Frank Rose isn't buying the doom-and-gloom predictions that the decline of print means the death of journalism as we know it. In fact, he sees signs that it's doing quite nicely online: "For every fledgling enterprise like Circa, which generates slick digests of other people's journalism on the theory that that's what mobile readers want, you have formerly short-attention-span sites like BuzzFeed and Politico retooling themselves to offer serious, in-depth reporting."
State of the craft
It may be all the rage in journalism, but longform storytelling places some unusual demands on the writers, editors, and other people who are trying to produce it, Lauren Rabaino writes in a report on the SRCCON conference: "Use longform storytelling to engage people with your site and draw them into other content. Because the content is so high-touch and bound to get attention, use that as an opportunity to draw readers into other places on the site and hook them."
Alexis Fitts and Nicola Pring write about a common dilemma in reporting on poverty — whether to ease a subject's suffering: Reporters "may consider their motives clear — to focus attention on societal problems in the hopes that they will be solved. But beyond the profession, the interpretation of motives and results when a (typically white) middle-class journalist presumes to tell the story of a poor family (often black or Latino) can be something quite different."
Roy Peter Clark once pitched a book proposal called The Honest Writer, in which he owned up to some of his own youthful sins against journalism, including fabricating quotes for a high school term paper. He reveals more in a Poynter post: "For the writer, in school or on the job, honesty is not just the best policy; it’s also the best insurance policy, protecting you and your reader from every form of literary malpractice. Honesty will keep you out of trouble."
Writing in AJR, Jim Bach explains how much reporter pay has slipped since 2003: "A decade ago, reporters and correspondents earned more than the average wage for all U.S. workers, but that is no longer true. Reporters, on average, earned $2,080 less than the national average last May, the most recent month for which data is available." Also, from Vox, we should have become anesthesiologists, but at least we're better than fast food cooks.
The Dutch financial institution ING surveyed journalists and public relations professionals to produce some surprising conclusions about fact-checking in the age of social media. "Fact-checking has become less thorough. 'Publish first, correct if necessary' is the motto these days. Only 20% of journalists always check their facts before publishing. Almost half of journalists said they published most of their stories as quickly as possible to correct later if necessary."
Erin Biba unloads on media startups and the way they pay writers, and she does it in a post on the media startup Medium: "I'm insulted by how much you're trying to pay me. Or not pay me. Until you guys coming up with newfangled ways to bring journalism online start valuing writers, I'm going to have to keep on dedicating the majority of my time and brainpower to traditional media organizations." Also, why Joe Wegner doesn't write for Medium.
Former Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert discusses the new reality of writing for a living — too few markets that pay well: "Maybe being a good writer increasingly will have to be an avocation – you'll need to earn real money doing something other than writing unless you marry well. It's hard to see how and where the digital world is going to support good article and book writing. Most of the writers I know in digital journalism jobs have to write short and often."
Derek Thompson has some highlights from an Indiana University survey of more than 1,000 journalists who were asked about the state of their trade. The results are downright depressing: Almost three in five say journalism is heading in the wrong direction. Less than one-quarter say they are "very satisfied" with their jobs. They're well educated, but — especially women — not very well paid. More from Romenesko, who notes a drop in minorities.
Mike Feinsilber thinks so. Reflecting on his decades of newsroom experience, Feinsilber recalls when "it rained yesterday" was followed by "the Weather Bureau said." Now, reporters can often assert facts on their own authority: "I'm not deploring this assertive, powerful journalism, I'm hailing it. The reader no longer needs to read between the attributions to discern the truth. Reporters can no longer hide behind sources: they have to know what they are talking about."