Generally speaking, the World section ran 12 pages in the magazine. Nation, devoted to news within our borders, ran about the same or a page shorter. Think of that--an American publication, marketed to millions, that devoted slightly more of its attention, and vastly more of its budget, to news about events outside the United States.Time Inc., the parent company of Time, was flush then. Very, very, very flush. So flush that the first week I was there, the World section had a farewell lunch for a writer who was being sent to Paris to serve as bureau chief...at Lutece, the most expensive restaurant in Manhattan, for 50 people.So flush that if you stayed past 8, you could take a limousine home...and take it anywhere, including to the Hamptons if you had weekend plans there. So flush that if a writer who lived, say, in suburban Connecticut, stayed late writing his article that week, he could stay in town at a hotel of his choice. So flush that, when I turned in an expense account covering my first month with a $32 charge on it for two books I'd bought for research purposes, my boss closed her office door and told me never to submit a report asking for less than $300 back, because it would make everybody else look bad. So flush when its editor-in-chief, the late Henry Grunwald, went to visit the facilities of a new publication called TV Cable Week that was based in White Plains, a 40 minute drive from the Time Life Building, he arrived by helicopter--and when he grew bored by the tour, he said to his aide, "Get me my helicopter."
These days, a reporter is far more likely to find himself explaining to accounting why he stayed in the Holiday Inn when there was a perfectly good Super 8 only 13 miles away.
There's little doubt that this inflects peoples' reporting. Journalists these days live in a world where a degree, long experience, a solid work history and quite a bit of talent are no guarantee of income security. It's little surprise that that's the world they portray in the pages of the nation's few remaining print outlets.
And that's why this former personal finance reporter for Time, Inc's FORTUNE Group ditched journalism to become a life insurance agent.
It's little surprise that that's the world they portray in the pages of the nation's few remaining print outlets.
Oh, but I though journalists were soooooo deeply "professional" that they would never, ever, let anything remotely personal affect their honed objectivity.
Second, random, thought: why do journalists need degrees? It's not like they have degrees in the subjects they write on, in many/most cases. Why not hire some smart high-school graduates?
The degree sure didn't do Edmund L. Andrews any good, as we found out this week.
The benefit of a what I would call a good college journalism program -- like, say, Missouri's -- is that it functions almost as a trade school within a liberal arts program. Students learn how to cover news by doing it, and also get what one hopes is a well-rounded if basic grasp of history, economics, foreign cultures, etc.
You can hire a smart high school grad and teach this stuff, but it wasn't really feasible on a large scale in the old days (it's cool to send a rookie out to cover a baseball game or a barbecue festival, but ideally, you'll have someone not so green at the city council meeting), and now, with editors overworked as it is, it's exponentially less so. When you have a dozen things to do before deadline, you just don't have the time or energy to explain to your average smart high schooler why it was important to get quotes from more than one source or how to craft a tight lede.
I run a small news gathering business (all Internet). Of the roughly 20 reporters we have hired none have had masters of journalism degrees. A handful studied journalism for their B.A., but that was not a criteria in their hiring. I work hard to hire the smartest people we can find who have a desire to be a reporter (not just a writer). Their academic background and the quality of the institution they attended has proved to be a very good proxy for their ability to learn on the job and interact with sources. The subject matter of what they majored in has not been important.
"Oh, but I though journalists were soooooo deeply "professional" that they would never, ever, let anything remotely personal affect their honed objectivity."
That was my first thought. But my second thought was to wonder whether this is even empirically true. In the era Podhoretz describes, were journalists less inclined to write heart-tugging stories about the poor during recessions? Somehow, I doubt it, but perhaps Megan can elaborate on this.
I'm not sure about the conclusion. As far as I recall, economic news as reported has always been bad news, regardless of how flush those doing the reporting may have been. (No boom has been so all-encompassing that reporters can't find someone, somewhere, for whom, as the cliche goes, "The American Dream is slowly becoming a nightmare.") The market's up? Jobs are down. Jobs are up? They're not good jobs like we used to have. And so on.
Obviously the reporting is more negative right now, but that seems pretty much in line with the state of things. If anything, it strikes me as more optimistic than it might be, because the press is for the moment inclined to give the current Administration's programs to deal with matters the benefit of the doubt.
Are you serious? I guess you never go to the Yahoo Finance section. Housing starts down 50%? Stocks are up because that's better than expected. If you say this is a bear market rally, people wanna tear your head off. I think you are confusing regular reporters(and CNBC) with people like Krugman and Roubini.
Rob Lyman raises an interesting point about the value-add of journalists having expensive degrees.
I would expand on that to say that my impression is that many (most?) of the classic journalists in American history where more of the high-school-at-best grad, apprenticeship, work-your-way-up school than of the all-the-right-ivy-league-degrees, my-masters-in-journalism-assures-you-of-my-quality school.
Indeed, it would seem that the rise of the "credentialed" journalist has largely mirrored the decline of the industry from the halcyon days Podhoretz describes to the doldrums of today.
It's almost like the fairly common story of once-great families: one generation is poorly educated and not "of society" but works hard, is smart and lucky and builds up a great wealth to bequeath to further generations. The further generations then attend all the right schools, mingle with all the right people, produce nothing of value and eventually squander the family right back to ordinary status.
As someone who has focused his career in entrepreneurial enterprises, how do companies function like this?
Flush times aren't an excuse to allow yourself an extra 10-20% in "expense" compensation. There's a huge difference between ensuring your employees expense things to use their time wisely, and encouraging employees to spend frivolously.
You take that extra money and you put it into:
1. Diversifying the business.
2. Paying off debts/amassing cash-on-hand
3. Other important things than expense accounts (are valued employees being compensated well against market?)
I just went to connecticut to do a bid defense, which included a number of people coming along. There were very few true frivolities. Meals, hotel, transportation. The hotel was mid-range business class fare, the meals were probably mid-range business class as well ( meaning each person spends about $35-40 on average for a dinner, and $15-25 for a lunch ). Transportation was normal for all attendees, meaning drive and expense the mileage/tolls, train, etc.
And this is for a company that met it's 2009 operating profit goal in May and is on track to grow at least 30% this year alone (3rd straight year of double digit growth in revenue, while experiencing better profit margins as well).
When a company or industry loses it's focus on operating smartly, it stops being a company or industry that can weather the bad times.
I've come to know a good many reporters over the years, and in my experience the best ones are those who got into journalism after working in some other field for awhile, and thus know what they're writing about through real-world experience. Most of the formal J-school trained reporters I know don't have a clue about much of anything. Until the last few years, these latter types seemed to believe that they were acolytes in some kind of high priesthood, whose job it was to report on the doings of those engaged in other, lesser pursuits, which meant pretty much anything not connected with journalism. And they did so with the attitude that those being covered should be grateful for the attention.
I've seen similar attitudes, for sure. I think another aspect of the problem is that the reporters and editors who practice the sort of no-BS journalism everyone (at least allegedly) would like to see more of tend not to be very good at climbing the corporate ladder. It's a personality type that doesn't lend itself well to meetings with the publisher and ad director about increasing output through leveraged synergy.
"Journalists these days live in a world where a degree, long experience, a solid work history and quite a bit of talent are no guarantee of income security."
Poor journalists. Almost everybody else lives in the alternate universe, where a degree, long experience, a solid work history and quite a bit of talent guarantee income security until retirement.
Oh yeah, well I'm a journalist and I made $1.30 on my blog last month!
www.jourtegrity.blogspot.com
ideally, you'll have someone not so green at the city council meeting
In my experience, the only people giving decent City Hall coverage are the alt-weeklies with ads for hookers in the back. Don't know where they get their reporters.
the only people giving decent City Hall coverage are the alt-weeklies with ads for hookers in the back.
Rob, those aren't hookers in the back of Willamette Week -- those are hard working college girls who need help with their tuition!
As we have seen, there's an alternative for writers: live beyond your means and then try to get sympathy for being stupid.
What's with all of the whining here about writers not getting paid enough? I don't recall the constitutional amendment that guarantees writers an income in the top 20%.
If you want to make the big bucks (or live on the big expense account), go into a field that makes the big bucks. If you don't like any of those fields, but still want to make the big bucks you've got three choices:
suck it up like an adult and do it anyway,
suck it up like an adult and don't do it,
marry someone rich who finds you attractive.
If you choose either of the first two, whining about the fact that you are smart but barely making ends meet doesn't endear you to anyone. If you choose the last one, whining about the fact that your spouse looks like Helen Thomas or Ed Asner doesn't endear you to anyone either.
Welcome to life...
It must have been nice.
OTOH, it's fun watching the largely pro-socialist media get a painful lesson in free-market economics.
Pro-socialist media? Care to prove that to me? CNBC? Brian Williams? Charlie Gibson? Fox? What basis do you have for that? Would you call the WaPo socialist? The only Democrat op-ed writer they have is Eugene Robinson. The rest are DINO's or Republicans. The NYT? The same NYT that hired Bill "William the Bloody" Kristol? Ross Douthat? David "Bobo" Brooks?
Polling has shown journalists skew far left; this has been true for decades.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2004/cyb20040524.asp#1
Pew compared this year’s poll of 547 journalists around the nation, 247 of them at national-level outlets, to the results of a similar survey conducted by the group, then-known as the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, in 1995. This year they discovered 54% of national journalists described themselves as “moderates,” down from 64 percent in 1995, as “the percentage identifying themselves as liberal has increased from 1995: 34% of national journalists describe themselves as liberals, compared with 22% nine years ago....More striking is the relatively small minority of journalists who think of themselves as politically conservative” at just 7 percent amongst national journalists, but that’s a surge from an even more piddling 4 percent in 1995. “As the case a decade ago,” Pew noted, “the journalists as a group are much less conservative than the general public (33% conservative).”
Frankly, I'm amazed there are people who don't know this.
I am skeptical of that study. Do you ever watch David Gregory? See, that is the problem with these kind of studies. Idjits like Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman can identify as liberals even though they aren't anything of the kind. Either that, or they displaying their towering insecurities twice a week on the NYT op-ed pages.
Calvin Jones,
You claim that "Idjits like Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman can identify as liberals even though they aren't anything of the kind."
But plenty of conservatives would make the same claim about "Bill "William the Bloody" Kristol? Ross Douthat? David "Bobo" Brooks?"
If one looks at "Journalism" as an industry, it is similar in paradigm to the automobile industry. The social contract underwritten by a fat bottom line is falling victim to leaner times. Journalism as a modern industry no longer has the revenue model to create a social contract of lifetime employment, big expense accounts, and a guaranteed pension.
I have my own theory that the self-importance of the profession noted by so many outside observers comes from 3 main factors:
1. in the old "halcyon" days, becoming a journalist was indeed like being admitted to an elite club, because there were very few real outlets to express opinion, commentary, and analysis-- the big national newspapers and three television channels. Now we have cable TV and the internet. Journalism culture has responded to this development by over-emphasizing its "eliteness."
2. Journalists do provide a necessary (if imperfect) function in our democracy, and most journalists are well aware that their work involves an element of "public good."
3. Journalists have all the tools at their disposal to self-inflate the importance of themselves and their publications. For example, the NYT won a Breaking News Pultizer for reporting on the Elliot Spitzer ordeal, and the LAT won an Explanatory Reporting Pulitzer for reporting on fighting wildfires in the West. For an industry trying to maintain its relevance, the topical emphases seem a little out of touch, but within the cultural "circle" of journalism it probably seems like a big deal.
That description of Time, Inc.'s glory days sounds exactly like what went on at pioneering graphics company 3dfx or at any number of dot-com enterprises. Dump roll-around money all over the floor when times are good, wake up the next morning in a low-rent motel room with a whopper of a hangover and the vague sensation that your wallet might be missing.
Journalists these days live in a world where a degree, long experience, a solid work history and quite a bit of talent are no guarantee of income security.
Boo hoo.
"Why journalists deserve low pay": http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0519/p09s02-coop.html
Our hostess excepted, of course. :)