State of the craft

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As traditional news media continue their contraction, Matt DeRienzo worries that the people who do the most important work — journalists — are being forgotten: "In theory, there could be journalism without traditional media companies as we’ve known them, but there won’t be without people who do the job of journalism. So why isn’t the economic, mental and physical well-being of individual journalists, their adaptability and resiliency, a bigger part of our conversation?"

Two of the most popular modern authors — Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series — don't even exist, Daniel A. Gross writes in a look at a publishing legend: "They’re still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers — a business model that is central to the Internet age."

Megan McArdle says that journalism's embrace of drama is partly to blame for that now-discredited study of same-sex marriage acceptance: "We reward people not for digging into something interesting and emerging with great questions and fresh uncertainty, but for coming away from their investigation with an outlier — something really extraordinary and unusual. When we do that, we're selecting for stories that are too frequently, well, incredible."

The latest report from the Project for Improved Environmental Coverage found an upswing in environmental stories, Laura Dattaro writes, but there was wide variation — big TV networks improved, but regional papers reduced coverage: "As media organizations of all shapes and sizes dealt with the combined hit of a recession and the exponential growth of the internet, environment and science reporters were frequently jettisoned, sometimes taking the entire beat with them."

The wall between editorial content and advertising just lost a few more bricks with a rewriting of industry guidelines from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Michael Sebastian writes: "The new principles simply say, 'Editors should avoid working with and reporting on the same marketer.' They previously said, 'Don't Ask Editors to Write Ads.'" More from ASME. And Mark Duffy on why native advertising doesn't work.

More than 40 years after uncovering the My Lai massacre, Seymour Hersh reflects on that story and the future of investigative reporting: "The mainstream press is driving itself out of business and it’s probably going to be okay, because some of the younger stuff, once they get their feet on the ground and get a little more money, a little more success, a little more security, and a little more confidence, they’ll fill the gap. I’m talking about the BuzzFeeds. Gawker."

Tim Adams writes about an upcoming book by photojournalist Will Steacy, who documented the Philadelphia Inquirer's slide from a staff of about 700 to the current 210: "[There] are small gestures of defiance, the pinned up cuttings and cartoons that reflect on the consequences of a revolution of 'news' to 'content;' there are poignant observations of defeat, note-strewn reporters’ desks quietly become sanitised and paper-free in his pictures and then disappear entirely."

The journalism recession put many copyeditors on unemployment, so reporters now have to work without a wire, Leighton Walter Kille writes. He offers some tips: "Many journalists work on their own or in smaller organizations without a layer of dedicated editors. Many large organizations have also seen significant staff cutbacks, and attention to fine detail has often suffered. So is it enough for reporters to simply submit or post a story and cross their fingers? No."

A new survey of 250 freelancers around the world by an organization called Project Word is bad news for freelancers who do investigative reporting, David Uberti writes: "Eighty-one percent of respondents said they abandoned 'otherwise viable and important public-interest reports' due to resource constraints over the past half-decade. These pieces, totaling between 560 to 1,150 stories, ranged from reports on Pentagon-provided healthcare to global reproductive rights."

The last we heard from Scott Carney, he was saying freelance writers in aggregate earn less than one college football coach. His math on that was challenged, but now he's back anyway with a post proposing that writers for major magazines should get $20 per word: "So how did I come up with $20 per word? Multiplication. If we were to make just 10% of the gross revenues of a given magazine then we would earn at least $20 for every word we publish."