Who Does Journalism?

Ross Barkan
Aug 28, 2017 · 9 min read
The first edition of the Village Voice. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

You have the feeling you’re living on a precipice, a pivot point in history. Of course you do. It’s the narcissistic reflex of consciousness, our ego telling us — the slice of humanity alive on this planet, right now — we are important because we are here. Our existence matters. We are witnessing change. We have to. Our time can’t be static.

But I’ll say, in the danger of sounding too caught up in the moment, this time feels different. Put aside the terrifying national political reality for a moment. I don’t know if one president can put democracy on the brink, or if nuclear war is coming. (Odds are against the latter.) What I know is the industry I work in, the deeply-flawed but ever-necessary media industry, is in trouble. The Village Voice, one of the publications I’ve been regularly writing for over the past year and the one people have come to associate me with the most, announced last week it was shutting down its print and becoming purely a digital entity, another website in a vast ocean of websites. That last sentence may betray how I feel — I’m one of the few 27-year-olds left who likes reading a print newspaper — but let me be clear, I get it. The ads aren’t there. Print is expensive. No one’s picking it up. It’s all unsustainable.

We know what happens next. Budget cuts. Layoffs. Web can’t pay for itself like print once did. The publisher promises, somehow, nothing will change. I am going to keep writing for the Voice as long as I can because I am still in awe of its tradition and the editors there have been very good to me. Through the Voice, I’ve become more relevant in this New York political circus than I ever could have dreamed. In college, the only journalism I did was for an alternative paper, the Stony Brook Press, that modeled itself on the Voice — as raunchy, as radical. My vow was to never bore people.

Change keeps coming. I’m not yet 30 and I can already say I’ve written for at least three publications that killed their print. After graduating, I interned at The L Magazine, a little arts and music paper serving hipster Brooklyn. It no longer exists. I was a staff reporter at the New York Observer for three years. Now it’s a trim website. Time hurries on. The leaves that are green turn to brown, et cetera.

Let’s at least try to put aside some of the nostalgia. The past is never as good as we make it. Read The Power Broker and learn how willfully blind the New York press was to the machinations of the authoritarian in their midst, Robert Moses. Read how the Daily News covered the Stonewall riots. Read how the New York Times weaved mythology out of the Kitty Genovese murder. The 20th century is littered with horrid journalism.

What struck me, though, in this wave of Voice eulogies was one from Camille Dodero, a former editor and writer there. She told Esquire:

What I believe to be the most significant, perhaps symbolic, loss of the Village Voice’s print armwhich I wrote about when the Boston Phoenix shuttered, for Gawker!is that there are fewer and fewer pathways for kids from low-income families to become journalists. In my experience, the alt-weekly world famously recruited and mentored scrappy people like me, or like, say, David Carr, and there are few mechanisms left that are predisposed to bring that class of people into this world. If that continues to be the case, and we don’t have people who identify with working-class, low-income people working on the national level, we’ll get more and more dangerous surprises like the election of Donald Trump.

Class is always at the forefront of my mind. Blame my leftist/progressive/liberal politics for that, or the state university I went to. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about how class colors everything, the way people talk and act and eat and love and move through New York or the suburbs or the towns where they seem to hurry less and brood more. Journalists and writers who don’t think about class don’t think about America. They think about what’s not there.

The tragedy of journalism — among many tragedies — is how it has progressively shut its doors to the very people it purports to serve. This is not necessarily intentional or overtly insidious. The people making hiring decisions are usually fine people. Nine times out of ten, I do think most want to do the right thing. We all talk a good diversity game.

What’s actually happening is what Dodero is getting at. The erosion of journalism as an economically-viable profession means opportunities vanish and competition for what’s left grows unduly fierce. How do you get a coveted news job? Do a coveted internship. How do you get a coveted internship? Go to a coveted school, or know the right people. Hope you have the privilege of a fallback plan if your journalism major inevitably, at some point, doesn’t produce the money you need to survive. If a journalism internship is unpaid, it guarantees only the kids with the blessing of supportive, well-off households will fill it. The kid paying his or her way through school or working two side jobs doesn’t have time for that.

I’m one of the privileged ones. Both my parents had stable government jobs. I went to a state school they could pay for. I studied to be an English teacher, but dabbled in journalism and knew I could take risks. The L Magazine internship was unpaid. My first journalism job at the Queens Tribune paid me less than $30,000. It required the use of a car and compensated you 25 cents for every mile you drove. The economics of this, obviously, are insane. But I lived at home and borrowed my mom’s 2001 Mitsubishi Galant, banging it up and eventually making it my own. I commuted between Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Whitestone, Queens, veering off several nights a week to take graduate classes in English literature in Manhattan.

Like any job today, journalism isn’t allowed to be practiced without a college degree. There are journalism graduate schools that help give a leg up to the applicants killing each other for staff jobs. Many of them cost exorbitant amounts of money, particularly for a profession that, while gratifying, seems to only guarantee precarity. If you’re from a working class background and need a job right out of college to start paying back the student loans your parents won’t help you with or you just need cash, immediately, to stave off homelessness and hunger, you know a gamble on a journalism career isn’t worth it. The days of college dropouts-turned-big city columnists are long gone.

When opportunities shrink, it only makes sense that those able to take advantage of what’s left are those with the most advantages. If the Times or Daily News or Voice has 50 percent fewer job openings than it did 25 years ago, this means desperate competition that only those well-armed with the best degrees, connections, and resumes can win. This doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to the rule. This is America. There are always exceptions. But they usually distract from the grimmer truth.

The story of Donald Trump, as Dodero alludes to, is also the story of dying media. As dark as things can seem in New York, they are far more distressing in the towns and small cities that have lost thousands of newspaper jobs over the last decade. News organizations are clustered in a few large cities and almost nowhere else. So much has gone uncovered that we don’t know what we’re missing — until we do, and a reality show mogul is elected the 45th president of the United States. Digital media cannot replace what we’ve lost with print: news that was once localized and is now atomized, flinging people into their silos and distancing them from a community a thriving newspaper could knit together. A website is not a place. And it can’t employ an army of decently-paid journalists to do what journalists, when they’re at their best, do.

It’s harder than ever for many young journalists to imagine doing this until they retire. Where is the healthcare, the benefits, the modicum of job protections? Why slave for an organization today that can dismiss you on a whim tomorrow? (Hey, sorry, we’re “restructuring”…we’re pivoting to video…we’re fucking you.) Part of the appeal of my freelance life has been the ability, at least for now, to make a living wage while not being bound to the unsettling vagaries of laboring full-time at a news organization. You get the byline without the hassle. I’m good at pitching and coming up with ideas. I have a niche. How long can I keep doing this? I hope, in some form, forever, but I don’t really know.

I want to publish books. I want to do a lot of things. And I want to know there will be places for me that pay enough to sustain my life. I hope that for everyone. A democracy, however flawed this one may be, needs journalists who are more than privileged hobbyists. What scares me is when the reckoning really comes, when all print newspapers everywhere are gone, and Google and Facebook keep their stranglehold on the online ad market, starving media to the bone. I don’t want to be 47 and looking back and thinking, “Wow, I really wrung out the last few drops of a really good thing before it all went to hell, forever.” I don’t want to be a nostalgist. It’s a tired pose.

Before journalism, literature was my salvation. It still is, even if my perspective has evolved. I picked Tropic of Capricorn off a bookshelf when I was 19 (remember the Seinfeld episode?), read everything Henry Miller wrote, read his heroes — J. Krishnamurti, in particular —and developed a withering view the news: it was the transitory crap that distracted from what was really going on, the matters of the mind and the heart. What difference did it all really make, in any cosmic sense? Miller’s anarchism spoke to me, though I’m much more of a society person now than I was then. I see the value of news. I feel it. I fear what’s to come.

Digital wouldn’t be so awful if capitalism didn’t directly determine the future of journalism, still democracy’s bedrock. I am an unshakable loyalist to print books and despise e-readers, and I thankfully can say I am not alone, judging by the rich scene of neighborhood independent bookstores and the decline in e-reader sales. With books, the medium is tied to the message — the permanence of the object matters, the ability to touch and interact with it matters. What if your device crashes? What if the servers fail, the links break, the cloud wipes your data? What if Google decides to be evil? Book collections are resilient. There’s only so much screen time we need.

News is less tied to medium, consumed, well enough, at a glance through phone and laptop screens. I can read 800 words on my phone, not 92,000. I fear my lifetime’s repository of work contained entirely in the white belly of the digital ghost— I hoard the copies of the Voice, New York Times, New York Observer and various other print publications I’ve appeared in — will vanish, but it is what it is. I can sacrifice the advantages of print, the ability to be able to focus on one story at a time without the bombardment of new tabs and gchats and video ads, for the cleanliness of digital. I can live in this new world.

What I can’t do is live here when news-gathering isn’t paid for at nearly the rate it once was. Ideally, the government would recognize that the death of news organizations across America is a crisis and subsidize the industry. News needs a bailout. This president won’t do it. Maybe someone else will. In the meantime, nonprofits are encouraging, and I would like to see more ailing media outlets at least try to raise some money from their readers. Allow the community to have a real stake. Imagine if all the people who bemoaned the end of the Village Voice forked over $20 or $50 bucks to keep the lights on and the talent from leaving. Imagine if the news industry collectively stood up to Facebook and Google and tried to carve off even a fraction of what they’re owed for producing all the “content” that’s brought the tech monsters world-historical wealth.

News should be divorced from profits, treated as a public good like police protection and sanitation. But it isn’t, and won’t be anytime soon. I’m lucky because I have organizations that want to publish me and readers who care about what I have to say. My self-pity is limited. I have my Guardian column, my bylines in the Voice and Gothamist and elsewhere. I’ll be alright. Whether I can say the same for myself, or my colleagues, in a decade is another matter entirely. I hope for the best, always.

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