The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes

By Bill Boyarsky, Truthdig. Posted December 18, 2008.

Sotomayor sounds like a Marine commercial: Only the toughest need apply. He doesn't mention the really ugly side of the new media life -- advertisers pressuring news organizations for favorable coverage. That's the great danger of all these news organization Web sites, one that journalism ethics gurus have yet to adequately confront. I don't see a lot of money-hungry news businesses resisting such pressure.

These are the low-pay jobs. There are also the no-pay jobs popular with Web site management. Young journalists are encouraged to blog and post on a variety of no-pay Web sites. This is supposed to help them find employment, and it probably does. But it certainly does violence to the old slogan of a day's work for a day's pay.

Or, journalists can hustle grants from foundations or wealthy individuals to pay for their reporting. The practice is becoming more common. In fact, a friend proposed giving a Pulitzer Prize for "entrepreneurial journalism."

This routine is a marked difference from the life of reporters on newspapers, especially the big ones, during a brief golden age of journalism, from the mid-1960s through much of the 1990s. Labor-saving technology, along with consolidations and a monopoly on classified, retail, auto and other advertising, had made newspapers quite profitable. Thanks to the American Newspaper Guild union, journalists' salaries increased. On the big papers, such as the Los Angeles Times, where I worked, we traveled far out of town pursuing stories that sometimes took weeks to report. There was a wall between the advertising and news departments.

It was a sharp contrast to when I started at the Oakland Tribune, where pay was low, working conditions bad and advertisers ruled. The life attracted only those in love with newspapering, including many eccentrics and nonconformists who wouldn't fit into an organization-man straitjacket. It was a blue-collar business. My friend Al Martinez, another Tribune survivor, and I used to look around the Times' large newsroom, contemplating our new pampered lives and agreeing that it couldn't last.

It didn't. 

With the new media's low pay, bad working conditions and powerful advertiser clout, the journalism world looks as it did when Martinez and I started.

Why would any college graduate want to do it? A lot won't. The smart, somewhat normal materialists will choose law or business school, just as their parents wanted them to do. Scholars of journalism and veterans of the golden age will mourn the loss of "the best and the brightest."

The impossible routine expected of today's young reporters will attract only oddballs, fanatics, obsessives driven to writing and reporting and free spirits entranced with the adventurous life of the journalist, all of them people who can't contemplate writing briefs for some fat-headed law firm senior partner. Only those who can live on the low pay, survive idiot bosses and navigate through many other obstacles will survive.

I went through all these negatives one night while talking to one of Truthdig Editor Bob Scheer's communication classes at USC. A young man in the back of the room raised his hand. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll figure it out."

They will. Despite all the miseries in the business, it's still hard to stop a good reporter.

See more stories tagged with: journalism, advertising, web, newspapers, los angeles times, bankruptcy, reporters, chicago tribune, tribune co., baltimore sun

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