Chris Anderson is at it again today on Salon, gleefully poking his finger in the eye not only of news organizations everywhere but all the journalists who work for them by saying that in the future
the media may well be a hobby, not a profession.
There, he’s said it. The author of
Free and the editor in chief of
Wired isn’t wringing his hands over newspapers losing their sources of income because he doesn’t think it matters to the commonweal if people get paid to report and write.
There are, he says, other rewards for the Work Formerly Known as Journalism (he’s got a pretentious little quarrel going with the j-word). In the future people will do it for the pleasure of being read and loved. They already are. “The vast majority of people online write for free. We've tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting,” he says in an interview. “They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun.”
I’ve never met anyone who was insulted to get paid to write something—that seems delusional—but otherwise he gets right to the anxiety deep down in the heart of journalists (and journalism lovers) everywhere. It’s really not about whether newspapers will survive (no, they won’t, not in their current form), or whether they'll morph into story syndicates or journalistic cooperatives (yeah, they will, or some other form that monetizes content more broadly), but whether people will get paid to report and write at all.
And here’s a guy living off his salary as editor in chief of a magazine, not to speak of the advance on his book, saying we don’t really need to pay for this stuff. Amateurs can do it, no problem. Gotta wonder what kind of day job would leave time for a Dexter Filkins or a George Packer to report from Iraq. Or maybe Chris doesn’t care for them.
It doesn’t bother me that the
Free evangelist would rather have what was Formerly Known as News (n-word banned, too), filtered via Twitter than by the up-tight suits at the
New York Times. His friends, he says, know what he likes and he trust them more.
The filters can change, the business models can change, but Chris is bullshitting if he pretends, for the sake of the argument, that there’s nothing working journalists do that can’t be done by what one of his commenters calls “a pajama-clad opiner.” I’m not knocking the pajama-clad, by any means, but if all the bright kids who want to be journalists give it up and go to law school or Goldman Sachs instead, there will be a hell of a lot less good stuff for the amateurs to opine about. People don’t go into journalism to get rich—they do it out of passion, or obsession—but if you can’t get paid to go after the great story, you need to get paid to so something else.
Do we really want an independently wealthy Fourth Estate? C'mon Chris. Even the all-volunteer Army gets paid.
