The death of the working class reporter

Journalism is becoming an elite profession—and that’s bad news

(Wikimedia Commons)

Back in college, our newswriting class was assigned All Over But the Shoutin’, an autobiography by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg. His was a Horatio Alger story, the journalist version of the American Dream. Bragg managed to make it all the way to the New York Times without ever completing college. He went straight from his high school paper to covering local sports. He kept swimming upstream to bigger and bigger papers, moving from sports to features, and ultimately he landed an assignment as an international correspondent in Haiti for the Times.

It was supposed to be inspirational for us young journos. If we just stayed on the grind and kept chasing good stories, we too could climb the ladder to the heights of our profession. But the media landscape we inherited was vastly different than the one in which Bragg made his bones.

In the late 20th century, it was possible for a college dropout to go on to be a household name. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, quit school early for a job in journalism. So did legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who learned his trade at the Daily Texan, just like I. But that kind of career trajectory was unimaginable to us.

More reporters, fewer jobs

The year I graduated was an inauspicious one. With the global financial crisis starting to unfold, 2007 was a bad time for the economy and an even worse time for the news industry.

The internet was growing mature, providing an endless source of free news and commentary. Traditional print media was hemorrhaging jobs, while it would still be several years before strong digital platforms would emerge. When they finally did, they would be lean operations, like the Huffington Post, relying mostly on freelancers and those willing to write for “exposure.” Needless to say, the outlook for young journalists was and continues to be grim.

According to a 2016 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 50,000 journalism jobs in the United States and that’s expected to decline 9 percent, or 4,500, by 2026. Competition for this ever-dwindling number jobs is fierce. In that same year, journalism and communication schools graduated about 14,000.

Gone are the days when a person could parlay a part-time job as a copyboy at the Palookaville Times-Picayune into a career as a globetrotting ace reporter. Where once there were many paths to success in journalism, now there is only one—and very few can afford to walk it.

It’s no longer possible forgo a college education and jump right into the news biz. An undergraduate degree is usually not enough, either.

You’re competing against people with master’s degrees from Columbia who were doing prestigious unpaid internships while you were dropping chicken wings into a vat of fryer grease until 6 a.m. to avoid taking out another PLUS Loan.

And if you are one of the lucky few who manages to land a job as a reporter, it won’t pay enough to cover the enormous debt you incurred to get it. The median salary for journalists is around $41,000 a year, which is roughly $18,000 below the national average.

Journalism is increasingly becoming off limits for all except the privileged few, and this reality can be seen in the composition of America’s top news rooms.

The rise of a media elite

Faux populists like Donald Trump and Lou Dobbs love to rail against the “media elite.” Though this attack is made in bad faith, it rings true. The top positions in media today are overwhelmingly held by coastal blue bloods who are isolated—both physically and metaphorically—from the rest of the country.

A 2018 study by the Journal of Expertise found that 44 percent of the editorial staff at the New York Times held a degree from an elite university, while the proportion for the Wall Street Journal was nearly half. Reporters and editors at these papers are about as likely to have an elite education as Forbes billionaires and Davos participants. They are more likely than senators, congresspeople and judges to have graduated from these schools.

“Expertise in Journalism: Factors Shaping a Culturally and Cognitively Elite Profession.” Journal of Expertise, March 2018

Neoliberal magazine New Republic is even more elite. As the table shows, close to two-thirds of its staff went to a top school, placing them in the upper echelons.

This week, the New Republic posted an ad seeking a part-time “inequality editor.” It’s a non-union job with no benefits based in America’s most expensive city. The magazine is “committed to diversity,” according to the ad. It “encourages members of underrepresented communities to apply.”

In reality, the field of potential candidates is limited to those who can live in New York City on a part-time income and buy their own insurance, i.e. the children of the very wealthy. It doesn’t bode well for the New Republic’s inequality coverage.