Freelance journalists don’t earn as much as they once did, but nor does anyone else © Le Yéti
A few days ago, Nate Thayer, a reasonably distinguished 52-year-old journalist, received an email from an editor at the Atlantic. She had read an article he had written and wondered if she could publish a shortened version. He said sure and asked what they paid. A bit surprised, she said they didn’t pay for reblogs but he would get “exposure.” Thayer, who half a decade previously had been offered a $125,000 a year staff job by that very same magazine, told her he didn’t need exposure, he needed money. He reprinted the entire email correspondence, triggering a firestorm in the journalistic community.
The internet has transformed journalism and few in the industry are pleased. When I started working, consumers of news had a limited number of sources. If you wanted to know what was going on, you watched the BBC or you read the Telegraph or the Times. People working for those organisations had a captive audience, which meant their editors could afford to fly them around the world, put them up in a good hotel, pay outrageous expenses and also a decent wage.
No more. Consumers of news are now spoiled for choice. They still read the Guardian or the BBC website but they can find countless other sources of information. And young journalists desperate to become the next Ezra Klein are happy to write for free. Even in war zones, you meet rich kids with a camera, travelling on their own dime, hoping to build their reputation. As consumers of news we are blessed. As producers of news, we are screwed.
But this story is larger than just the plight of freelance journalists. The condition of all workers is harsher than it was in our parents’ day. It is not just blue-collar workers that are suffering. Lawyers, advertising creative directors, middle managers and even bankers are working much longer hours than they used to. Unless you are a professional athlete, the guy who had your job 20 years ago almost certainly made more money (in real terms), had more fun and didn’t work as hard. As consumers, we live like kings. Even people on council estates can afford flat-screen TVs that Gordon Gekko would have lusted after 20 years ago, but our work lives are ever less rosy. We work harder, with no job security, for less pay—but even during this recession, corporate profits remain healthy. Established professionals (like Thayer) who have worked for years to build a reputation see themselves edged out. Firms are looking for 22-22-22: 22-year-olds willing to work 22 hours a day for $22,000. Median inflation-adjusted male wages in the United States are lower now than they were in 1973.
All the fuss in the blogosphere about the Thayer story shows that freelance journalists are frightened of the future. They have good reason. It is hard to see how journalists will ever again earn an enviable wage. But perhaps we only have ourselves to blame. As industrial jobs evaporated, few of us in the news business cared. Remember that famous quote about Nazi Germany. When they came for the miners, I remained silent because I wasn’t a miner. When they came for the air traffic controllers, I remained silent because I wasn’t an air traffic controller. When they came for the middle managers, I remained silent because I wasn’t a middle manager. When they came for the journalists, only the journalists spoke out—and guess what, nobody listened.
I am old enough to have experienced the waning days of union power. One election day 25 years ago, working as a sound man for a New York TV station, I made $1,500 in a single shift. Back then, union penalties ensured you were paid extra for overtime, for holiday work, for missing your mandated hour-long lunch. I ran a few cables, twiddled a couple of dials and mostly sat in a chair, reading a book, counting my money, feeling like the luckiest man in the world. Good luck getting that gig today.
Back in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, lots of us were paid more than we deserved. Jobs were easy to get. Firms treated their workers with respect. Everybody went home at 5pm. Reading Charles Bukowski today, it’s shocking to realise that although he was reprehensibly lazy and usually drunk, he never had any difficulty finding work. Economic growth was faster than it has been ever since and income distribution was much more equitable. Those days are long gone. It is not just journalists in trouble. All of us are getting screwed.
Alan Hutchinson
Tom Palley puts this in a different light, in his book “From Financial Crisis to Stagnation”. See also http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=232.
Put very simply, he argues that developed economies grew for the 30 years from 1945 because investment raised productivity, and the profits of increasing productivity were paid to the workers. They spent them, so consumption grew along with productivity and there was an incentive to continue investing. From about 1980, for the next 30 years, profits went to capitalists instead. The workers were squeezed. Economies did not collapse immediately because workers went on spending, but the money they spent came from borrowing (e.g. as mortgages) and asset price inflation. The resulting bubbles and debts caused the crash of 2008. There is more to it than that, but I think that is the main aspect of his argument.
The change in working practices hurt not just workers but the whole economy, right across the developed world.
Alan Robinson
There is also the fact that in 1945, the Allies found themselves with a huge war manufacturing industry but no war to supply; some of us were deeply endebted because of the war, and there were literally millions of people returning to civilian life who wanted affluence and welfare previously unknown, together with opportunistic and cunning politicians eager for power. We know the outcome, which must have been pretty obvious at the time, namely to convert the war manufacturing industry to commercial purposes. This is what paved the way to the relative affluence of the later twentieth century. Without WW2 however, I personally doubt that industry and commerce would eventually have become as intense as we have seen it, nor would there have been a European Union. There would have been far more protectionism, and less globalization.
My point is that the author of this article seems to imply that things are going to the dogs, when in fact, these last 70 years were historically quite abnormal. We have enjoyed an oil-fuelled party since the 1960s funded by creating even more debt than we did to fight WW2 – the final repayment for which incidentally was only paid a few years ago. It seems to me that the post war, oil fuelled party is over, and we ought to be aware that disappearing affluence can cause social unrest. While I sympathize with Tom Streithorst finding himself pressed, I would have welcomed an article concerning the dearth of visionary statesmen in government.
Tom
Alan,
You nailed it, and very succinctly. During the Golden Age (1945-1973) productivity gains turned into wage gains almost immediately. That meant demand kept rising, as did corporate sales, giving firms reason to invest, creating further productivity gains. This virtuous circle gave the world its highest growth rate ever.
Today, the benefits of productivity gains go to firms (or sometimes consumers) and do not get translated into higher wages. And if productivity goes up and wages do not, then we have a shortfall in demand. From 1982 to 2007, we made up that shortfall by going into debt.
The essence of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution was to shift power from workers to firms. The problem is that workers are also consumers and without healthy demand, firms have no reason to invest.
Alan Hutchinson
Tom
Thanks for your reply.
Please don’t credit me with this idea. It is from Tom Palley who is a very well qualified economist. See both http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=232 and http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue50/Palley50.pdf – this second reference is probably better than the one I gave you first.
Alan Robinson
“It is not just journalists in trouble. All of us are getting screwed.”
World war 2 hostilities ended in 1945, but it took the world several decades more to come to terms with what had happened. The comparitive affluence of the period 1985 – 2005 was however just an unsustainable bubble fuelled by cheap and abundant oil, the creation of huge piles of debt, and globalization. The 1985 – 2005 era was not normal; it was abnormal, and developments of that time could not continue unabated, as we now see.
“All of us are getting screwed?” I don’t doubt it, but that simply means that we are returning to normality. Most of us have almost always been screwed. Michel’s Iron law of Oligarchy isn’t called an iron law for nothing.
Michael Goldfarb
With you, Tom, most of the way. But you are wrong when you say no one covered the miners or air traffic controllers. Of the latter I am certain as I was just starting out then at the Washington Post and Reagan’s War on them was a major story.
The reason they came for us – got me in the prime of my career – and no one cared is that while we were practicing journalism that covered things like the destruction of unions, outside our line of sight a well-funded assault on our legitimacy was being waged on talk-radio. When the web hit our “leaders’ decide they were managing decline, rather than fighting back against the 3 decades of propoaganda that deligitimized our work.
it doesn’t help that the new generation coming into journalism did not during the course of their education – personal & public – learn the history of working people’s struggles that led to unions and so on. As you rightly say, they mostly come from more moneyed sections of society and their world view reflects the concerns they learned of at their parents’ dining tables (although I know one or two former students of mine who are committed to the journalism I practiced)
Alan Robinson
Michael, in Britain the Trades Union Congress is only about 110 years old, though the first trade unions were formed about 180 years or so ago. Until the TUC was formed, unskilled workers were not organised at all, and the trade unions were little more than cartels of self-interested people having essential skills. They didn’t care less about unskilled workers or social security for all, and they controlled in the very strictest manner the numbers of apprentices in order to make their clan irreplaceable to the bougeoisie.
In fact, the same nasty behaviour was still going on when I was a shipbuilding apprentice in Hull during the 1960s. Not only was membership of the Boilermaker’s union a matter of family connexions, but also employment on Hull docks.
I care very little for the bourgeoisie, but British trade unions have been little better. Lenin was right, the unions have to justify their existence to their members, and make out they have won modest victories while all the time they are seduced by the bourgeoisie. Perhaps you noticed my mention of Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy.
Tom
Michael,
When I started in the TV business in New York, all the producers were state school educated ethnics from the Bronx or Queens. By the time I got out, all the younger producers had gone to Ivy League schools. That is because you could not afford to live in NYC on an entry level salary so all the kids working as assistant producers had to have rich parents subsidising their existence.
Naturally the pool of senior producers comes from assistant producers and now we have the situation where hardly anyone working in media comes from a working class background. No wonder workers are treated with disdain.
Eric Garland
This is a good article, though I would take issue with one statement:
“Back in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, lots of us were paid more than we deserved.”
I beg to differ. Back in the middle 20th Century, a global society sick of Depression and World War and flush with cheap energy reserves for a brief period of time defeated its natural tendency toward economical feudalism and shared profits with the workers that helped produce them. We are still benefiting from the historically-unprecedented advances in public health, domestic peace, and even geopolitical stability that resulted.
Today, we are swinging back toward the logic that inherited wealth and faux-meritocratic social position is somehow a positive thing. It is tragic to watch.
We were not paid too much. We are now paid too little. Woe betide us if we choose to relive the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We know what comes next.
Peter Maguire
For those of us who worked in SE Asia during the 1990s, Nate Thayer was significantly more than a “reasonably distinguished journalist.” Simply put, he should not have survived his bouts of malaria, much less his decade long dance with the Khmer Rouge. Thayer outworked and outfoxed numerous high profile journalists to get the only interview with Pol Pot. Nate’s greatest flaw was that he spent far too much time on the front lines reporting at great risk and not enough time in NYC, DC, or London, time dining out on his past glories. The author’s assertion about Charles Bukowski is also erroneous. He never had a difficult time finding work because he had the good sense to support his writing and drinking with a day job–he worked at the post office until he was 49. “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy,” wrote Bukowski, “or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
Tom
Bukowski got his full time job at the Post Office in 1960. Before that he floated through a number of jobs and from my limited reading of him, he skipped work at will to get drunk and never seemed to worry about losing a job because he usually was easily able to get another one.
Back in the 1960s, losing a job at a factory wasn’t a big deal because you could get another one at another factory reasonably easily. Power on the shop floor was with the workers more than with management. It is the “reserve army of the unemployed” today that makes us much more docile employees than our fathers and grandfathers ever were.
I am sorry if I in anyway denigrated Nate Thayer’s accomplishments. In a way, that makes my point more poignant. If a man who was the best journalist in Cambodia in the 1990s and interviewed Pol Pot can’t get a paying gig, than what will all the kids writing for free for “exposure” be living on when they are 50?
Dave
A muddled, whinging article. Who is “They?” Nazis? The establishment? Empowered consumers? All of the above? Maybe such distinctions are lost from high atop the pedestal Streithorst considers journalism’s due, I don’t know. But the vague, sloppy jeremiad lamenting he-knows-not-what is symptomatic of a big reason for the profession’s demise: when everybody can do it, nobody finds it worth paying for.
I’m not unsympathetic, being a 49-year-old advertising writer who finds himself constantly passed over for younger talent. But as other commenters have noted, we can no longer mistake a remarkable prosperity as the traditional norm. Struggle is the traditional norm, and it’s back with a vengeance.
Tom
Dave,
Yes, struggle used to be the norm. Per Capita income stayed pretty much the same from 0AD to 1820. Then came the industrial revolution and because of rapid technological progress, our incomes skyrocketed. Technological progress has continued post 1982, post Reagan/Thatcher. What has changed is who gains the benefit from those productivity gains. During the Golden Age (1945-1973) it was workers. Today it it is corporations and the people that own them.
Lower real wages, in journalism and in advertising, are less due to techological changes and more due to political changes. Compare your work experience to that of the advertising creatives of the 1960s (as exemplified by Mad Men). You work much harder and get paid less. Interestingly this does not inspire you to any solidarity with fellow workers.
Steven McConnell
Times have changed and Nate Thayer hasn’t. That’s why he is upset – he is living in the past, wishing for his “good old times” to return.
The journalists have done it to themselves. Young kids now aren’t interested in reading their political analysis and news of yet another crisis in the Middle East.
Young people today want to read about how to build their dreams online, how to build something that makes a difference and how to have a job which not only pays well, but is connected to their purpose, too.
That’s why online blogs like Mashable are blooming, and newspapers aren’t. You’re right about one thing – no-one needs a journalist that sits on his ass and gets paid $1,500 for it. That’s not inspiring, remarkable or sustainable – it’s a drain on the system and it doesn’t feed anyone’s soul, either.
Question is, why are some people still lamenting about that?
Steven
Tom
Steven,
Maybe Nate Thayer is a Luddite and maybe he and traditional paying journalism deserve to be thrown on the ashheap of history. The Luddites were high skilled textile workers concerned that modern machinery allowed less skilled (and so less well paid) workers to take their jobs. Kinda sorta what is happening today.
When agriculture mechanized and created rural unemployment, those ex farmhands went to the cities and found work in factories. Heretofore, capitalism’s creative destruction has always created more and better paying jobs to replace those that have been lost.
What are those jobs of the future? Will we all be dog walkers and PR assistants? The difference now is the disappearing jobs don’t seem to be getting replaced, certainly not with jobs as well paying.
I had a look at Mashable. It wasn’t particularly soul nourishing but then I am more interested in yet another crisis in the Middle East than in some app or “what to wear on a 100 year starship voyage”.
Steven McConnell
First, I think many people underestimating the importance of apps.
It’s not just “some app” you could check out – those apps are the platform on which the world of tomorrow is getting build. Often by kids who are not unlike Luddites you mention – highly skilled in tech, savvy, full of great ideas and (now) are not dependent on an employer to be able to make them into reality. Often they make more money than a 17 year old could ever dream of.
Are the jobs you mention not getting replaced? Maybe not all – I’m not saying it’s rosy-peachy for everyone. But being on top of the changes on the Internet helps to be one of the people whose jobs seemingly don’t disappear, but transform into something else which may look different, but still aligned with their deeper calling.
If Thayer, for example, was more social media and Google-savvy, then he’d jump at the chance of having that story published (his reward only being exposure – heck, I’d request to write a free weekly column for the Atlantic) and he’d leverage that to promote his own personal blog/site with content/books (perhaps even apps?) which would make him the bucks he needs to pay rent.
It could be a scalable, highly leveraged and easy to set up relationship which would bring him a lot more money than a one-off payment for his article.
Just checked out his Twitter feed – seems like he spends some time arguing his “starving artist producing quality news VS capitalist media companies making a profit while producing garbage” rhetoric. I’ll assert that if he spent some time learning how to monetize the quality news he creates, he’d have a lot less complaints about the latter.
Claus
Tom, I think the constantly improvement of better jobs in the past is a good argument. And better paying jobs are being created, looking at the world as a whole (a lot of people are, and have been in recent years, moving towards major cities outside the west, in return for very significantly higher salaries), and up to some amount in the west (thinking about e.g. the technology sector).
I do not believe the current recession is as much a result of capitalism wanting to share less, but that as the world develops, a structural change is taking place. The west is losing it’s pedestal, resulting in worsening jobs, and more competition. This is more than made up for with the improvement of people’s lives in countries like Brazil, India and China, but works out badly for us. I also believe you can see a similar thing happening 40 years ago. If you were a banker in 1970 instead of 1930, I am quite convinced you had to work harder, for a lower salary (compared to the median). This is because fewer people could become bankers in 1930, as your parental wealth was much bigger of a factor than in 1970. We are now (starting to) see a similar trend, but instead of being on the poorer side, who’s lives are improving, we have made it onto the wealthy side, so perceive this change as a negative one for us.
james c
Yes, the economics of journalism have changed completely.