Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads
by Barbara Ehrenreichhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/31/ING317S025.DTL&type=jobs
Link to article
Barbara Ehrenreich delivered this commencement address to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism class of 2009 on May 16. This reprint is from the San Francisco Chronicle:
The dean gave me some very strict instructions about what to say today. No whining and no crying at the podium. No wringing of hands or gnashing of teeth. Be upbeat, be optimistic, he said — adding that it wouldn’t hurt to throw in a few tips about how to apply for food stamps.
Well, you are not alone.
How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of laid-off paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They’ve got skills; they’ve got experience. They just don’t have jobs.
So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class.
You won’t get rich, unless of course you develop a sideline in blackmail or bank robbery. You’ll be living some of the problems you report on — the struggle for health insurance, for child care, for affordable housing. You might never have a cleaning lady. In fact, you might be one. I can’t tell you how many writers I know who have moonlighted as cleaning ladies or waitresses. And you know what? They were good writers. And good cleaning ladies too, which is no small thing.
Let me tell you about my own career, which I think is relevant, not because I’m representative or exemplary in any way, but because I’ve seen some real ups and downs in this business.
I didn’t start out to be a freelance writer or a journalist, but after a number of false starts and digressions, I discovered that’s what I really loved doing. In about 1980, I was a single mother of two small children, and my work quota was four articles or columns a month. I did my research at the public library. I bought my clothes at Kmart or consignment stores. The kids did not get any special lessons or, when the time came, SAT prep courses.
Then came the fat times, in the ’90s, which I realize now were an anomaly in the history of journalism. The industry was booming; editors would take me out for three-course lunches in Manhattan. I’ll never forget one of those lunches: It was with the top editor of Esquire, and I was trying to pitch him a story on poverty. He looked increasingly bored as we got through the field greens with goat cheese, the tuna carpaccio and so forth – until we finally got to the death-by-chocolate dessert, and he finally said, “OK, do your thing on poverty — but make it upscale.”
It was still an uphill struggle to write what I cared about, but at least I was getting generously paid – up to $10 a word by Time magazine. Imagine that — $10 a word. Most Americans would be happy to make $10 an hour.
Then, bit by bit, it all began to fall apart. The news weeklies: Time let me go in 1997. The book publishing industry was in tatters by 2005. And then the newspapers began to shrink within my hands or actually disappear. I was beginning to feel a certain kinship with blacksmiths and elevator operators when the recession hit in 2008, and every single income stream I had began to dry up.
But it was the recession, of course, that saved me from self-pity. I began to get sick and tired of the typical media recession story — which was about rich people having to cut back on the hours they spend with their personal trainers. All right, I realize those are man-bites-dog stories compared to a story about a laid-off roofer being evicted from his trailer home. But it seemed to me that the recession had absolutely eliminated the poor and the working class from the media consciousness. Once again, they had disappeared from sight.
So a couple of weeks ago, I pitched a certain well-known newspaper a series of reported essays on precisely this topic. They took it — but at about only one-quarter of what they had paid me for writing columns five years ago, barely enough to cover expenses. That bothered me. But then I had a kind of epiphany and realized: I’ve got to do this anyway. I’m on a mission, and I’ll do whatever it takes.
Which brings me back to the subject of journalism as a profession. We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history — as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily — just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.
But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn’t go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we — journalists– we can’t stop doing what we do.
As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won’t stop us. A dying industry won’t stop us. Even poverty won’t stop us because we are all on a mission here. That’s the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight.
In the ’70s, it was gonzo journalism. For us right now, it’s guerrilla journalism, and we will not be stopped.
Tags: American working class, Barbara-Ehrenreich, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
June 4th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Nice work. I’d like to see more commencement speeches like this–a challenge to grads to appreciate their talents and dive into the fight. Much more helpful than the recent Oprah “being rich is really great” talk that Duke grads got.
June 8th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Wow. It would be phenomenal if journalism was transformed by this spirit in defense of democracy again. People in a lot of other industries might begin to view their role as socially invested instead of just lucrative.
June 11th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
True, professional journalism has been losing perceived value for about a decade. But I hope the pendulum is swinging back to a reasonable center — the place where people demand reliable information in exchange for their eyeball-time and subscription fee (or the website ads they click on).
I think that even the generation that grew up with the Web as their primary information source may be getting cynical about the bloviating bloggers who present unfounded opinions as sure-of-it facts or well-reasoned analysis. We’re all getting too busy to waste our time on nonsense. I think we’re entering an age of increased critical thinking and skepticism. We know too much about the huge salaries paid to the loudest of the noise-makers by the corporate and political interests who benefit from their ability to persuade great numbers of readers or listeners to accept … well, let’s call them what they are: lies. Worse, lies that motivate action against the audience’s own real best interests.
Um, children, can we spell “sub-prime mortgages”? Civic organizations, schools and corporations are investing in “financial literacy” education for their communities. One core concept taught by these educational programs is the importance of reading the fine print, asking every question about every phrase you don’t understand, and keeping on asking until it’s absolutely clear to you. Fearless questioning — what a concept! The courses teach the basic tactics of critical thinking — checking sources; demanding examples; insisting upon an explanation you understand.
As a result of the current economic and intellectual pain, I think we’ll see a resurgence of demand for informational accuracy and analytical rigor. And that bodes well for professional journalism. To turn a catch phrase around, if they come (demanding it), you’ll (re)build it. Journalism, like any product, is market driven. I think the market is driving in the direction of True North again.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:43 pm
I’m hard-pressed to find any resurgence in the demand for info accuracy and analytical rigor.
The media conglomerates who control the print news are victims of the economic but not the intellectual pain. To protect profits, journalists are being chopped in the two countries I monitor (US & Canada). Page counts of their product appear to be diminishing.
Like Berkeley, Schools of Journalism and Creative Writing abound, charging big bucks which they desperately need, for degrees in this shrinking field.
I agree that jobs here are market driven but employer profits seem to trump the virtues journalism has been proud to represent.
As Barabara said, journalism is “a license to fight” and perhaps Web 2.0 will be the battlefield where the unemployed writer can afflict the comfortable, even on her nickel.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
I noticed, as far back as the 1980s, that college and grad school curricula, particularly in professional schools like Journalism and Law, were excising genuine intellectual exercise and development, and “loading up on busy work.” Critical thinking skills education and development began to be extinguished, and since the 1990s seem to be extinct.
Similarly, ethics modelling was nowhere to be found on campus, top-down from administration through “publish or perish” professorial ranks. Even as college “education” costs soared toward etheric heights, the college-trained mind being produced was a disabled product — from what college curricula had surgically removed. Will there ever again be the opportunity for cohort intellectual development to be re-inserted and promise the college grad will be made whole, an educated citizen rather than just a trained worker? Will American life have a chance to be healed?
This has had devastating, lifelong effects for a generation of youth who streamed into American life, post-commencement, to take their places/jobs over time as junior, middle and senior adult citizens. What a horrific travesty to have been extorted such expense for college and to graduate with such minuscule skill for “analytical rigor.”
Perceiving the performance of the majority of today’s professionals, the most crippled in college may have very well come from Law, Journalism, Medical and Business schools.
Most folks can imagine American life if we failed to teach one single generation of children to read. What we are living now, 2009, is rooted in the intentionally designed failure to truly educate an intellectually competent, thinking-abled college generation in the recent past.
Under age 50? You have been robbed of comprehension of the life and times to which you are born, and if for nothing else than what you cannot know will you ever miss, or even be curious about, what you have never received? I think not, but mostly I fear, …you know not.
Most of you are good memorizers and skilled at choosing the “correct” answer from a pre-formed list of four or five options. Otherwise, are you competent in asking big questions, analyzing four and five hundred complex and pertinent data points for yourself, and formulating a personal moral and ethical “meta-analysis” to live as brilliantly as the potential human being you are? Or, are you limited to knowing yourself simply as what you do? Busy, busy you, too busy to seek the higher synergistic sensibilities of being human, especially since being college trained you “know” how to do more and more tasking but were cheated out of any inquiry and exposure in how to “be” a vibrant educated human.
I would say that we all, parents and students, paid a very high price for college to experience not an Institution of Higher Learning, but only a stripped-down institution of “higher earning…” Did you knowingly choose to live a life of mere earning, treadmill work and consumption, or was it important, ever, to expect to have received a lifelong skill called “learning” in the purchased college credential package? Have you noticed, yet, that limited multiple choice and memorization abilities give whithered returns on the treadmills of our voluntary (trained)servitude?
A “deconstructionist” result seems to be upon us as education is reduced to training is reducing to illiteracy on the horizon. Concurrently following along is extinction of functional public social, political and economic institutions, as well as the formerly more “private” marriage and family health and civic functions, sweeping us into “global third world” piles of imploded and trashed republics that once were.
Will writers even be able to “fight” against the weapons of mass propaganda? Will writers find able readers after the remnants of free speech are erased from the Internet and all traditional media?
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
You really know how to spoil the party, Mahakasha!
I’m not sure if I should just shoot myself or go to Iran. But thanks for a thoughtful post.
When the felt pain is great enough, as it has been in Tehran this week and was 20 years ago in Tiannmen Square (sp?)then I suspect we too will take to the streets.
But wait! Western governments have cleverly crafted just enough benefits for its subjects to be platinum shackles. The wild card, however, (as it has been elsewhere) is the courage of young people to demand better at the risk of their freedom. So here’s to the fighters everywhere even if they be amateur journalists with inferior education.