this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Politics
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Glad to see the Times still churning out utterly tone-deaf columns about kitchen-table economics.
I don't care about what the statistics say about the economy; what matters is that all these available jobs are entry-level. The rate of inflation is largely irrelevant when I've been losing purchasing power since 2003 anyway. The real problem is that when I entered the job market, you had to have 15 years of experience to make middle-class wages in journalism, and 13 years into my career, everyone with experience had taken buyouts or been laid off, with those of us stupid enough to think editing wouldn't die being shipped off to centralized production facilities.
Now, I can't get a job paying a subsistence wage in any field. Either the algorithm finds me too old or data analysis and coding, which I understand to be in high demand, don't count if done in a newsroom. I'm still supposed to have more than 20 years of career left and had to move into a vehicle because all the hard work one was supposed to do in one's 20s for the later payout of a comfortable life with vacations and such just ... doesn't count.
I don't care what the Fed does or who's in the White House; I care about being able to afford more than bologna sandwiches for every meal having already given up housing. That much should not be difficult to understand.
Journalism has been utter hell as a place to make a living for the past 20 years. Online platforms broke the local oligopolies on commercial speech and classifieds, and left that money in the hands of a few newly-minted billionaires instead of journalists. I don't see that as the result of the Biden administration or their policies.
By 2003, most newsrooms were already owned by chains. Readers didn't know this, as I found out when I took over as news ed in a small town after a corporate acquisition. Pitchforks galore (and on a long enough timeline, their fears were founded in that it was functionally subsumed by the already-owned larger nearby sister paper), but we'd been sold by fucking CapCities, not some local eccentric publisher/owner/gadfly.
And the journalists never got the big bucks.
Craigslist was encroaching on smaller and smaller markets. We're pre-Facebook here, so there's still plenty of time to abandon classifieds as a sunk cost and right the ship, but instead of using the diversity of markets and demographics to foster an era of experimentation in delivery methods and pricing, we pretty much got "we tried nothing, and it's not working" as the excuse to accelerate consolidation.
Gannett's finally catching up to Sinclair in brazenness such that we can all see the endgame, but the end of local control was going to mean a similar result regardless of where the Web taking off ended up falling on the timeline.
Good reporting carries risks for shareholders, especially those of the institutional variety.