Joshua Ellis : Work

New media blogger/guru Seth Godin has this to say in a post entitled “When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?“:

What’s left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.

[...]Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.

Having been a print journalist for a pretty long time now (13 years! Jesus!), I’m gonna go ahead and disagree with Godin here. The heavy stuff — investigative journalism, maintaining a Washington bureau, local news — is way more than 2% of the cost of running a paper. Non-feature sections of a newspaper — arts and entertainment, opinion/editorial, advice columns, et cetera — are not that expensive to maintain. Trust me on this — most columnists and reviewers aren’t making the big bucks, unless their work is regularly and widely syndicated. (This is not a function of the Web’s advent, by the way. This is how things have always been, as far as I can tell.)

Until the current crunch, most of this work was handed off to freelancers, who were paid flat fees (like $50 for a CD review) or word rates (like 15 cents per word). For example, when I wrote a weekly column for the Las Vegas CityLife, I was paid the same amount every week for a column that was expected to run between 750-850 words.

“Real” journalism — investigative, in-depth journalism — is usually done by full-time salaried newspaper staff. Why? Because it takes a hell of a lot of time and effort and resources, and it’s rarely worth it for freelance writers, who are almost always paid by the word for features.

To put this in perspective: the first story that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote as staff writers for the Washington Post about the Watergate scandal runs to 1558 words. If that story were being published today, and Woodward and Bernstein were freelancers, they could expect to make somewhere between 20 - 50 cents per word. That’s $311.60 - $779.00, split two ways, in 2009 money. (Split more ways if you count the contributing writers listed at the end of the piece.)

Do you think that amount is commensurate with the amount of time and effort Woodward and Bernstein spent researching that piece? Of course not. It probably took them weeks if not months to do the footwork to put that piece down on paper and make it stick. That’s real work, real hours, real expenses. (Unless you think Woodward’s car ran on good will.)

What newspapers have that blogs don’t — and can’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future — is full-time staff, who are paid a (presumably) living wage to do the kind of in-depth work that blogs don’t, can’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future. A staff writer can spend the hours in the library or the paper’s morgue and on the street interviewing sources, doing interviews and getting background.

Newspapers also still provide identity and legitimacy functions for journalists, particularly in the world of politics. Don’t believe me? Try to get White House press credentials for your blog. Call up your Senator and ask their press secretary to provide you with background and an official statement for a blog post you’re doing.

I think the key here is in the last paragraph of Godin’s post. The statement that “the reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)” is simply untrue. Having a staff of journalists costs the same as having any other kind of staff: salaries, real estate, equipment, insurance, utilities, the whole nine yards.

If having a staff was somehow cheaper than hiring freelancers, why do technology companies send their programming work to Bangalore? The answer: it’s not. Journalists don’t make as much money as programmers do, by and large, but the economies of scale are the same. Paying people to do work full-time is much more expensive than paying freelancers. This is simple fact. And I’ve already explained why freelancers don’t do investigative journalism, as a general rule.

Godin also says “The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical.”

But it’s not free. I can’t understand why people don’t see this. Writing an article about corruption in local or national politics is not free. It takes time and money to make it happen — more time and money than this blog post took, or Godin’s post took, enough time and money that most people can’t afford to do it simply for whuffie or blogerati status. Delivering it may be free and instantaneous, but that doesn’t mean making it is free and instantaneous. In this sense, the economics truly are magical, in the sense that most of the people attempting to practice them are making an extremely artful show out of smoke and mirrors. And the miracles are just as illusory.

Just because you make an elephant vanish from a stage doesn’t mean the elephant’s really disappeared. It’s still around, somewhere…unlike, unfortunately, the prospect of having real, in-depth, sophisticated investigative journalism in an era where people seem to genuinely believe you can get something for nothing.