Congratulations on a fine piece by Ray
Ring, “The Big Story Written Small” (HCN, 10/13/03: The Big Story
Written Small). I was a reporter in Arizona in the early ’80s
who wrote extensively on environmental and development issues, and
frequently found I had the field pretty much to myself. Over the
past two decades, alas, environmental reporting became even
sketchier and more superficial.
That said, I want to
observe that the hollowing out of newsrooms is not unique to the
Mountain West, nor is it confined to environmental and natural
resources coverage. I’m currently editor of The Guild
Reporter, the monthly publication of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, and
in that capacity have had the unpleasant task of chronicling the
steady decline of our craft.
One measure: Total newspaper
employment peaked at a bit over 450,000 in 1990, declined in the
recession in the first couple of years of that decade — then
leveled off throughout the ’90s, despite a booming economy.
Then employment plunged again in 2000 — and has continued
eroding every year since, to approximately 382,000 today.
Fewer bodies may translate into greater “efficiency” in “news
gathering,” to use a favorite Wall Street “metric,” but such
measures say nothing about the quality of what’s being
produced. The latter is evidenced by the continuing erosion of
newspaper circulation figures.
As notable as employment
numbers are the industry’s wages. Researchers at the
University of Georgia reported Aug. 1 that the median salary for
journalism graduates going to work at daily newspapers was a
pitiful $25,000. And it doesn’t get much better for those who
hang on: The median salary for all American journalists in 2001,
according to researchers at Indiana University, was just $43,588.
No wonder most newspapers have revolving doors to their
newsrooms.
Such numbers might be defensible if the
newspaper industry were ailing, but in fact they are the product of
an investor-driven obsession with squeezing out ever-higher profit
margins. Employees of any publicly held newspaper (as most of them
are) returning less than 22 percent to 24 percent margins can
expect layoffs, wage freezes and fewer “fringe” benefits, like
decent health care and pension plans.
The bottom line here
is that the media in general, and newspapers in particular, are so
obsessed with the bottom line that they’ve lost sight of the
unique role they were assigned within our democracy: To provide all
of us with the information, ideas and context we need to
competently govern ourselves.
Ray Ring did an excellent
job of detailing the problem. Now it’s up to all of us to
start thinking and talking about the appropriate response.
Andy Zipser
Washington, D.C.
For more
information on this subject, see
www.mediareform.net.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Journalism is in bad shape.
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