Passing it Down
I’m teaching Journalism 371, “Feature Writing,” at the University of Oregon.
Teaching is good for me. Because of the students, and the paycheck, but also as a writer. Teaching forces me to relearn what I know, to put it succinctly, and to dialogue with my students, testing my ideas against theirs.
Students are young, duh, and have access to a world I do not. I refer to “newspapers” and they have hardly seen a paper newspaper. My cultural references go right past them—anything before 2007 draws blanks—but they fill me in.
Talking about the issues within journalism can be depressing. I assigned a segment from NPR (below) on how badly local news has collapsed over the last decade. It uses their local paper, the Eugene Register-Guard, as the example, declining from 40 to just seven reporters since 2018.
Can you learn a craft without being in the presence of craftsmen/women?
I also assigned my students an obituary for newsroom culture, by Maureen Dowd. She laments the loss of cross fertilization, the happenstance, teamwork, and education that occurred in newsrooms. I asked my students how they could still absorb the lessons of journalism while working alone at home on their keyboards.
Their answers were, by reading all day—mainlining good journalism—and by going to journalism school. I had the same answer—teach and study, write and talk journalism continuously.
But they are not mourning a previous world. Their question is, what can we do next? And there are many things, from new news sites to subscription models, from owning the issue silos to building followers on Substack. Intensely local news sites are growing in many places, sometimes with more staff than local newspapers. Willamette Week in Portland is breaking news and investing heavily in reporting. The very biggest media are thriving financially. At the entry level, barriers have never been lower.
What kind of journalism has actual, sustained value?
Two iconically-new, emblematically-cool, very-very futuristic (new!) news brands have folded.
BuzzFeed News and Vice News have both gone bankrupt…again. (Below.) Vice has burned through over a billion dollars from multiple investors, generated a lot of sexy and crazy journalism, and never made a profit, once. BuzzFeed, which invented viral clickbait, thought it could roll that into a journalism empire. It won a Pulitzer, burned through hundreds of millions in investment cash, and never made a profit, once. Notice a pattern here?
I just assigned my students a documentary, Page One, about the New York Times in 2015. In it, my old mentor David Carr attacks BuzzFeed for “putting on a pith helmet” and pretending to do real journalism. They in turn insulted “legacy” media for being clueless.
Back then, the Times was deep in debt, and had two million subscribers, half digital. Now BuzzFeed is bankrupt and the NYT has 9.3 million subscribers, the most in its history, 90% of them digital.
Who got the last laugh?
Mainstream media = quality journalism = accuracy = valuable.
Viral = forgettable = pointless = worthless.
Articles referenced above:
Opinion | Requiem for the Newsroom
How the rivalry between Gawker and BuzzFeed drove a social media boom – and bust