Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012. The controversy over a job offer paying €0.75 per article, mentioned as “a few months ago”, the state of Spanish newspapers and the debate over the origins of the crisis reflect that moment.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about journalism, about the precarious conditions of new journalists, and we could even get into the debate about the death of good journalism. The truth is that journalism is one of the degrees with the fewest job prospects today. Even so, new journalists may not be approaching their future the right way in this new era of opportunities.
I once met a great journalist who used to say that studying journalism to work for peanuts at an established newspaper was like studying business administration to end up behind a bank counter. A few months ago, a huge row broke out on social media when a job offer proposed paying a journalist €0.75 per article. From there, the precarious conditions of journalists came to light, along with news outlets’ inappropriate and abusive use of interns and an endless stream of complaints from an increasingly battered profession. Let’s begin.
Being a journalist is not the opposite of being an entrepreneur, nor is it the same as being a civil servant. Howard Owens has published some guidelines for reinventing journalism, a very interesting article whose points I’m going to take the liberty of discussing, because it was written from the mind of someone inside journalism. When you look at it from the outside, as those of us who consume the news do, you can say where journalism could improve and at what point good journalism began to die. And that’s where new journalists, whether young recent graduates full of energy and passion, journalists who have lost their jobs or those working freelance, can now give journalism a new twist.
Owens’ list included these 10 points:
- Start your own online news site.
- Connect with the community you serve, whether geographic or topical.
- Cover the big stories, and the small ones too.
- Be a real person; your byline counts.
- Publish what you know when you know it, and let stories develop incrementally.
- Be absolutely ethical in how you handle information.
- Be transparent.
- Forget old-school objectivity and be transparent about your point of view.
- Give readers what they want.
- Don’t give readers what they want.
At one point I was subscribed to 16 newspapers. Now I’m subscribed to just 2 of them. Do you know why? Because these two papers say exactly the same as the other 14, and probably the same as the hundreds of newspapers there are in Spain.
When we read a story in a newspaper, we usually remember the name of the paper where we saw it, but we rarely remember the name of the author, simply because few journalists give their personal point of view or set themselves apart from the rest. We might even think the same journalist had written for 100 newspapers. So where’s the difference, in a comma or a period?
What’s more, we already know what we will and won’t find in a newspaper. We know we’ll find stories twisted to fit the paper’s ideology, and in many cases we know we won’t find the truth, or that it will be reduced to an ambiguous version of it.
If we stop at points 9 and 10 of Owens’ list (give readers what they want, don’t give readers what they want), the truth is that a point 11 is missing: “Give readers what they need, even if it’s not what they want to read: give them the truth.”
A business opportunity for journalists
I imagine (and forgive me if I’m wrong) that a journalist’s dream should be to have their own newspaper and not depend on other people’s terms. I know that in Spain the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t very widespread yet, but journalists are no exception to the phrase we so often repeat: “for you, entrepreneurship is not an option but a necessity”, at least if you want to start working soon or have a minimum of financial security in your profession.
As a young journalist or an inexperienced entrepreneur, you might think this idea is crazy, since you couldn’t compete with today’s big media outlets. My answer is that this view is far removed from reality.
An online newspaper with 30 million visits a month and a staff of 30 doesn’t have a profitable business if it lacks the profits of print journalism. On the other hand, one person with an online newspaper and 500,000 visits a month has a very profitable business and a great showcase for their professionalism. What’s more, you can always team up with 4, 6 or 8 journalists and launch your own newspaper. If you do something different from what already exists, many people would read that kind of journalism.
An example: When the press talks about the origin of the crisis in Spain, one newspaper blames Zapatero for his poor management and another blames Aznar for inflating the bubble (both former Spanish prime ministers). Clearly, what’s missing is a newspaper that tells us the truth about how the crisis began. In fact, we’ve seen shameful and pathetic manipulation by much of the media on all sorts of issues. That gives a bad name to journalism, to the newspaper in question and to the journalist who goes along with it.
A journalist sells information (the truth). The moment a journalist manipulates the truth in any way, they are killing journalism.
In the age of freedom of information, people are over-informed and at the same time uninformed or misinformed. Don’t you want to change that and earn a living while you’re at it? It’s time for new journalists to replace a badly damaged journalism.
Featured image: Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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