HOD Chapter IV
How much is it worth?
In this recent Anderson - Gladwell debate (which is hardly serious debate at all. This is no Dewey/Lippman conversation) they both, in their attempts to be the ”smartest guy in the room,” overshoot the mark. The question is not whether it’s free or not, it’s how much is it really worth? And worth is measured in two ways: money (our favorite) and social respect. For reasons i’ll go into later, reporters of my generation (1970 onwards) swam in oceans of respect until the last decade or so… Even as the public lost respect, we certainly maintained it for ourselves. But the money continued until the current crisis. Now the money is gone and in America, when the money goes, any illusion of social respect is lost forever. This is part of the problem with non-profit journalism. It’s a last ditch attempt by that generation to say ‘we are valuable! we are smart! we are indispensible! Of course we well still be professionally paid in the new world, but we won’t have to attract, or keep an audience.
What’s so discomforting is that as the profession looks to establish the value of their work they are forced (if honest) to see that so much of the success of golden age journalism was due to factors other than their intelligent reporting. The habit of it, the affordability of it, the classified, sports, comics, stock listings… What Adrian Monck calls ‘distraction.’
I have to think that Anderson will be more right in the end, some kind of amalgam of professional and avocational. It will be a much smaller profession and one wonders if it makes sense to have thousands and thousands of college students majoring in it. O right, ‘journalism’ is good all around training for many careers!
