Is this the worst time to be a journalist?
With scores of redundancies in 2012 and a mass exodus of experienced journos, is this the worst time to be a journalist? In a feature that first appeared in Encore, Nic Christensen asks the question.
In June last year a tsunami of redundancies began to sweep across Australia’s media landscape. They came in a series of waves and in the 12 months that followed, an estimated 1,200 journalists departed the mainstream media.
The tide first went out on Fairfax Media. The company unveiled its “Fairfax of the Future” project and explained that this future would involve shedding 1,900 jobs over three years with more than 20 per cent of the departures coming from editorial. Reporters who were in the newsroom at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that day have told Encore of a palpable sense of shock.
“We’d seen redundancies before, but never of this magnitude. Many sensed that it was time to get out,” says one Fairfax reporter.
Add to all this there are way too many journalism schools churning out mediocre graduates. There are stuff-all jobs, so those who have one hold onto it way too long and become stale and bored. Such is the measure of quality these days, I think most media outlets would rather hire junior writers and save some money on the salary than invest in senior scribes and produce quality work. The whole cycle is vicious and it’s certainly not a career I’d recommend a young person thinking about wasting four years at uni. Instead, get a finance degree. 1) There’s high demand for finance journalists and 2) if all else fails you can get a job with a bank.
I’ve spent five years working as a writer online. I was lucky to get the job but I got myself out there and was prepared to compromise when it came to shaping content around the audience. Journalists I feel more broadly need to adapt their work and be prepared to alter it for a mass audience, as print journalist had a minnow circulation compared to what’s possible online.
Most importantly, I feel journalists need to start looking up the audience, rather than down and expecting people are going to care about what they have to say. Thinking something is important doesn’t make it important to the public. Raising awareness is important, too, but the hardline moving forward for the industry is that you need to shape content relative to your audience: write FOR your audience, rather than BECAUSE of your audience.
I’ve said this elsewhere but, going forward every “journalist” will need to know how to write, take a photo, capture audio and video, edit video, publish and share (read promote) their work through social media channels. Print roles are going because they are a singular dimension.
Oh and I wouldn’t sit around waiting to be taught those skills. Everything you need to know is out there already. With some good journalistic experience you’ll find it. What you can’t get easily is the experience of just doing it. I do everything now on a smart phone – record, edit, publish, promote. Each story gets better as I become more practiced. Look for good stories and just get started.
The future will be much brighter with multimedia skills and being digital first.
@ Charles Hodgson… I worked as a freelance journalist for three years and to make myself more employable I took up photography too. The gear, the kit, the lessons cost me at least $12,000. I worked for Fairfax and News (who are heavily unionised) and there is NO WAY they let their writers take photos. The more you diversify the role the more shit you become at each one of them. A lot of web journalists are asked to do Photoshop, HTML, Final Cut Pro etc but all they become is very ordinary at each one of them and ultimately the final product is second, if not third rate. As an example, take the stunning photos you often seen in mags like GW, AFR magazine, Wish or Sydney mag – you think a journo with a digi camera and three months training is going to produce that??? I know a lot of great photographers (who are out of work) and it takes a lifetime to perfect those skills! This idea that journalists can do everything is a bit condescending for mine…
I certainly feel very lucky to have had five years on newspapers at the start of my career. Everyone always said starting out on newspapers was the best training you could ever have and I loved every badly paid minute! Equally, I feel like it’s an exciting and interesting time to be a blogger, which is where I find myself since being retrenched from a print job last year. I will always love print but I also love the flexibility and immediacy of online.
@ Charles Hodgson
Do you mean “in future” rather than “going forward”?
Hi All,
I have worked as an international freelance journalist / now international news correspondent for Australian and global media for over twenty years.
I am the busiest that I have ever been with ongoing commissions from Australian and global media.
As a freelancer you need to be entrepreneurial and think like a business. As well as journalism / features / news – I train students in journalism, business and travel. Also I have set up and online training schools.
I have just set up a Linked In Group called Professional Paid journalists and there has been a great interest in joining. I was fed up with the groups that allow unpaid jobs and people offer to work for free. My group will not have any such unpaid jobs, they will be deleted.
Journalism is alive and well but if you specialize and look globally, the opportunities are endless.
cheers
Carole Goldsmith
@ JB Certainly not meaning to be condescending. I suppose my experience varies. I am in a regional area and I know some of the local print journos are expected to be able to take a “suitable” photo and some video. The local uni also features the multimedia skills as part of their journalism course. I suppose what i am saying is that being multi skilled will be better than specically skilled when it comes to flexibility though not necessarily making you the best at any particular one. May be the difference metro versus regional?
why have my positive comments been removed Tim, it is not all doom and gloom
Too long didn`t read I was once a journo Now I`m a janitor
Tut tut . . quite a few bum spellings in the comments.
I can’t help it . . my brain sees them and stops reading.
Whoops! sorry when I checked the words . . . they were indeed correct
Not sure holding up Mama Mia website as teh future of journalism is valid. They don’t actually pay their journalists.
How is it that a former fellow masters student that I studied with – who can’t spell and doesn’t know how to grammatically string a sentence together (who is Aussie born and bred) – not only graduate from a top Melb Uni, but then gets a (casual) job with Fairfax? This person seriously cannot spell – I’ve seen it with my own eyes – and not very bright either (and I’m being nice).
I was a top student, yet I am STILL struggling to find paid employment, even after working for free and am close to giving up entirely.
The only work I could find as a full-time “writer” was for a marketing company in the UK where I was severely underpaid (working 60+ hours a week). I came back more hopeful with a folio full of work, yet it has been an absolute nightmare.
If I knew then what I know now, I would never have studied media. I feel disappointed and apathetic. The industry is way too small in Australia, with not enough opportunities for not only experienced writers, but the many students graduating.
I keep trying because I write well and enjoy it.
It’s just so frustrating and depressing 🙁
Saw this the other day. Adds another perspective to the debate. Furore erupted when a photo taken with an iPhone and modified with instagram appeared on the cover of the New York Times. http://au.businessinsider.com/.....ram-2013-3 We live in interesting times.
The public no longer trusts the media. There are thousands of independent blogs and outlets for the news out there who are not being paid to censor or twist their words. The grammar and spelling alone in most mainstream media publications is enough to turn your stomach, and the highly doctored stream of nonsense the media tries to feed us finishes the job.
Newspapers are unnecessary and no longer relevant or trustworthy. They may never have been trustworthy, unfortunately for them we are now well aware of this. Journalism is already dead.
Alienate more than half the audience, then as a side dish ‘write crap’ my goodness whatever could be going wrong
I was a print journalist for more than 40 years and took a redundancy a few years back from a feature writing job on a national title. I saw that the writing was indeed on the wall and so I took what was, at the time, a reasonable payout and ran.
Luckily, my super was in reasonable order and after a few uncertain months I knew I’d made the right decision as both magazines and newspapers hit the digital wall and started dumping hundreds of good people out on the streets.
I still do a bit of freelance for a couple of reliable sources with whom I go back a long way – the money ranging from good, a dollar a word, to as low as 50 cents. But there are all sorts of bottom-feeders out there who want you to work for the dubious honour of seeing your name on their website. Thanks, but no thanks.
I feel truly sorry for young journalists who want to write but are exploited by these start ups, most of which will be lucky to be still functioning next week. Start your own blog, they say, but the unfortunate truth is that 99 per cent of personal insights don’t amount to much – there’s just so much yummy mummy angst or hip young dude attitude one can stomach.
Will it get better any time soon? I doubt it. The MEAA – we used to call it the Clowns Union because it was so laughable – and the pointy heads in the never-ending list of journalism schools are talking themselves up, per usual, as they carry on about “shaping the new media” and what a brave journalistic world it will soon be for all their starry-eyed graduates.
The simple truth is Australia is such a small market and making less do more, but not better, is how it now works. It’s all about whiz bang cheap thrills over boring words, even those that might actual say something worthwhile.
Sure, I’m old and grumpy but I had a good go over a long time and for that I’m grateful – all I would like to see is that the young writers of today are given a decent go, not exploited as is now too often the case.
There will be always be a need for people to report car prangs, gangsters, public events and so on.
There isn’t any more any need for “journalists” who write opinionated nonsense cut and pasted from Liberal party and dodgy lobbyists media releases.
Indeed wasn’t it only last week Kim Williams said there was still a future for newspapers. I can’t believe he honestly even thinks this and continues to talk about “newspapers” in the same way people used to talk about the exciting horizons brought about by the telegraph. He really needs to change his language, start talking about content everywhere and how media companies and their owners can work with journalists and others to create a newer and more relevant industry. It’s not as if the changes in the industry should have taken anyone by surprise.
The only people still talking up the future for newspapers are the papers. I believe that their reason for doing so is to milk existing (yet decreasing) revenue streams while they buy time working out how to effectively transition to online, both in terms of content creation and new business models. I think they would drop the physical production of papers in a heartbeat if they had confidence in the financial viability of the new models. If there exists a genuine concern for journalism, a key requirement of their future business must revolve around the creation of quality content (in its many forms) to drive consumers to online destinations and warrant the payment of fair compensation for content creators. There is an increasing demand for more quality content not less. Multi skilled journalists must surely be at the forefront of such content creation and core to the value of online news products.
I graduated 1984 with a BA Journalism and Sciences with a specialisation in Oil. As an investigative journalist I have not been able to publish in the media. The best I have done over the past decades is to produce two submissions to Australian parliamentary inquiries, one on Iraq (Intelligence on WMD’s) and the second on “potential reforms to national security legislation”. I have a theory on the demise of the print media – that the public do not want to waste their time reading news which only tinkers around the edges. There are very good reasons why the truth about oil and CSIRO developments in hydrogen fuel cells and biofuels needed to be published in the mainstream media from the 1970’s onwards. Readers want the truth about the nuts and bolts issues, I believe, and they are not getting it.