[LINK] "On the declining prospects of the young journalist"

[rfmcdonald]

The subtitle of Mireille Silcoff's despairing National Post article on the future of journalism is "(or: To the writers of the future: good luck with that)". The economics of freelance writing just don't work any more, not as a career and not even as a primary job.

Another friend who is a newspaper editor recently described the problem of speaking, from the perch of experience gleaned in decades before this one, at a journalism school today: “It’s either you stand up and lie, or just depress the hell out of all the students.”

Because copy editors have become an extreme luxury at many news outlets, and fact checkers a distant memory, and there are barely any free weeklies any more, certainly none that can get you your own apartment while still in university, and most outlets have no travel budgets for cultural reporting anymore, and most editors are so overburdened that a writer is lucky to get a one-word email (“thanks!”) in return for a commissioned article, be it a blurb or something slaved over for months.

The writer should be happy they are getting paid at all. The thousands of kids graduating from the print streams of North American journalism schools now are destined for years of unpaid internships at organizations currently hemorrhaging money, or an unmoored existence, fuelled by bright hope and nearly impossible expectations, in the twittering universe of blogs, Tumblr, non-paying online magazines and postings on social media. They will be convinced to write for free over and over again, because it is “good exposure.” It comes to the point where a thousand retweets — or Facebook likes or Instagram thumbs-up — feels like actual career headway, rather than the fleeting pleasant distraction that it is, the scent of bread and circuses in the wind (albeit much more circus than bread).

Last year I did visit my former editor’s feature-writing class. For my talk, I chose the lying route. I had just written a cover story for an American magazine that represented a quarter of my income that year, a story I had worked on for six months. I talked about the multiple trips the piece required, about the all-nighter with the cawfee-tawking fact checker, about the library of 23 books I read in preparation for writing, about the month of interview transcription, about the four versions the story went through before publication.

I stood there lying not because any of the above was untrue for me, last year. I was lucky enough to be born in 1973, to have gained all my experience and connections in the last decades when the long-form style of feature print journalism I was describing was not just a viable route for many writers, but a profitable one.

But it will frankly will be an impossible career niche for nearly every single person in the graduating classes of 2015, who are coming into journalism in a time of great transition and mystery as to how the industry, never mind its art, will continue. I certainly have no crystal ball on the matter.