I’ve been remiss in not linking to J-Lab’s new J-Learning center, with lots of helpful advice and instruction helping anyone and everyone do journalism online.
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Times change
I happen to have The Mean Season on the TV right now. Kurt Russell, playing a reporter at a Miami paper, is recording conversations with a murderer. Today, reporters in Miami get fired for less.
Follow the money
Cyberjournalist reports on a survey that finds that online workers fresh out of college are getting higher salaries than their print and TV cousins.
The survey found that the media online publishing salary in 2004 was $32,000. By comparison, the median salary for TV was $23,492; for cable TV was $30,000; for daily newspapers was $26,000; for weekly newspapers was $24,000; for radio was $23,000; and for consumer magazines was $27,000.
Since I wrote the new-media curriculum for the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism, I consider that good news.
But the real question is what an independent online writer (aka blogger) will be able to make soon, from a company a la Gawker Media or WeblogsInc or from advertising at Blogads et al. Where will the best and brightest of journalism’s future go? [via Lost Remote]
I unlearned everything I learned in kindergarten in j-school
Jay Rosen, back from a journalism educators’ confab, writes about what he used to teach but doesn’t now. A few of his bullets:
* I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it’s a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it’s the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don’t care if they’re called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help.
Yes, and so we need to rethink how we look at the schools and their mission just as we look at the news organizations and their missions. More on this soon.
* I used to teach that the ethics of journalism, American-style, could be found in the codes, practices and rule-governed behavior that our press lived by. Now I think you have to start further back, with beliefs way more fundamental than: “avoid conflicts of interest in reporting the news.” If you teach journalism ethics too near the surface of the practice, you end up with superficial journalists.
* The ethics of journalism begin with propositions like: the world is basically intelligible if we have accurate reports about it; public opinion exists and ought to be listened to; through the observation of events we can grasp patterns and causes underneath them; the circle of people who know how things work should be enlarged; there is something called “the public record” and news adds itself meaningfully to it; more information is good for it leads to greater awareness, which is also good; stories about strangers have morals and we need to hear them, and so on. These are the ethics I would teach first….
* Alas, I used to teach that the world needs more critics; but it was an unexamined thing. Today I would say that the world has a limited tolerance for critics, and while it always needs more do-ers, it does not always need more chroniclers, pundits, or pencil-heads.
No news is news
Tonight I was listening to Anderson Cooper (via Sirius) and he broke an unwritten rule of news: He criticized his competitors for overdosing on the Natalee Holloway story. Of course, CNN and Cooper can be accused of overdosing on a few stories of their own (ahem). But I’ll take a little news self-criticism, even if it is self-serving.
COOPER: Well, in Aruba, not much happened in the 11th week of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, but you’d never know that if you listen to just about every other cable news channel.
We did a number of stories after the American teen went missing and her family’s anguish is and hard to imagine and we understand why they want the story to remain in the news, but we’ve been kind of stunned, because every night, our cable competitors devote hours and hours to this story, even though, sadly, nothing new is happening. We decided to start tracking their coverage, because to be honest, it’s getting downright ridiculous. Here’s what the other guys were reporting just last night…
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS HOST: Not much new in the Natalee Holloway mystery.
RITA COSBY, MSNBC HOST: The big mystery, of course, is taking place on the island of Aruba.
DAN ABRAMS, MSNBC HOST: Let’s go to Aruba. It’s getting ugly. Natalee Holloway’s mother is fighting back.
JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC HOST: Meanwhile, a new battle is brewing between Natalee’s mom and a key suspect. We brought you that story last night. ….
O’REILLY: … 2 1/2 months, I’ve never seen in my 30-year career, a crime story covered this way, ever. It’s a mystery. It’s a soap opera. It’s a reality show and each night, people come in for the latest. I thought it would dissipate. I thought it would go away. It has not.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: It truly has not. The only thing we can honestly report to you tonight is that a young woman is still missing. A family is still in anguish. Until something else happens, until there really are developments, we’ll leave the rest to the other guys.
Until we get a good, juicy runaway bride, of course.
