But no, really, what's the future of this profession?

This all comes down to not knowing how to monetize internet material.

It isn't so much that reporters willfully or willingly gave away/surrendered their ethics or influence with regard to their own destinies or that of their profession. It is that the entire industry turned on its head.

Previously, in the print format, reporters held the power and were the ones generating the quality work that sustained newspapers and most visibly displayed their need/importance and usefulness. The bean-counters were in the background, just counting all the money.

In the internet age, from a reporting standpoint, it seems that quantity/volume matters more than quality -- this is shown in the emphasis on clicks, tweets, etc. -- and reporters' efforts, status or even the perceived need for them to be very good -- have fallen off and into the background in the push for numbers/volume. With their inability to keep up -- not the reporters' fault, just the nature of the beat -- the bean-counters have stepped into the void and up to the front and center.

And they have no financial solutions.

 

everything you say is true. one point: i'm not saying reporters did or didn't "surrender" ethics or code. industry tumult "surrendered" it for them. i'm simply saying it's noteworthy that with a wholesale change in reportorial identity, there wasn't even a self-serving debate on the change. a cow became a fish and didn't think it important to remark upon. that's odd -- and contrary to the original beast's nature.

 

If management and the industry dictated it, what is there to debate? Many true journalists don't like, or are appalled by, the direction, but what is to be done about it?

 

look around this site. we talk about EVERYTHING in journalism, big and small, hated and loved: movies, whitlock, awards, f-in' studs, story length, content, editors, bosses, money, podcasts, clicks, blah blah blah. a basic alteration to our DNA? not so much.

 

You really believe it hasn't been discussed here? We don't discuss many journalism topics anymore but we've been over it ad nauseum. Paging Fredrick ...

 

Reading some of the posts on here make me wonder ... do amounts of hits really matter to advertisers? Do the ad teams go into the grocery stores and car dealerships and start barking out figures about clicks and hits? It seems to me everybody knows what a newspaper is and an Internet site is and they are either interested in advertising in there or they are not.

 

The stegosaur never saw the meteor coming, either.
But it wasn't drunk on an awards culture at the time of the strike.
I worked for a paper that had a guy who basically did nothing but collate awards submissions. Think they paid anyone exclusively to think about the future?

 

The Internet wants everything for free. It's the Millennial way.
The Research Pirates of the Dark Web

 

“If the next three years look like the last three years, I think we’re going to look at the 50 largest metropolitan papers in the country and expect somewhere between a third to a half of them to go out of business."

Nicco Mele - In Search of a Business Model: The Future of Journalism in an Age of Social Media and Dramatic Declines in Print Revenue - Shorenstein Center

 

AD, your point is well taken. I think many of us did worry as "the wall between the newsroom and ad department" crumbled, but it's one of those things that happened gradually, while the layoffs/furloughs/benefit cuts took most of our attention.

I do remember applying for a job about 10 years ago, and the ME sent me some papers to critique. They looked good, but I also noticed there was an ad across the bottom of A1, and mentioned that as a "negative."

He told me no, it was a huge positive, because they were generating revenue with that space. He also told me to adjust my way of thinking because the newspaper business was changing.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job, and I mocked what the ME said at the time. But after 10 years of ads, stickers and wraps all but obscuring the front page of every print edition in the country, he was right.

 

I was an assistant news editor on the news copy desk when my former paper started running section-front ads -- it was 2005, I think, and began with the metro and business sections, then sports and features, and finally A1. There was a lot of pushback from the copy desk -- so much that the assistant ME who was in charge of the desk (she'd approach people who were tabbed for OT on short notice or other unpleasant tasks and say, "We have an opportunity for you") finally called a staff meeting.

After letting a few copy editors have their say, she finally said, "You better get used to it if you want to keep your jobs."

A decade later, my former paper is like most others. There's a daily mishmash of A1 spadea ads, ads on all section fronts and even crazy-shaped inside-A ads and ad stacks that undoubtedly create all sorts of trouble for designers.

And of the 20 or so copy editors who attended that meeting, maybe three have kept their jobs.