Jeff Jarvis: The days of "inflated paychecks" for journalists are over

As I noted in the comments, I was unaware they had even begun.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/05/20/the-journalism-bubble/

 

I got into this industry for the big bucks.

They're cutting teaching jobs in my area, and is that because they were overpaid?

I don't understand why there's an undercurrent of "they deserved it" coming out at journalists who have lost their jobs or at least the financial upside of their jobs. You can argue that the higher-ups at newspapers are responsible for not evolving to a more fiscally viable model, but the reporters and copy editors getting laid off are often doing their jobs as well as they did five years ago, if not better, by blogging and podcasting and doing other things to adjust to today's technology. Am I wrong?

 

Obviously, someone never made $19,000 at a small-town daily.

Journalists are among the lowest paid college graduates. And this guy is saying we don't even deserve that?

You get CEOs who receive bonuses for doing little more than cutting jobs. Where's the CEO's value?

 

Jeff Jarvis can bite my shiny, metal ass.

This is the same schmuck who, on the Guardian's first Media Talk USA podcast, spent nearly the entire show joining one of his Gnu Meedja colleagues in shouting down the evil MSM. The Guardian does good work more often than not, but his show just devolved into an echo chamber.

 

Jarvis, along with Jay Rosen and a few others, are the most noxious of the Messianic Web crowd who, I should add, seem to be making a pretty nice living.

 

Do the 5-inch cops and courts briefs add value? Probably not if Jarvis' thinking is taken into account, but they are they most popular item in my paper.

 

Hey, Jarvis, inflate this.

 

I swear to Tebow, if I was to meet Jeff Jarvis I'd punch him in the fucking face.
Dude has made a fortune off telling people that print is dying. Huh, as an internet consultant who can make your shop ready for the future.
Fuck him.

 

Jeff Jarvis can eat a dick. I worked a major beat at a major metro and made less than anyone I knew.

 

I'm with all of the above, and I especially agree that Jarvis and his ilk have a blatant vested interest in the collapse of print.

However... should any of us be surprised that journalists' pay has dead-ended and is going backward? We don't generate revenue in any direct sense, we use up money the company has to raise through others' labors, and the quality of what we do has little impact on the bottom line and is subjective to most of the folks who make the big decisions. At least that's how so many of the suits surely see it. So a greater surprise might be that we ever have been paid more than clerical or temp staffers in the first place.

I have long thought that our field ought to be more like pro sports teams, where it is accepted that the talent will be paid more than the managers. Most places I've worked, what drove the place was the quality of the reporters, photographers and line editors. But newsrooms traditionally are as top-down in culture and compensation as you'll find anywhere in the corporate world, from the don't-question-what-we-decide stifling of journalists' inquisitiveness internally to pay issues, which -- I think -- suffer because we don't have individual "sales figures" we can point to for our professional worth.

Getting into and staying in this business used to mean accepting that you'd never get rich. Now it means accepting that you're going to keep getting poorer.

 

^ Totally disagree. Advertising has to sell a paper that has readers, hence potential customers, for advertisers. Readers don't pay 50 or 75 cents to see ads. They pay that to see local copy about things they care about. It's a team.