet Malcolm says on my sidebar, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” We don’t have subpoena power. There’s no reason you have to talk to us. But invariably, I pick up the phone, identify myself as media, and ask people to spill their guts to me. And more often than not, they do. Sometimes it’s professional, sometimes it’s personal, and usually, it’s a mix, but the information they’ve given me, whether about an interest rate or a murder, wouldn’t have been known before. I always thank them and try to be respectful of their time. Sometimes I have to spend a lot of time badgering people into talking– not because I’m trying to get some kind of ‘dirt’ on them, but because I really think their contribution is invaluable to the story. The times I try hardest to get someone to talk is when I feel the story will be a disservice to them without their weighing in. If I’m writing about someone’s actions or thoughts, I want their voice in the there. So when Sheelah asked me to talk to her for her piece, I felt I owed it to her as a journalist myself. How could I ever ask anyone to do what I instinctually would not want to do (talk to media) if I refused to do it myself? So I did.
2. I’m in the Lost Generation: If you’re in your early 20s and entering journalism, the narrative is that you’re foolhardy or you’re a digital guru. If you’re in your 40s, the narrative is that you’re an entrepreneur with a second act, or you’re a sad sack print refugee who’s been laid off or jumped ship to a new industry, after spending half a career toiling in this unfruitful enterprise. But I don’t see much written about my group: roughly 30-40, having clocked some solid years of labor, and watching the old world that inspired us to enter journalism fall apart in front of our eyes, even as we try to work every day. David Carr asked on Twitter, “Can I eat?” Unless that is an invitation to dinner, yes, David, I can eat. (And I’d be happy to eat on the Times’ expense account, so call me.)  What did you think was happening out here man? There’s a hard reality to the economics of the business for me: I’m invested in this career, having already changed careers once before, just a few years out of college. I could probably jump ship again and be making more in a few years in some other field, or doing something completely off the grid like running a charter boat in the Caribbean, but I’m still committed to this undertaking (funereal pun not intended). I’m learning more about it in the hopes of having a hand in shaping it for my successors. What would be “dead bang” scary to me, as Carr put it, is being about 45 and about three promotions away from the job I’d want to retire in, at a newspaper. What are the chances you make it all the way home?  Anyway, less has been said about my cohort than the ones above and below me, and so I understood why Sheelah, a member of it herself, wanted to focus on people around my rung on the ladder.

Here’s how she closes:

He also writes a blog for a Web outfit that pays him $250 a month to try to generate traffic for its site. He is making progress; some larger Web sites and even print publications have asked him to contribute. “What are the goals now?” he said. “I don’t even think about it in those terms right now. I’m just happy to be writing regularly. I’m treating it as a month-to-month thing.”

While most people are worried about getting paid for their work, I’m more concerned that journalists might be the digital-age equivalent of monks illuminating manuscripts, a group whose skills will soon disappear. Still, Paul and many like him press on, hoping that things will get better. And maybe they will.

I am worried about getting paid. And I found it really funny that Sheelah made a reference to monks, given that my blog is called Living Through 1500, a Clay Shirky reference to the rise of the Gutenberg printing press era. But I take her point. It’s harder to do old-fashioned yet immensely important journalism from where I sit. On Friday I was at the paidContent2010 conference at the New York Times building (strangely, probably as Sheelah’s story was being edited, a few floors above my head) and heard Arthur Sulzberger brag about sending David Barstow on a six month assignment to write a story about the Tea Party movement. It’s a pretty great story, but I wonder, as my colleague at The Big Money, Marion Maneker commented to me later, if the Times got their money’s worth on that one. Not that the article wasn’t superb– it was. But it seemed there and gone in a flash. Couldn’t the website have done more–with the article, with the voices, with the reporter’s notes?– to really make sure Barstow’s piece got the attention it deserved? What would.. yes I’m gonna say it… What would Gawker have done with that material?

There’s a lot of talk about the death of media, death of journalism, etc. Don’t put too much stock into it. A lot of really good people are trying really hard to do good work. And the industry is being forced to purge itself of a lot of really bad habits it picked up when printing press were also licenses to print money. In the long view, I’m more convinced than ever that  journalism will be here. It may not be in a form we recognize today, but people will always pick up the phone and get other people to tell them important things they’re not supposed to talk about.