Journalism is a *learned skillset*. The industry isn't just dying it's completely eliminating knowledge and abilities that took people decades to perfect. No matter what you think of "the media" without those skills you couldn't just wake up tomorrow and write an article worth reading.
Absolutely and it's not just talent, it's also a specific and special set of skills developed over decades, with generations of passed on knowledge, and it's all just evaporating into the ether.
A lot of us, I think, don't fully appreciate the distinction between Comcast and Gannett and Disney and WBD, who own the media empires, and the journalists who work there.
Most of these people live in hell doing the best they can in the narrow area they're allowed.
I would so appreciate having a career in journalism, but the pay isn't there! I'm good at journalising. And we rot as a society without good journalism.
The pay of journalism has never been currency; nor have the best journalists been paid handsomely for their effort.
Even Hemingway abandoned it for the novel form.
The skills are one thing, but the culture and ethos of independence and service to the truth and the public good rather than the business bottom line in which you use them are also key and you absorb those as much as actually learn them
a lot of people only seem to experience the news media via punditry and don't seem to even consider where the original reporting the pundits comment on came from. I remember when blogging was the big thing and some would claim they were "replacing the news media" despite doing no reporting at all
Journalism began to wither when colleges stopped teaching English and started offering Communications.
Propaganda is not fealty to record; it is fealty to vested interest -- yet it pays bills remarkably well.
As a journalism graduate, I agree with this. Sadly, I became disillusioned with news writing, but I still understand and have begun using those skills in my podcast. Brevity and simplicity of getting the opening introductions and questioning. Follow-up questions. All of the things that make stories.
