[HN Gopher] The dangers of high status, low wage jobs
___________________________________________________________________
The dangers of high status, low wage jobs
Author : jger15
Score : 392 points
Date : 2022-02-09 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (economistwritingeveryday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (economistwritingeveryday.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc. The filtered
| bubble of their society becomes the pole star of their existence,
| and the rest of the world gets devalued.
|
| Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage, there
| would be a bar where the journalists hung out. Listening to the
| conversations there would tell you what the story was going to
| be, as well as how it differed from the facts. The audience that
| _mattered_ was the rest of the media clique; the actual paying
| "audience" was the chum that everyone took for granted.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Can often see the same thing on Twitter now - it's cool to see
| in real time
| password4321 wrote:
| I've heard rumors a lot of the grouthink happens as Twitter
| users share lists of accounts to block and coordinate in
| private Google Docs.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Wouldn't not witnessing this yourself or similar be a
| similar kind of groupthink behavior? In an us vs them
| mentality.
| password4321 wrote:
| > _Wouldn't not witnessing this yourself or similar be a
| similar kind of groupthink behavior? In an us vs them
| mentality._
|
| I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying... not
| doing these things is just groupthink in the opposite
| direction?
|
| Edit: Maybe there's a better word for it: bubble
| building.
|
| Edit 2: I do believe Twitter fosters the 'us vs them'
| mentality you mention; I tried to point out only the tip
| of the iceberg is visible publicly.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I'm saying that "I heard rumors of X" is the same bubble-
| type behavior that's being criticized in the conversation
| flow just towards an out-group (aka a group on a
| different social media platform).
| password4321 wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
|
| How would you recommend initiating a conversation to
| discuss when 'the actual paying "audience" was the chum
| that everyone took for granted' but one actually _can 't_
| 'see the same thing on Twitter' except due to
| intermittent OPSEC/OSINT failures?
| hguant wrote:
| I went to high school with a guy who is big in the self
| described Left-wing journalist Twitter.
|
| I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the
| ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New
| Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period
| of about a month. What was interesting was that in his
| original article, the concepts he presented were presented as
| radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its
| way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were
| presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree
| on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just
| intellectual folly.
|
| The conversation about these ideas had already happened on
| Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Can you link these articles? I'd be interested to see this
| evolution you describe.
| codechad wrote:
| It is interesting to see the overton window slide in real
| time.
| pessimizer wrote:
| People don't present themselves as extreme. I think what
| happened is that a lot of people ran this "thought
| experiment" and it made a lot of sense to them.
|
| edit: The New Republic was passed from a famous racist to a
| founder of facebook to a Democratic party bagman and
| banking heir. Characterizing it as an extreme left outlet
| is bizarre, because at times it wouldn't even count as
| center-left.
|
| From the first paragraph of wikipedia: "Through the 1980s
| and 1990s, the magazine incorporated elements of the Third
| Way and conservatism."
| hguant wrote:
| So first of all you're responding to what you want to
| read, not the actual content of my comment. I said that
| the friend of mine in question was a self described hard
| Leftist, and that he was big in leftist oriented Twitter.
| I made no statement about New Republic...which is in fact
| a hard left publication. When you were looking at
| Wikipedia, did you skip the part where they were owned by
| that guy in the 1980s because it came out that the
| editors and owner were spies for the USSR, EDIT and they
| were trying to revamp their image /ENDEDIT? Or the bit
| about their return to their leftist roots since their
| sale in 2016?
|
| Furthermore looking at who owned an institution 30-40
| years ago doesn't really add any value to the
| conversation about what they are today.
| groby_b wrote:
| Dude.
|
| The New Republic isn't a GOP outlet, sure. It might even
| occasionally slightly hurt centrist sensibilities, which
| _would_ put it left of the NYT. But if you think that 's
| "hard left", you haven't seen hard left, or even moderate
| left.
|
| Try something like wsws.org, or The Jacobin. The New
| Republic isn't remotely that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I made no statement about New Republic...which is in
| fact a hard left publication.
|
| What are the actual ends of the spectrum on which you
| identify the NR's position as "hard left" ?
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| I've seen Breitbart comments accusing the AP of being
| communists.
|
| They're about as milquetoast neoliberal as you can get,
| but they typically skew towards diversity and democracy
| which is probably enough to make you a steenkin pinko to
| some people.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| It's the same on both sides. The Hunter Biden "laptop saga"
| moved from NY Post -> Fox News -> Wall Street Journal.
|
| This was after Fox and WSJ passed on the story initially.
| Once it got traction from NY Post, they ran with it. Sean
| Hannity even claimed to have the laptop in his possession.
| Then he said it was stolen. Then he got it back, but
| couldn't share any of the juicy details cause his "lawyers
| wouldn't let him" [1]. They wouldn't even let other news
| organizations look at the incriminating emails [2].
|
| [1] https://news.yahoo.com/sean-hannity-says-lawyers-
| wont-020500...
|
| [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/here-s-
| what-h...
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I had a LOL moment when Rudy Giuliani posed with one of
| the computers on TV, because apparently the Mac guy
| wasn't smart enough to know the difference between an OSX
| based Macbook Pro and a Windows based LG.
| r-zip wrote:
| I don't know about journalists, but given the idiotic replies
| to the posts of the computer scientists I follow on Twitter,
| I'm not sure I blame them for producing content for other top
| computer scientists.
| curiousllama wrote:
| One day some rando really will solve P=NP and they'll show
| you! (Divide by P and N=0 obviously)
| achenet wrote:
| Uh... you mean N=1, unless P=0... :p
| curiousllama wrote:
| I said what I said
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, just look at the covid lockdowns and superstars posting
| crying videos, wanting sympathy from regular people, for being
| locked in ther multimillion dollar villas with tennis courts
| and swimming pools.
|
| Bubbles are bad... but if you don't want to escape from one by
| yourself, you'll stay there forever, your bubble won't move by
| itself.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Bubbles eventually burst, just ask an economist.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Australian housing? Not yet. It's been... forever. Never
| burst in modern times. They even managed to ride the Global
| Financial Crisis tsunami in 2008. The income-to-sale-price
| multiplier is simply mind blowing. I do not understand it!
|
| Ref: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-
| indexes-and-...
| xxpor wrote:
| Supply constraints are powerful things
| mc32 wrote:
| What happened to the wealthy?
|
| They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather than
| announce everything to the public.
|
| They used to use hidden signals of wealth to show themselves
| to each other but not reveal themselves to the public --but
| now it's a contest for crass popularity.
|
| I guess Robin Leach opened the crack and Instagram et al
| opened the floodgates. It's a bit pathetic.
|
| What the hell happened to the "millionaire next door" types?
| Someone who had wealth but you'd never know it?
| bitwize wrote:
| They've been replaced with nouveaux riches who want to show
| off to their poor friends (and enemies) that they've "made
| it".
|
| The "millionaire next door" also has low time preference,
| which is how they made their money. They don't spend
| extravagantly but reinvest that money into their business,
| stocks, real estate, etc. That's also why they're stealth
| rich.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| The real wealthy folks still are hush about their capital.
| The folks you see flinging cash and status around are - and
| always have been - the nouveau riche.
| mc32 wrote:
| Perhaps but Bezos, Branson, Ma, Musk, etc, aren't the
| quietest bunch regarding their monies. We even have those
| who are wealthy but need to tell us how unwealthylike
| they live such as Dorsey.
|
| Just be.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Perhaps but Bezos, Branson, Ma, Musk, etc, aren't the
| quietest bunch regarding their monies._
|
| Well, those are also crude nouveaux riches. Heck, they
| even had to somehow work for their money (even those of
| them that got some hefty support from their parents).
|
| As opposed to several generations of old money.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >the nouveau riche
|
| I'm not even sure that many are really rich. I recently
| read that the average net worth of a Ferrari owner is
| less than one million pounds and that most Ferraris are
| financed.
|
| Real wealth is what you don't spend.
| astrange wrote:
| Net worth isn't a good measure of being rich; high
| negative net worth means you're rich too. All the average
| people are in the middle.
| coldtea wrote:
| Real wealth is what you get to enjoy.
| Kye wrote:
| How would you know they aren't still majority? There were
| always conspicuously wealthy people, but now there are more
| wealthy people in general. It's inevitable both the quiet
| and noisy segments would grow even without other changes.
| newsclues wrote:
| My theory is that too many of the "wrong" people got rich,
| so the luxury industry and media worked together to
| increase consumption and funnel the nouveau rich money to
| the "right" wealthy people.
| groby_b wrote:
| If we even accept the premise (and it's a doubtful one,
| obscene wealth was always visible), it's worth pointing out
| that a lot of wealth is generated simply by being in the
| public eye. Cynically put, the not-wealthy like having a
| look at the things they'll never have enough to hand over
| money for it.
|
| As for "millionaire next door", they're still around. The
| US has 20 million of them. But most of the "next door"
| wealth is achieved through doing a "normal" job. (I.e. jobs
| that most other people can relate to, and could possibly
| achieve working in)
|
| Ostentatious wealth is requiring arbitrage of some form, at
| scale. Celebrities arbitrage fame. And it's a smart
| business, because part of their payment is more fame. Hence
| the "crass popularity" contests. People pay them for that
| popularity _and_ make them more popular.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _What the hell happened to the "millionaire next door"
| types? Someone who had wealth but you'd never know it?_
|
| Remember your audience here. You're surrounded by them.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I think you have a valid point, although I think it
| should probably be the "decimillionaire next door" to
| keep up with inflation and retain its original meaning.
| This is a case where the floor dropped out and the
| ceiling is falling, when a "millionaire" doesn't really
| mean what it meant many years ago.
|
| In 1904, $1M inflation adjusted is $31M now. In 1956,
| it's $9.9M. Seems to have peeked at 2007/8. The uptick to
| "billionaire" started around 1982 which is about $2.79M.
| Words are very discrete bins and usage lag.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Millionaire
| %2C...
|
| While there is a very valid point that many who frequent
| this site may be considered millionaires and by some,
| considered wealthy relative to the median in current
| times, that isn't to say the median hasn't been falling
| in terms of the sheer scale of wealth these days.
| munch117 wrote:
| You mean deca, not deci.
| pragmatic wrote:
| I'd rather have a million now than 31 million in 1904.
|
| The quality of life difference isn't measurable in money.
| wikibob wrote:
| > What happened to the wealthy? They used to keep these
| things amongst themselves rather than announce everything
| to the public.
|
| Still happens.
|
| See this $600 hat which is sold out, used as a wealth
| signaling mechanism. And also as an aspirational luxury
| good now that the masses are aware.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/succession-morning-show-
| luxury-...
| saltminer wrote:
| There have always been rich people who flaunt their wealth
| and crave attention, just as there are those who are, as
| you say, the "millionaires next door". The difference is
| now, I can easily check in on the lives of the ones who
| crave attention anywhere in the world. We no longer have
| "local celebrities" like we used to, as their fame is
| rarely only covered by the local papers.
|
| People always seem intrigued by the lives of the rich and
| famous, and tabloids have been milking that for
| generations. Before the internet, that was the best way to
| keep up to date on celebrity gossip, and it was a lucrative
| market (see also: MTV Cribs).
|
| It just seems like the rich are so much worse these days
| because it's so easy for them to get attention. Some have
| even turned it into an art form, knowing how effective
| ragebait is at getting clicks. (Remember Logan Paul's
| Japanese forest video?) Combine that with the reduction in
| our media landscape and increase in outlets which just
| report on drama, many of which get reposted with only minor
| rewording on more general outlets, and it's much more
| difficult to escape this stuff today.
|
| All this said, I would agree that the rich generally are
| worse today, but that's a byproduct of capital coalescing
| in new forms to lobby for awful laws spurring greater
| inequality, and it would have happened without the
| internet. They were also bad in the past, but unless you
| went out of your way, it was difficult to get a grasp on
| how wealth multiplies and the horrendous practices of many
| large corporations. The popularity contest becoming
| inescapable, on the other hand, is a direct result of our
| hyper-connected world.
| retrac wrote:
| I certainly agree society has gotten a lot more
| ostentatious, to the negative. But there's still a bit of a
| "kids these days" vibe to this comment; people (by which I
| mean the long-established aristocrats) have been decrying
| the tasteless, crass vulgarity of the nouveau riche since
| at least the late Roman Republic.
| saltminer wrote:
| Anyone who read The Great Gatsby in high school should be
| familiar with the disdain for the nouveau rich amongst
| old money. The movie Caddyshack also does a good job at
| depicting this.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| While mostly being angry they can't display the crassness
| of the new even richer class.
|
| The Guilded Age on HBO right now is a great show about
| this.
| t-3 wrote:
| > What the hell happened to the "millionaire next door"
| types? Someone who had wealth but you'd never know it?
|
| They're still around, and people still don't know it. Some
| of those older people you see working at the grocery store
| have been "retired" from executive positions and need
| something to do until they reach retirement age. Lots of
| diligent people working normal jobs and without vices
| manage to become quite wealthy while living unremarkable
| lives.
| belval wrote:
| These people will always be interesting to me. They "won"
| the game, they accumulated wealth and made a comfortable
| life for themselves. Yet they usually live frugally and
| die with several millions just because they never
| actually spent the money.
|
| Some of my relatives were like that. Lots of money in the
| banks, 70 years old, yet his wife would chastise him for
| buying a small $16k Mazda truck to replace his +10 years
| old $12k Ford truck.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That's how "new money" turns into "old money". Low time
| preference on a generational scale is all it takes.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Only if you inculcated the same standards into your
| children, which is definitely not a given. If you were
| just a miser and your children didn't understand your
| reasoning, I would expect them to blow their entire
| inheritance and leave a pittance to their children.
| tejohnso wrote:
| Couldn't this be addressed with some kind of legal entity
| like a generational trust where the children don't have
| direct access to the principle?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Yes, absolutely, and it would be a great idea if you
| don't trust the financial competence of your
| beneficiaries, but you want them to have access to your
| assets. The problem is that those trusts may be viewed as
| overly restrictive or unnecessarily burdensome to the
| beneficiaries and so may not be created in the first
| place. IE beneficiary needs $X for a rational business
| investment, but can only get $X/4 out of the trust within
| the timeframe, even though 1000*$X in total is in the
| trust.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > IE beneficiary needs $X for a rational business
| investment, but can only get $X/4 out of the trust within
| the timeframe, even though 1000*$X in total is in the
| trust.
|
| I mean, the trust can (usually) invest money without it
| being considered a distribution. I suspect that happens a
| lot based on the trustifarians I see in capital-intensive
| businesses and crushing it (due to below-market cost of
| capital).
|
| I feel bad for their competitors having to prove
| themselves to a bank or other arms-length financier.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| The mindset that "wins" the game (as you put it) is the
| same mindset that carefully considers whether a 16k truck
| is really worth the expense.
|
| If you start inflating expenses "because you have money",
| you don't become the old guy with lots of money in the
| bank.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > They used to keep these things amongst themselves rather
| than announce everything to the public.
|
| When did this happen? Do you mean the gilded age where the
| wealthy had giant, showy mansions built now used for
| various museums, or funded massive libraries and stuff in
| their name? Do you mean when the wealthy hung up painted
| portraits of themselves everywhere? Do you mean when the
| wealthy were building literal castles and starting literal
| wars on their name? Do you mean when royalty proclaimed to
| be a royal was to be divine??
|
| I don't think the wealthy have ever stfu'd about their
| money...
| rayiner wrote:
| > What happened to the wealthy?
|
| I wonder the same thing, especially with respect to the
| lower rung of wealth. I'm shocked at how much of the top 1%
| views themselves as victims of higher rungs of the top 1%
| instead of having attitudes commensurate with their wealth,
| privilege, and social status.
| analog31 wrote:
| Computer programmers too. My irony meter went off scale when
| this article hit HN.
|
| "You tell me where a man gits his corn pone, and I'll tell you
| what his 'pinions is" -- Mark Twain
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Computer programming is a high status, low wage job? I'm not
| sure about the "high status" part, and I'm even less sure
| about the "low wage" part. It pays pretty well, even if
| you're not at a FAANG.
| [deleted]
| xxpor wrote:
| It's somewhat the opposite in fact (not exactly _low_
| status, but not on the forefront of a cool job either). It
| 's the wordcel vs shape rotater meme/discourse.
| syshum wrote:
| That bar has now been replaced with Twitter, and other social
| media, but it is hard to listen to the conversations because of
| the number of voices all speaking at once...... the truth is
| out there, just hard to find.
|
| "Authoritative Sources" are not the solution either, which is
| what most social media companies seem to be banking on as the
| solution to "fake news" but their chosen authority are just as
| prone to reporting non-sense as some random guy with a blog
| jseliger wrote:
| _Not just journalists, but politicians, priests, etc_
|
| Yes: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/11/19/have-journalists-and-
| acad.... Journalists, and academics in the humanities, have
| become more cleric-like.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Economists are even more priestlike than humanities
| professors.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Used to be, near any event that generates news coverage,
| there would be a bar where the journalists hung out
|
| Just curious, how old are you and what year do you believe this
| "used to be" ended?
|
| I'm 40 and my guess is that this time is 25+ years gone by?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I'm 49; and i dunno about "ended". Its no longer required to
| attend a physical place to "cover a story," but I'm sure that
| bar is still there at every big event.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You're confusing (as so many people do, alas) the jobs of
| "reporter" and "journalist".
|
| The former is a job where you are required to attend a
| physical place to cover a story, required to talk to
| people, required to gather facts. Of course, you might do
| all of these badly, you might even lie about having done
| them, but that's the structure of the job.
|
| The latter is a job whose name comes from the practice of
| writing "journals", and has little, if anything to do with
| reporting. Journalists do not "cover stories", they write
| about things that are happening, informed by the work of
| reporters, but also other folk: researchers, essayists (an
| even less-connected-to-the-story form or journalism),
| lobbyists, politicians, and yes, their neighbors. They've
| been around for at least 350 years in European-linked
| cultures, and probably a lot longer than that if you take a
| broader view.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| My understanding (based on some podcasts I've heard on) is
| that journalism has developed journalists not being by in a
| physical place except at very big events is due to
| newspapers closing/lack of money. There simply isn't enough
| funding to have a well-considered reporter report on a
| specific subject or region where they then are in a place
| and regional education to then comment when something major
| happens. Now national newspapers ship reporters out to
| major events who simply don't have the know-how of on the
| ground context and therefore can come away with drastically
| different conclusions than the people who actually live
| there.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I am living near a medium sized city in Germany; here
| journalists from the local newspaper are very present at
| events, may they be cultural or political. A few days ago
| an incident made international headlines. After a few
| hours the place where the incident happend was full of
| journalists.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's been replaced with various private whatsapp groups.
| A surprisingly large amount of UK politics coverage is
| Laura K and Robert Peston reading out messages they have
| been sent by various leakers.
| paulcole wrote:
| > but I'm sure that bar is still there at every big event.
|
| Why are you sure of this?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I believe that where journalists gather, there will be
| drinking (and other intoxicant consumption). Usually as a
| herd.
|
| Perhaps the profession changed; my observations are
| dated.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I still remember the gamergate... The secret discussions and
| the amazing width of pushing the same narrative by publishing
| same story on multiple platforms... Still probably going on in
| many cliques...
| Sebguer wrote:
| Is this effectively the same reason so many crypto folks have
| consolidated in Miami?
| guelo wrote:
| Garbage article is just opinions based on broad stereotypes and
| the author's biases.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Chris Hedges entered the chat.
|
| Every public K-12 teacher entered the chat.
| grapescheesee wrote:
| We have nothing to talk about. When you have two options you have
| an illusion of choice. It is a duopoly in the corporate world. A
| 'competition' they love and enrich each other with.
|
| Just look at the way they have change labels on all sides. 'Far'
| right, 'Progressive', 'conservative', not worth a word more. It
| gives the two 'parties' more worth in the purpose their words
| have than trying to understand the inflections a dog makes as a
| complete sentence.
|
| Yes, ideas have meaning and somethings politicians say actually
| represent them. Apart from that nearly worthless sentance.. I
| can't tell you the last time I voted for someone and had a
| realistic means to contact them about some issue.
|
| The last time I contacted my senator was while I paid
| international call rates and when I asked for a reply on the
| issue the representative actually laughed at me and said no. We
| can't do that and this phone call has gone on three minuets
| longer than the average. I have many other people waiting sir! So
| what is the point? They literally can't pay staff to reply to my
| question. What is the senator view on issue X?
|
| Worthless elected leaders.
| csdvrx wrote:
| The only problem I see there is a missing market, or as explained
| in the article, "2. Status can't pay the rent". But I disagree
| with the premise that you need a direct intermediary.
|
| Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit will
| want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most valuable
| writers, those who result in precious ad money eyeballs.
|
| Otherwise, these writers may go to those who'll pay them. Some
| may decry that, but I think it will incentivize both to behave.
|
| If you need fresh examples, I find Rogan tone regarding the whole
| Spotify thing very telling: he's as nice to them as someone who's
| received a $100M cheque :)
|
| And on the other side, how Spotify handled that despite the
| various pressures exerted, is also very telling: they're as nice
| to him as any pro-sports manager would be to a highly paid star
| player, who in the course of the contract is expected to generate
| way more revenue for the team that what they pay him (or... they
| would not pay him that much in the first place!)
|
| Both parties benefit tremendously from the deal, which gives a
| strong incentive for everyone to behave.
|
| The author has noticed part of the trend in journalism: the
| "extreme upper who's public standing achieved escape velocity,
| allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly
| higher incomes".
|
| The only reason it's currently limited to the upper tail is due
| to frictions and transaction costs / legal issues etc. making it
| easier to pay $100M to 1 person vs $1 to 100M people. However,
| that's not set in stone.
|
| With the financial upheaval that crypto will unleash onto the
| world, I believe that status _WILL_ end up paying the rent:
| reddit could certainly spin some coin to pay the people they
| value. Writers will moonlight under a nom-de-plume, until it
| starts paying more than their daily job. If it 's not reddit,
| then some other company will.
| maybeOneDay wrote:
| I'm not certain why crypto is hugely important here. Can reddit
| not just ask people to link a paypal/some other banal payment
| provider if they would like to pay content creators?
| csdvrx wrote:
| I see two huge reasons: 1. friction and legal issues when it
| comes to money being send to people 2. lack of a second
| market for current reddit badges etc.
|
| Now if said badges were say NFTs and could be traded for
| something else easily, I would agree with you.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Isn't reddit already doing this with NFTs and a secondary
| market? And I think it's not working out so great.
|
| Edit: I can't for the life of me find the link but I swear
| there was an article posted to HN in the last week or so
| about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token of some
| sort that the mods were then selling for significant sums.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Edit: I can't for the life of me find the link but I
| swear there was an article posted to HN in the last week
| or so about Reddit giving mods an exclusive NFT or token
| of some sort that the mods were then selling for
| significant sums.
|
| IDK, but it's bound to happen eventually, one way or the
| other!
|
| I think we're in the very early stages for something that
| will change the power dynamics in social media
| bosie wrote:
| > legal issues when it comes to money being send to people
|
| how is the mode of sending money the problem here?
| csdvrx wrote:
| The mode is a problem when sending fractions of cents
| (the elusive micropayments), but the core problem is
| sending money in the first place.
|
| Giving people that's not money comes with fewer
| administrative burden - and even less if it's digital.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Crypto is important because those invested in crypto have to
| keep growing the market to find new people to buy they stuff
| they own.
| anthony_r wrote:
| This is exactly what YouTube does already. In fact I see no
| reason why Twitter couldn't spill ad money to the content
| (tweet) creators within the next year or two, creating a
| similar ecosystem. Maybe the value attributable to individual
| creators would be too small? Videos are quite a bit bigger than
| tweets (in terms of what matters most, the eyeball time), after
| all.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-monetization?
| You had me till that paragraph but there's no reason Reddit
| can't pay contributors in cents per thousand likes if currency
| is really the bottleneck. If it can be properly valued, it can
| already be properly paid.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Why would crypto be the missing piece to micro-
| monetization?
|
| Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny
| problem" of child labor...
|
| Something I've found very interesting on reddit gaming subs
| is how a lot of gamers easily admit they use Bing simply
| because it gets them a free gamepass every month.
|
| Could Microsoft give them an equivalent amount of money?
| Maybe, but the costs in red tape alone would eat a lot of
| what they'd get.
|
| A gamepass paid by Microsoft rewards points achieve the same
| thing, without having to consider the legality of say whether
| compensating someone below 18 to use a search engine could
| constitute child labor.
|
| Microsoft has tried to shove Bing down people throats using
| various strategies, but this one works! I see it as one early
| type of micro-monetization, and crypto as what will enable
| that for most companies who can't mint xbox gamepass :)
| hannasanarion wrote:
| > Accounting fees, laws regarding employment, the "tiny
| problem" of child labor...
|
| And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be
| taxed, and that children can't get it?
| csdvrx wrote:
| > And you think that crypto has no fees, that it can't be
| taxed, and that children can't get it?
|
| I think that companies rolling their own (or adopting low
| fee ones) can mitigate all this - along with making these
| problems other people problems (capital gains -> you, KYC
| -> exchanges!)
|
| Oh, and BTW:
|
| > that it can't be taxed
|
| It's interesting you're shoving these words in my mouth
| :)
|
| I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate
| that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be
| more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash
| (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)
|
| Imagine how much worse it would be for reddit at scale
| (friction!)
|
| About taxes, for a coin, it's up to the individual to
| declare what they did with that they received, or the
| parents of said individual :)
|
| Then no need to bother with age checks or expose yourself
| to potentially thorny contractual or PR issues (ex:
| parents monetizing their kids' videos on youtube)
|
| Your hate for all things crypto may prevent you from
| noticing the huge opportunities that await given the
| various problems it solves, and which may be all that's
| needed to create the missing market here.
| saltminer wrote:
| I don't see how this solves any problems.
|
| How would this hypothetical reddit coin work? Does reddit
| mint them or do the users have to buy them? How are they
| distributed? (e.g. based on interaction vs awarded by
| users)
|
| If this is to be a payment system, then these coins have
| value, value which can be taxed. Sure, meeting up with
| some dude and paying cash might avoid it, but the success
| of Coinbase shows convenience is king, and the
| demographics of reddit are far different than the initial
| Bitcoin crowd, so these exchanges would pop up much
| sooner. Even if reddit manages to dodge the tax situation
| by minting coins themselves (vs charging sales tax on
| purchased coins), the tax man will be more than happy to
| collect records from exchanges.
|
| You may be right in that distributions of virtual coins
| may not fall under any existing labor regulations, but I
| don't see that as a good thing. "Just think how much
| money we could save by skirting labor laws through paying
| people in crypto" is only a win for the employer.
|
| But even if these coins have no real value and can only
| be used on reddit for virtual goods reddit wholly owns
| (e.g. reddit gold), considering how people farm karma, a
| meaningless virtual number, I can only see more perverse
| incentives being created for those running repost bots.
|
| Edit: Much has been said about the state of Youtube
| monetization over the years and how infuriatingly often
| that yellow "limited/no ads" icon appears for seemingly
| no reason, about the drop in payouts, abuse of copyright
| claims, and how some people take advantage of the system
| (see: Dan Olson's video "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming
| the Algorithm"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8). But despite
| all this, I think the current state of Youtube would be
| more fair than a hypothetical reddit monetization scheme,
| and most micropayment schemes I've read about for that
| matter.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| > I guess it goes with the usual irrational crypto hate
| that often flies here... but FWIW, I think reddit may be
| more concerned with the legal implications of paying cash
| (W9, and OMG the paperwork, accounting etc.)
|
| "irrational crypto hate" says the guy who doesn't think
| that there are any tax forms involved at all when paying
| people for work in-kind using volatile securities.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Well, double down on tax stuff all you want, I replied
| fairly to your biased views.
|
| Your answer makes me think you're missing the forest for
| the trees if you still refuse to see the reduction in
| paperwork and the gains from automating/internalizing
| some stuff that most companies can't do (Microsoft can
| mint gamepass, what about you?)
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I've gone from not giving a shit about crypto to being
| repulsed by it because of comments like this. Using smilies
| to convey the benefits of using shitcoins to skirt around
| child labour laws? Employment laws? And proper
| accounting/taxation? Thanks but not interested.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Using smilies
|
| Is the problem the form, or the message?
|
| > And proper accounting/taxation?
|
| Interesting, here's yet another person shoving words in
| my mouth!
|
| Nowhere in the above or anywhere else did I even suggest
| people shouldn't pay the taxes they owe if they make
| capital gains.
|
| And FWIW, taxes are a very small problem in the grand
| scheme of things: my core argument is about reducing
| friction, which may allow a missing market, even for
| companies that are not at the scale of Microsoft and
| can't mint a gamepass.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > Sooner or later, I think companies like twitter or reddit
| will want to "lock in with golden handcuffs" their most
| valuable writers, those who result in precious ad money
| eyeballs.
|
| Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in upvotes.
| But seriously though, that's how places like Reddit get their
| content. You want to post because you think "people might like
| this", and "I might get a ton of upvotes" and "I might even get
| some awards". Now all of these things are completely worthless,
| but the point is to trick your brain into thinking those things
| hold value in an attempt for you to post.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > Reddit already "pays" their writers, they pay them in
| upvotes
|
| Good enough for now, but then it's a high status zero wage
| job :)
|
| > Now all of these things are completely worthless, but the
| point is to trick your brain into thinking those things hold
| value in an attempt for you to post.
|
| Think further: not _if_ but _when_ a company comes with a
| good way to exchange this social capital for more traditional
| financial capital, it will crush those who don't allow that.
| woopwoop wrote:
| If you are going to pay for something, you want to pay for it in
| money if at all possible. Social problems arise when you pay for
| your spot on the road with your willingness to sit in traffic
| instead of a congestion fee. When you pay journalists in
| attention instead of cash. When you pay politicians in power
| instead of cash.
|
| I think that in the case of journalism the problem is the
| hardest. I disagree with the author that the problem can just be
| solved by people doing local journalism. That pays less in both
| money and attention. The bottom line is that good journalism is a
| public good in an extremely strong sense, and is very unlikely to
| be provided by the market. But obviously the government employing
| an army of journalists is not any kind of solution either.
| Whereas we could much more easily implement congestion pricing,
| or pay politicians more money.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Let people crowdfund good-quality journalism/blogging/policy
| work. Patreon and GoFundMe are good first starts at the
| problem, but of course their political bias is highly
| problematic. If anything, it is all the more urgent to fund
| high-quality work on the _other_ side of the political spectrum
| - surely they deserve way better than their current focus on
| Trumpism and anti-vaxx protests!
| Jiro wrote:
| >Social problems arise when you pay for your spot on the road
| with your willingness to sit in traffic instead of a congestion
| fee.
|
| On the other hand, it's a lot easier for a bureaucrat to siphon
| off a congestion fee to fill his own pockets or his friends'
| pockets, than it is to fill his pockets with "willingness to
| sit in traffic".
| carlmcqueen wrote:
| If journalism is similar to art, this seems obvious. When we
| consider the many classical periods of art, we see that the
| majority of the artists lived in the same location, knew each
| other, and had the same circle of funders for their work. It is
| essential to be able to compete with someone on your level.
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| At the very start of the article, I was deathly afraid the author
| would conclude these people should be paid more. Most of the
| white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in Brooklyn don't
| actually have any firm values of their own; they're just floating
| along with the cultural tide and trying to fit into the bubble.
| If they had their own money, they would definitely shut up more-
| whether or not they contribute anything to society and deserve
| more is a separate question.
| malandrew wrote:
| The main reason I want them to be paid more has nothing to do
| with deserving more. The overwhelming majority of journalists
| certainly don't do work that deserves higher pay. The problem
| with the low pay is that they become highly prone to viewing
| the world as much worse than it is and sowing discontent. A
| financially comfortable journalistic class that feels the
| weight of taxes is more likely to defend hard work and keeping
| the fruits of their labor instead of arguing for an ever larger
| unaccountable and ineffective government apparatus to fix
| problems that they could fix themselves with their own money.
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| Yes- that's roughly what I'm saying as well - they would shut
| up more if they were beholden to a corporation that feeds
| them a lot more. I conclude differently than you in that I
| take issue with what I interpret to believe would be society
| bribing them to achieve this outcome. Many of them have a
| deeply negative impact on society, so it sounds like paying
| off someone to stop a temper tantrum, which is a hard pill to
| swallow for me.
| scandox wrote:
| > they become highly prone to viewing the world as much worse
| than it is and sowing discontent
|
| So pay them to keep them sweet so they can accurately portray
| people's live back to them as being wonderful?
|
| I don't think it takes poorly paid journos to "sow
| discontent". The fact is people need their material needs met
| and a sense of self-respect to be content. Many people really
| do not have those 2 things.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in
| Brooklyn don't actually have any firm values of their own and
| are just trying to fit into the bubble.
|
| Arguably neither do most of the Christians
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement
| blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual. A Christian will
| hold a firm set of values for their entire life, whether or
| not they actually practice those values (not a Christian-
| specific problem). The average Brooklyn liberal will give
| Lindsey Graham or Biden a run for their money on flip
| flopping as the breeze changes.
| amcoastal wrote:
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| This reads more like a haphazardly-inserted, boring and
| vanilla anti-Trump virtue signal rather than a thoughtful
| critique on Christian values.
| [deleted]
| kcb wrote:
| Meh Christian values are not so well defined
| kuhewa wrote:
| The only value they necessarily hold is that faith alone
| yields salvation, i.e. fuck up all you want if you ask for
| forgiveness. maybe you can include some obvious ones like
| 'dont murder'.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I am definitely not a Christian but I find that statement
| blatantly ridiculous and counterfactual.
|
| I am a Christian, and stop trying to use Christians as a
| target of the "noble savage" trope.
|
| > A Christian will hold a firm set of values for their
| entire life
|
| Not more likely than anyone else.
|
| > whether or not they actually practice those values
|
| If a belief you state doesn't guide your decision-making,
| it's not a value just a PR position.
|
| But Christians also, while remaining Christians, can drift
| around a pretty broad space of even public moral positions.
|
| > The average Brooklyn liberal will give Lindsey Graham or
| Biden a run for their money on flip flopping as the breeze
| changes.
|
| It's interesting that the people you use as touchstones of
| flipflopping, despite your claim that Christians are
| universally steadfast, are both Christians.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| What does it mean "don't have any firm values of their own" ?
| What kind of example can you provide ?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| A lot of people pick teams and shape their values based on
| what the team tells them. You see that a lot in political
| parties. When "their" party pushes for something their
| supporters are for it. When the "other" party pushes
| something they are automatically against it. Same with the
| latest calls for censorship. People would be outraged if the
| "other" side had called for censorship but if "their" side
| calls for censorship they support it. Also see allegations
| about sexually abuse. People's level of outrage about
| allegations is usually closely correlated with how much they
| agree with the person otherwise.
| h2odragon wrote:
| An example might be someone who once said "Labeling records
| for language is fascism!" but now fully supports blocking the
| distribution of content _they_ now find offensive.
|
| Some people cannot see the contradiction, to them it seems a
| matter of "but thats what _we want_ " alone.
| iqanq wrote:
| >Most of the white (not going to sugar coat this) liberals in
| Brooklyn
|
| Define white. :)
| drnonsense42 wrote:
| In this context, people born in the US who circle Caucasian
| when filling out their college applications honestly, and
| this Brooklyn white journo caste is typically middleclass+.
| yazboo wrote:
| This doesn't cohere into an argument, its like a loose pile of
| grievances and suppositions about...who, exactly?
|
| For easier scanning I've extracted this author's ideas as to what
| constitutes "heresy":
|
| - Accusations of politicians and celebrities
|
| - Cheap pablum for frothing basement trolls and listicles of
| reasons never to let your kids leave the house
|
| - Election conspiracy theories
|
| - A new expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid
|
| - Corporate public relations expressing the deepest committment
| of the NFL to protect everyone and only good from here on out
|
| Do these things sound at all similar to each other, like they
| would be produced by a homogenous group of people? Does it sound
| reasonable that these things are produced by low-paid writers in
| Brooklyn due to the financial pressures of middle age? As far as
| I can tell, the progressive unionized sports writers of Brooklyn
| have been more vocal than anybody against the public relations
| arm of the NFL, to take one example.
|
| I wonder if the unidentified group of people this guy has a
| problem with - who do the "progressive cosplay" and produce
| "little in the way of insight or information" - are even that low
| paid. Journalism on the whole doesn't pay well, but some national
| outlets in NYC really do! Unfortunately, this article has no
| insight or information on the topic.
| [deleted]
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think one of the dangers is that it will ultimately lead to
| discontent, and all of the consequences of that.
| bwestergard wrote:
| "If you're curious why unionization has taken the journalism
| world by storm the last few years, you don't have to look to
| politics or in-group signaling for an explanation, basic
| economics will get you all the way there.... You reduce quantity
| of labor supplied and end up with higher equilibrium wages for
| those who manage to get their foot in the door. Of course, this
| will only heighten the favoring of those who can get their foot
| in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing fashionably and
| using "semiotics" correctly in a sentence, but that's neither
| here nor there."
|
| This is a cute theory, and tickles some people's ideological
| fancy. But if the author had done more research, they would know
| where the CWA-NewsGuild is actually doing most of its new
| organizing (hint: not New York), what sorts of contract articles
| they bargain around hiring, and what the status quo in non-union
| newsrooms is.
|
| In brief, the Guild has been organizing tons of local newspapers
| in small cities and rural areas, particularly those bought up by
| private equity firms who want to cut the newsroom to the bone.
| They bargain contract articles that curb the nepotistic in-group
| hiring practices common at non-union papers.
|
| Source: I'm a former NewsGuild member, but at a software company,
| not a newspaper.
|
| Take a gander at the NewsGuild president's twitter account and
| you'll see many examples of these campaigns:
| https://twitter.com/gaufre
| ekanes wrote:
| Please ignore if this takes us off-topic, but is this a case
| for micropayments, done via cryptocurrency? Because I think a
| successful implementation of micropayments might solve for
| this.
|
| I don't want to subscribe to any regular news, but I'd be happy
| to click a button that gives $.25 to the author/site.
|
| That doesn't work with CC fees, but if micropayments done via
| crypto (there are many with low/no transaction costs).
| khalladay wrote:
| I could be misremembering, but this seems like an idea that's
| been tried (and failed before). I have a memory of a service
| whose pitch was that you'd load funds into an account (a 1
| time large transaction to get past the CC fees), and then
| individual sites could request micropayments from that
| account balance. No crypto then of course, but I'm not sure
| adding crypto makes this idea functionally different from how
| it looks without it.
|
| I could be totally off my rocker, but I'm pretty sure I
| remember this from sometime around the early 2010's ?
| azza2110 wrote:
| I think you are talking about Blendle which up until a few
| years ago let you pay by the article for many major
| newspapers and magazines.
|
| I miss it.
| fragmede wrote:
| The failure in the 2010s, is due to (lack of) network
| effects (from lack of participation), among other things.
| Crypto doesn't necessarily solve this but things like the
| Solana cryptocurrency enable solutions built on top of it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think the point is that nobody wants to make some
| account, then pre-load that account with money, and then
| wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck! If this
| problem is going to be properly solved, someone has to
| solve the [evidently very hard] problem of being able to
| send $0.25 over the Internet without all these accounts and
| without getting overwhelmed with fees from the banking
| establishment.
|
| If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical,
| business, or security constraints, what would the ideal
| micropayment system look like? A button on the web page
| that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account to
| the web site. Isn't something like that the holy grail? No
| need to "have an account" at the web site, and "have an
| account" with the payment processor or pre-load things with
| funds or any of that garbage. I already have a bank
| account, why do I need a handful of other accounts all over
| the place?
|
| There's the UX. I think it would be successful. But nobody
| has managed to build it yet.
| ghaff wrote:
| Back in the dot-com era (and maybe since), there were
| some startups in the micropayments space.
|
| >If we had a magic wand, and there were no technical,
| business, or security constraints, what would the ideal
| micropayment system look like? A button on the web page
| that, when I press it, sends $0.25 from my bank account
| to the web site.
|
| That sounds like exposing my bank account quite a bit too
| freely. The obvious approach is that you have an account
| with someone who collects the money and distributes it--
| and yes it would probably be prepaid.
|
| In any case, if there were a demand the technical and UX
| problems can be overcome. The bigger issue, other than
| establishing the network, are getting people to actually
| pay per article--given that we've mostly moved to all you
| can eat subscriptions for other media--at an amount that
| would actually pay the bills. And in light of the fact
| that a lot of people don't want mental transaction costs
| to decide if reading an article is worth it every time
| they want to read something. (Which Clay Shirky brought
| up 20 years ago.)
| marmadukester39 wrote:
| See Iota - the only zero fee crypto with realistic
| ambitions for supporting smart contracts.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I think the point is that nobody wants to make some
| account, then pre-load that account with money, and then
| wonder what the balance is, etc. etc. etc. Yuck!_
|
| Those free-to-play phone games seem to survive ok while
| making players pre-load a balance before they can buy
| their in-game advantage items with it.
| itronitron wrote:
| As long as the reader needs 'an account' this will never
| take off. There should be some way to load money into my
| computer and then drag a quarter or half dollar coin onto
| an article that I want to read.
|
| The only information that needs to transfer is the coin's
| value. There is absolutely no need for any account
| information to propagate off of my computer. But the
| current state of the internet basically guarantees that
| the most syphilitic tech whore lead is going to shout
| from the mountain tops who paid what to view which
| article and then carve it into stone which is
| subsequently dumped into a landfill.
| meetups323 wrote:
| This is what Web3 is supposed to be. "Want to store some
| data? Just pay the market rate for data storage!" Of
| course they chose the most expensive and unwieldy data
| storage mechanism imaginable.
|
| Inb4 "but X chain is so cheap!", all chains are cheap
| until they're popular. Make a chain that gets
| faster&cheaper to commit on as the amount of compute on
| it increases (as you would expect... pretty much any CS
| thing to work) and you've solved web3. Oh but then the
| asset is inherently inflationary and people care more
| about getting in on the next big hockey stick than sound
| financial instruments. So... there you have it.
| thebean11 wrote:
| The blockchains you are thinking of were never meant to
| be data storage layers. The proof-of-storage chains (at
| least, the ones that store "real" data) are much more
| reasonable, check out prices for storage on FileCoin.
|
| The distinction here is that nodes publish proof that
| they have data stored on chain, rather than publishing
| the data itself on chain.
| meetups323 wrote:
| Yep, proof of storage is the only way forward as far as
| I'm concerned. At least of the currently available
| options. But they aren't great for representing a ledger.
| Some sort of hybrid is needed.
| [deleted]
| agentdrtran wrote:
| This has been trialed several places before and never taken
| off, the type of people willing to engage in micropayments at
| all, but who will never subscribe at any price point, seems
| to be quite small.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not entirely true. There are a few porn sites that have had
| success moving away from "all scenes access" subscription
| models to load up an account and purchase individual scenes
| from the pool models. And, of course, services like
| Clips4Sale have always worked this way. I suspect it would
| work well enough for any kind of cross platform video on
| demand service, not just adult, but no such thing exists
| right now because streaming providers largely don't work
| with each other the way porn providers do, preferring to
| own both the content and the platform.
|
| Another part of this is I guess the payments aren't really
| "micro" in the video case, as filmed scenes are more
| expensive to produce and more valuable to consume than most
| written articles, so they can charge more per scene than
| anyone would ever pay per article.
| ptman wrote:
| https://webmonetization.org/ the transactions need to
| batched, e.g. once per month
| nemothekid wrote:
| If you have a paywall, a subscription works a lot better. If
| you don't, ads have a better CPM than donations.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Don't you think you're just postponing the inevitable?
| Newspapers historically made most of their money from the
| classifieds when most people are using Facebook and Craigslist
| and the like.
|
| Then you have the fact that "only old people buy newspapers"
| mchanson wrote:
| Everyone is always delaying the inevitable. It is the only
| thing anyone can do. None of us (or our companies) are
| getting out of this alive.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The difference is that millions of people aren't going to
| wake up one morning and say they want to start buying
| physical newspapers.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I had a similar reaction when I read the grandparent post.
| Could we not say the same about most retail shops and
| people who work at them? "Bah, why bother? In the long run,
| you will all be replaced with robot pickers in an Amazon
| warehouse." And yet, the retail "experience" continues to
| innovate / find / create experiences that people cannot
| have with pure online shopping.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Would you invest in either a bookstore or a big retail
| shop in a mall today?
| bwestergard wrote:
| In the U.S., the gutting of newsrooms has largely already
| happened, with disastrous consequences for democracy. There
| is simply too little actual investigative journalism,
| particularly at the local level, being done today. There are
| too few independent newsrooms.
|
| Consider that this was already a plotline in the early 2000s
| TV show "The Wire", written by former Baltimore-Sun reporter
| (and NewsGuild member) David Simon.
|
| The papers being organized are those that found a business
| model that works to a degree. The fight now is largely about
| whether their owners will continue to operate real newsrooms,
| which requires employing journalists at a living wage and
| having a fairly long time horizon for investment, or whether
| they will become essentially hollow brands with little
| original content.
|
| But to your point: yes, the broader political question of how
| the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains unresolved
| for now.
| WesternWind wrote:
| There's also been a huge rise of non profit journalism.
| brimble wrote:
| I don't think folks appreciate just how tetering-on-the-
| edge local corruption already was before local newspapers
| started to die. Expect to see a lot more crazy stories
| coming out when small towns and small cities go so far into
| private-fiefdom territory that someone outside notices. The
| _only_ remaining significant bulwark to ruining-the-country
| levels of corruption is state auditors--and that 's if
| they're not corrupt themselves.
|
| Larger cities may be OK a little while longer since they
| usually still have _some_ local investigative reporting.
|
| It's one of several reasons I'm no longer sure the Web is
| compatible with healthy democracy.
| WesternWind wrote:
| One thing I have read about though, is that, since unlike
| radio or tv stations there is no real regulator of who
| owns how many websites, conservative media networks are
| creating news sites for towns using a local contractor
| for local stories, and then having national or
| international stories be presented with a conservative
| slant.
|
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/hundreds-of-
| hyperpartisan-...
| webdoodle wrote:
| > But to your point: yes, the broader political question of
| how the fourth estate is funded in the U.S. remains
| unresolved for now.
|
| It's been funded by for profit organizations, that have a
| vested interest in controlling what is newsworthy and what
| is ignored, and who gets discredited and maligned. Unbiased
| news died with Operation Mockingbird in the 60's and it's
| corpse has been dancing along like Weekend at Bernie's.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Thank you to post about this important issue. The demise of
| diversity in news sources is that local politics will lose
| its Fourth Estate (media) that acts as a check-and-balance.
| National politics will continue to be closely monitored by
| national papers. To all readers of any nationality: This
| issue will affect any democracy that sees a sharp decline
| in local news sources.
| mcculley wrote:
| I would love to buy a subscription to a newspaper. As far
| as I can tell, nobody wants to sell me one without ads and
| trackers. It does not appear there is a big enough market
| for a publication that serves the interests of subscribers.
|
| I canceled all of my subscriptions after asking politely
| that they do something about the third party tracking.
| tharne wrote:
| I think a big part of the problem with funding the news is
| the way papers handle online payments. I would happily pay
| a dollar or two to have online access to the NY Times, WSJ,
| or even my local town paper for a day. What I absolutely do
| not want to do is spend $500+ on 3 or more subscriptions
| that I will not read, or not read much of, on most days.
| For papers that still have a print edition, you can buy the
| day's paper. I don't know why you can't do the same thing
| online.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You misunderstand. The subscriptions are not the key to
| revenue. The dollar even per article would be even less
| so. They are qualifiers for the ad demographic.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The "qualifiers" are way too high for anyone who isn't
| from the boomer generation. I can afford it, but I cannot
| justify it.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| The NYTimes seems to be doing quite well on subscription
| revenue.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| The NYT has subscribers across the country (and beyond)
| as it covers broad US and world events. I doubt a local
| paper that principally covers local/state news will have
| that same reach.
| ghaff wrote:
| The NYT, WSJ, FT, The Economist, and maybe a few others
| have a national and international (to greater or lesser
| degrees) audience who are willing to pay $100/year or so
| for a subscription. That's a much tougher sale when your
| audience is almost entirely just, say, Philadelphia.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| And for the same reason, local papers are going to have
| paltry ad sales.
|
| At the end of the day, none of this looks good for local
| news, but that doesn't been that subscription sales
| aren't a viable business model to some degree.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not sure why people are downvoting you. Here are some
| numbers from Feb 2021:
|
| > Total subscription revenue in 2020 was up 10 percent,
| to $1.195 billion.
|
| > Total ad revenue at The Times fell 26 percent in 2020,
| to $392.4 million.
|
| > Adjusted operating profit rose 1.4 percent from the
| fourth quarter of 2019, to $97.7 million, and 0.9 percent
| over the year, to $250.6 million.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/business/media/new-
| york-t...
| autokad wrote:
| 1/3 of their revenue from ads is a lot. especially since
| the ads are probably high margin
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Just because the NYT was successful doesn't mean that
| model translates at all to local independent newsrooms.
| It doesn't even necessarily translate to other large
| national news papers.
|
| The resulting problem is exactly why people complain
| about too many streaming services. You could easily have
| to juggle national, state, and various local-level
| subscriptions. Maybe multiples at every level. Plus any
| other publications specific to other hobbies or interests
| you might have.
|
| Just because it works once, doesn't mean it will work for
| everyone.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I've had some conversations with my
| local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican about this, since
| their subscription cost seems sort of absurd for the
| value. They point out (correctly, IMO) that the really
| small upper bound on their potential subscriber base
| really forces their hand a lot, a problem that the NYT
| does not face and likely never will (given its national
| and international reach).
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I mean, the ad model doesn't seem to be working all that
| well for local news rooms _either_.
|
| My point was simply to show a counter example that news
| _must_ survive off of ad revenue.
|
| The old model of subscriptions covering cost of
| production + ads delivering the profits is just dead.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I see your point, but I don't think it's a good counter-
| example. News needs a new paradigm entirely most-likely.
| The NYT isn't "the news" and the only options seem to be
| subscriptions and/or ads. For smaller operations, the
| problem gets a lot harder a lot faster since there's an
| upper-bound on the number of people they serve.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| > The NYT isn't "the news"
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this.
|
| At the end of the day, I think the answer is that local
| news rooms just aren't going to be viable, by and large.
| This is a consequence of a century long trend to begin
| with.
|
| The way I see it, either you have a broad enough reach,
| or you have to niche yourself into the broader content
| generation ecosystem. Local news publishing that just
| reprints of AP stories or talking about some new pop
| health study of the week isn't going to survive. To the
| degree that local investigative journalism is valuable,
| it's going to have to find an entirely new model to
| sustain itself.
| marmadukester39 wrote:
| Or, more likely, simply die, and take fair local
| government with it.
| foolinaround wrote:
| Is 'fair local government' correlated to the presence of
| robust local media? Seems like a sad state of affairs if
| that is indeed the case..
| eastWestMath wrote:
| I feel like the NYTimes could take more papers under its
| subscription - e.g. give subscribers the option to bundle
| in a state and municipal paper, that the NYTimes
| essentially vets as a local affiliate (I'm guessing this
| would probably lead to substantial overhead on their end,
| though).
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| The New York Times is the only legacy media company to
| successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at
| that. In 2014, an internal innovation report [1] laid out
| the challenges the Times faced and what it needed to do
| to be successful. To the Times' immense credit, it
| succeeded and then some. I worked at a digital
| publication that was cutting edge on the types of digital
| and audience engagement work the the Times was trying to
| chase and used to say that "we are trying to become the
| New York Times before the Times becomes us." And in 2016,
| we had layoffs and the company "pivoted to video," and as
| I said to some colleagues the night of the layoffs (I was
| spared but many other were not), the Times won. (The
| pivot didn't work and the company would sell for 1/5 of
| its valuation 18 months later. But at this point I'd just
| left media for tech.)
|
| The Times is the exception. It's the Apple amidst a sea
| of Commodores and Ataris and DECs. The Times is the
| exception and is exceptional as a business reinvention
| story, but it is the outlier, not the norm.
|
| (The Journal has always had a paywall (even in the mid
| 1990s when it sold digital editions over dial-up), tho
| its porousness has ebbed and flowed, and as such, has
| never had the same degree of challenges that faced local
| papers or the national papers like the New York Times,
| WaPo, and the LA Times)
|
| [1]: https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-
| York-Times...
| rjsw wrote:
| > The New York Times is the only legacy media company to
| successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at
| that.
|
| How about the Financial Times or The Economist?
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| The Economist is so small (staff of 75 writers, not sure
| how large the whole organization is but it's still very
| small) that I don't think it counts the same way
| something like the Times counts. That isn't to take
| anything away from The Economist, but a magazine isn't
| the same scope, to me. Especially since the magazine has
| changed hands a few times. And if I'm going to be
| brutally honest, The New Yorker is actually the magazine
| that has adapted to digital the best and if it were its
| own business and not one of the things propping up Conde
| Nast, I'd list it alongside the Times.
|
| (Thinking about it more, The Atlantic is close to
| successfully pivoting but I don't know if I can say it
| has done it quite yet. And again, it had to sell itself)
|
| FT is a fantastic newspaper but I think it's much more
| akin to WSJ, where its paywall and subscriber base
| insulated it from the challenges than a lot of other
| papers. But that's a good call-out as a paper that has
| done its part to pivot like the Times has. (It has also
| been sold, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but is
| worth noting).
|
| The Times, to me, is unique in that it's investment in
| its tech has been as significant as it has. And not just
| for the apps like Cooking and Games, but the commitment
| to the full stack within its storytelling, its video, its
| audio. It is really remarkable from a product
| perspective, as much as from a journalism perspective.
| The core product it offers is still news, but it has
| managed to really change the medium and packaging of its
| offerings in a very demonstrable way.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| I'm glad they were able to figure that out, and now the
| question that arises in my mind is whether there is any
| hope for finding a model that props up local
| investigative journalism. Even if all those local news
| organizations became non-profits and had access to a very
| effective digital media platform that made it effortless
| to produce online content (including mobile-friendly
| functionality), and maybe even charge micro-payments for
| some of the individual articles, would it be enough? Or
| would it not work? Can they only survive if they do real
| news while selling other stuff?
| julienb_sea wrote:
| WSJ has also pivoted quite successfully and maintains
| pretty much the same operating model as NYT.
|
| I realize these are basically the two highest profile
| legacy news products, so broadly your point stands.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Totally, and WSJ never had the same challenges because it
| never took down its paywall/had a different subscriber
| profile/etc. But yes, those are the two that have managed
| to stay successful and that's a testament to both of
| their teams.
| Veen wrote:
| > The New York Times is the only legacy media company to
| successfully pivot into digital, and pivot properly at
| that.
|
| I'm more familiar with the UK media market, where quite a
| few legacy media publications have pivoted into digital
| successfully. Whatever you think of the Daily Mail/Mail
| Online, it's very successful. The Guardian is doing well
| without a paywall (although it has a large endowment to
| sustain it). Smaller publications such as the Spectator
| (which is about legacy as it gets) are doing well with a
| digital subscription model. And then there's The
| Economist, of course.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I think the Daily Mail is a good example and this is a
| reminder to never speak in absolutes.
|
| That said, I don't think any of those other examples
| pivoted the way the Times pivoted. The Times didn't just
| digitize the newspaper or combine the newsrooms. It
| started to do real digital first and product first
| investments. The Cooking app, the Games vertical, the
| investment into audio and video, the tremendous
| investment in data tools for its journalists for
| multimedia storytelling (consider the impact of Snow
| Fall, even a decade later).
|
| The Daily Mail may have successfully managed
| profitability, but I wouldn't put it on par with the
| transformation that happened at The Times. The Times
| looked at the innovation happening at BuzzFeed and
| Mashable (where I worked for many years) and Vice and Vox
| and has not just been able to compete with them, I would
| argue that it has largely vested them. Whatever else you
| think of their journalism, that alone, is nothing short
| of remarkable. And I cannot think of another legacy media
| company that has transformed itself the same way.
| ekanes wrote:
| Agreed, micropayments would be clutch here.
| philwelch wrote:
| The heyday of the newspaper also had disastrous
| consequences for democracy, such as the Spanish-American
| War.
| seanicus wrote:
| Lest we forget NYT being used as a mouthpiece for Dick
| Cheney and forming the foundation of the invasion of
| Iraq. I'll stump for the importance of journalism at any
| level (esp. the local level) but the willingness of major
| outlets to accept and regurgitate anything from
| cops/3-letter orgs is absolutely confounding.
| scarface74 wrote:
| "Journalism" has never been good when it comes to covering
| anything that didn't effect the White _middle class_.
|
| Journalist reflexively took the word of the police
| department and prosecutors and didn't believe minorities
| when they complained about police misconduct. It was only
| when everyone could film the police that it became
| apparent.
|
| On the other side, the rise of Trumpian populism came about
| because everyone ignored rural White America including
| journalist.
| bnralt wrote:
| I think Walter Lippmann covered this pretty well 100
| years ago in his book Public Opinion (an excellent book
| by the way, I highly recommend it). Newspapers get money
| from the public through a hidden commodity tax by way of
| advertisements. In order to get this to work, they need
| to sell their circulation, and the value of the
| circulation depends on the buying power of those in it.
| As such, the goal of a newspaper has to be to keep it's
| target audience happy by giving them what they want:
|
| > Circulation is, therefore, the means to an end. It
| becomes an asset only when it can be sold to the
| advertiser, who buys it with revenues secured through
| indirect taxation of the reader. The kind of circulation
| which the advertiser will buy depends on what he has to
| sell. It may be "quality" or "mass." On the whole there
| is no sharp dividing line, for in respect to most
| commodities sold by advertising, the customers are
| neither the small class of the very rich nor the very
| poor. They are the people with enough surplus over bare
| necessities to exercise discretion in their buying. The
| paper, therefore, which goes into the homes of the fairly
| prosperous is by and large the one which offers most to
| the advertiser. It may also go into the homes of the
| poor, but except for certain lines of goods, an
| analytical advertising agent does not rate that
| circulation as a great asset, unless, as seems to be the
| case with certain of Mr. Hearst's properties, the
| circulation is enormous.
|
| > A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to
| reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an
| advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that
| advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in
| those publications which are fairly certain to reach
| their future customers. One need not spend much time
| worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods
| merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and
| incidents of this sort are less common than many critics
| of the press suppose. The real problem is that the
| readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost
| of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them
| into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and
| merchants. And those whom it is most important to
| capitalize are those who have the most money to spend.
| Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the
| buying public. It is for this buying public that
| newspapers are edited and published, for without that
| support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout
| an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or
| traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public,
| it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
|
| Especially relevant today, with the number of
| advertisement driven companies.
|
| Also from the book, how newspapers will often let
| erroneous stories die rather than correcting them and
| angering passionate readers:
|
| > The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he
| will tend to resent not only a different view, but a
| disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper
| finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of
| its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor
| believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a
| change is necessary, the transition has to be managed
| with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper
| will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier
| and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and
| disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| > Newspapers historically made most of their money from the
| classifieds when most people are using Facebook and
| Craigslist and the like.
|
| Really? I didnt know that. I assumed ad sales were how
| newspapers made money.
| scarface74 wrote:
| https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-
| kil...
|
| I was off when I said "most"
|
| > Newspaper classified advertising peaked in 2000 at $19.6
| billion. In 2012, the most recent year for which data are
| available from the Newspaper Association of America,
| classified advertising was $4.6 billion -- a drop of about
| 77 percent in barely more than a decade.
|
| > In 2000, classified ads accounted for about 40 percent of
| newspaper industry ad revenue. In 2012, classifieds made up
| about 18 percent of the ad revenue in an industry that was
| barely half the size it had been a decade earlier.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The only hyper local paper in my region that seems have
| worked out a stable model, delivers to everyone free and is
| the only outlet that covers local events.
| AlexB138 wrote:
| I'm not sure I would consider being a journalist a high status
| job anymore. Trust in the press, and the prestige that goes along
| with it, has been in a nose dive for years. It may just be my own
| bubble, but even the old guard publications are seen as having
| barely more integrity than the tabloids these days, and that goes
| for both sides of the political spectrum.
|
| I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status,
| and that is the mechanism that really matters.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think the article's points about 'status' apply more to
| 'status among your peers', yes.
| YEwSdObPQT wrote:
| It has been in a nose dive for "everyday" people. But there is
| a whole section of society where they are treated as minor
| celebrities. The number of those people are shrinking
| (thankfully) but they are sizable enough for some journalists
| to break out and make bank through their substacks e.g. Bari
| Weiss is bringing in 800,000K a year via substack.
|
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-times-walkout-wei...
|
| I don't think she is particularly interesting but a lot of
| people do.
| nostromo wrote:
| Bari Weiss falls into the category "homogeneity creates
| rewards to heresy" in the article.
|
| Bari Weiss is heretical to mainstream journalism because she
| has pushed back against CRT, mask mandates, etc.
|
| Because she's a sane-sounding lefty that is voicing some
| concerns that the left-wing media is afraid to touch, she has
| found a great market for her content, just as the article
| says.
| YEwSdObPQT wrote:
| Maybe. I get your point. I saw the clip of her on Bill
| Marr's show that has been floating around. She has pushed
| back when it was safe to do so. The tide was already
| turning on that.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Well it's no different now than it ever was. If you want free
| news, you could get that back in the day, there were these
| terrible free newspapers. If you wanted a real newspaper you
| had to pay. So can still get somewhat better news on the Wall
| Street Journal, but for a price.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think that's a large part of the point though. The author is
| claiming that journalists take the job because they believe it
| is high status. When others disagree the journalists move near
| each other so that they can circle jerk over their status
| without the pesky normal people who disregard them.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > I suppose journalists may still believe that have high status
|
| It's how that "high status" is quantified. A journalist might
| look at their twitter profile, see the blue checkmark, see
| their 50k followers, and see their inbox filled with the ire of
| those on the other side, and conclude they are "high status".
|
| Problem becomes, what is "high status" for one person is just
| "wasting time on twitter" to another person.
| samatman wrote:
| 50k followers is elite tier, I can show you NYT journo
| bluechecks in the low four figures, who regularly get dragged
| by anonymous accounts with robot avatars.
|
| The difference between being high status and wasting time on
| twitter gets, extraordinarily, blurry.
| boyka wrote:
| I was wondering: is being an influencer a low status high paying
| job? Because that is who journalists are indirectly competing
| with if we funnel ad-spend through until it reaches media.
| ghaff wrote:
| "Influencer" in the Instagram sense is probably very power law.
| I'm sure the vast majority make squat.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Oh is this yet another article about how writers make dirt these
| days? And then people wonder why journalism is going to hell
| while also loudly telling writers to stop whining about their pay
| and get a real job.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Journalism is going to dirt because it isn't practiced. Or to
| put it in a more honest way: newspapers don't want to, or
| cannot afford to, pay for it anymore. Easier to just repeat
| press releases, or report on the latest twitter nitwitting.
|
| Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist. She's paid over a
| $1k just to access court records in the last year, out of her
| own pocket. Investigative journalism is expensive.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm a writer and blogger who doesn't make squat. My writing
| has repeatedly hit the front page of HN but it almost never
| gets submitted by anyone but me and then I get harangued for
| "self promoting." I write a great deal more than what I
| submit here and I submit a lot less than I used to. No, that
| hasn't caused other people to submit my stuff more often.
|
| People here don't want ads on your website. They use ad
| blockers. They don't want affiliate links. They don't want to
| leave tips or support your Patreon. They don't want your
| writing to be _content marketing_ for some other means to pay
| your bills.
|
| They de facto expect writing to be unpaid slave labor and
| _then_ bitch and moan about how much writing sucks these
| days.
|
| "You get what you pay for."
|
| I bitch less than I used to. It seems to only be an excuse to
| hate on me some more, not effectively move the needle.
| cletus wrote:
| This is what a de facto aristocracy looks like.
|
| There are an awful lot of jobs and careers that are purely the
| domain of the wealthy. Unpaid internships and low wages are only
| part of the reason. Social connections are probably a far bigger
| factor (IMHO).
|
| Personally I don't care if fashion is dominated by trust fund
| babies. Politics however? That's a different matter. The
| dangerous part is how Ayn Rand acolyte billionaires have managed
| to dupe a good portion of the population to literally fight to
| the death to prevent Jeff Bezos and like 7 other people pay
| slightly more taxes and pay for the society that makes their
| wealth possible is the scary part.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Really interesting piece. Without any particular evidence other
| than my own perception on the discourse of journalism over the
| last 20 years or so, I had come to many of the same conclusions
| as the author (the leftward shift in journalism is due to
| decreasing wages and so people who accept status or the
| projection of their own ideology as currency will
| disproportionately take those jobs). I think teaching (at various
| levels) has similar forces impinging upon it.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Ah, yes, private media and factual information. Like water and
| oil.
|
| Also the left is socialism and communism, not liberalism. Get it
| right, else youre feeding the culture war the politicians want us
| to keep fighting.
| known wrote:
| rch wrote:
| > a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what
| you wrote, what your core ideas are.
|
| Part of the problem in journalism is that someone motivated to
| share their core ideas should be an author, not a journalist.
| These are different jobs.
| insickness wrote:
| Journalists get caught in a local maximum: the more they move
| toward proclaiming loudly and fervently the most common
| narrative, the more success they have locally in the graph. But
| to achieve big success requires big risks outside the local curve
| exploring uncommon narratives. This may require a short-term loss
| of income/eyeballs that the professional journalist can't afford.
| efields wrote:
| This reads like someone who just got dumped by a journalist
| living in Brooklyn.
| alexashka wrote:
| _Shrugs_.
|
| Hasn't this always been the case? Some rich kids do drugs, some
| rich kids tweet. So, what?
|
| They are little puppets in a larger game. If you think these rich
| kids make any of the decisions that give rise to braindead
| quibbling over who can use which bathroom or what pronoun ought
| to be used for years on end - you are wrong.
|
| These are just distractions. The question to ask is, _who is
| paying for these distraction generators and why?_
|
| You can't get status from just living in New York and tweeting.
| You need to be part of an organization, that many people are
| _funding, protecting and enabling_.
|
| If you ignore it, it makes their entire effort futile. It is easy
| to do too - just find something that actually interests you
| instead. Don't fall for their cheap tricks and help your fellow
| friends/family do the same and it'll magically resolve itself,
| sooner than you think :)
| achenet wrote:
| Uh, ad revenues?
|
| As far as I can tell, the NYT and Facebook have the same 'share
| content, sell ads' business model.
| ouid wrote:
| >2. Status can't pay the rent
|
| >Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly exchange
| for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such as a
| person desperate to market their latest brand of protein powder
| or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for access to
| your status.
|
| This should be number 1, and probably the only item on the list.
| The word influencer should evoke in you a deep dread. Sure
| there's neo fascist authoritarians, but they aren't really the
| dangerous ones. It's the sales people. In order to convince a
| person that they need to buy something, you usually have to get
| them to believe something that isn't true. That's obviously not a
| stable system.
| kache_ wrote:
| Interesting article. A new manifestation of the priestly class
| that Nietzsche went on about in the Genealogy of Morality?
| bjourne wrote:
| What is the source for the claim that so many American
| journalists under 40 live in the area encircled in the map in the
| tweet? The source for wages in journalism having gone to hell?
| The source for unions restricting the supply of labor? If so, why
| hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already
| restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages?
|
| I also think the author's characterization job status is wrong.
| Journalists mostly hang out with journalists so whether
| journalist is a high-status job or not is irrelevant since they
| are all journalists. Working for Google has high status in some
| circles but probably not among Google's own employees.
| Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of all journalists write for
| the Washington Post or other recognizable papers. Not a lot of
| status in writing for marketing agencies or obscure trade press
| magazines.
| bluGill wrote:
| > If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming
| already restricted the number of journalists and increased
| their wages?
|
| They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free
| labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means
| to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the
| safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws
| restricting supply some legitimacy.
|
| Unions work best when (among other factors) everyone has a
| feeling that they are not better than the others and can
| substitute for each others. Writing fails this in general
| because writers want to have their own voice. You want everyone
| to know it was you writing, and a guest writer will have a
| different voice and different ideas. Note that in corporate
| writing the above doesn't apply and so unions are more likely
| to have a place (but corporate writing is mostly by marketing
| and probably better paid and so the union doesn't really have
| as much to do and so there is less reason to pay those dues)
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of
| free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their
| legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also
| don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that
| give laws restricting supply some legitimacy.
|
| I think the bigger hurdle is that the people they'd need to
| convince, politicians, are by nature of their profession,
| very well versed in public messaging and "journalist
| adjacent" skills and deal with journalists on the regular and
| therefore very likely to say "lolno" to any request for a
| moat of regulatory capture.
|
| Plumbers and electricians would never have been able to get
| the regulatory capture they have if the people they needed
| sign off from had been equally well versed in their skills
| and exposed to dealing with them.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Did you know the sector with the sharpest rise in union
| membership last year was media?
|
| "Among the industries with a growing share of union
| membership is journalism, where 33 workplaces voted last
| year to organize with labor unions, according to Poynter,
| the media industry news outlet. In 2021, employees at
| Politico, Forbes, The Atlantic and Insider all joined
| NewsGuild, while journalists at MSNBC voted to organize
| with the Writers Guild of America East."
|
| https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-
| member...
| Ekaros wrote:
| When your skills are replaceable you have very little
| leverage. Journalist are certainly a field where these days
| you can be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern.
| Only if you have build a name and grinded it out you have
| some leverage. Thus union is little help if you could just
| fire your entire staff and pay a few editors to hire new
| people.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| > Journalist are certainly a field where these days you can
| be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern
|
| Only if you're a median journalist. If you're a top 1%
| caliber journalist you're not replaceable. It's much like
| software engineering, social media influencers, and
| Hollywood in that regard. 10x skill gap between median and
| top and heavily bimodal comp model as a result.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I understand the sentiment of your post.
|
| Zero trolling: For a very high quality pool of journalists
| and writers at The New Yorker, do you think that also
| applies?
|
| I hold the opinion that certain media outlets have out-
| sized cache (attraction) in their country's culture and are
| able to "punch about their weight" and draw incredible
| talent for the wages. It is almost like an inverted veblen
| good! Examples that come to mind: The New York Times, The
| New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Economist,
| The Financial Times, Le Monde, Nikkei Shimbun, Der Speigel,
| and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
|
| Re-reading that list before clicking 'reply', I wonder if
| all of them have strong employee unions. It seems possible.
|
| EDIT: What about public radio and television in highly
| advanced democracies? It is a pretty similar situation.
| High quality staff, peanuts for wages, but they don't have
| commercial pressures. US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all
| have outstanding, neutral public broadcasters. (Queue the
| 1000x naysayers that will say "Oh, it's never been worse --
| see recent scandal XYZ".) Is the answer: Gov't funded
| (taxes) public broadcasters that cover news that struggles
| to make money in the private sector? Maybe.
| rjsw wrote:
| ITYM "cachet" not "cache".
| notfromhere wrote:
| The irony is that going corporate and writing marketing copy
| will earn you way more money than journalism ever will.
| Kalium wrote:
| A few items that popped up from quick searching:
|
| * On journalist wages - https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-
| pay-falls-u-s-average-wa... - wages are not growing and the
| employment pool is shrinking. A comparison with BLS data shows
| a similarly slow wage growth pattern.
|
| * Unions, in some circumstances, can restrict labor supply.
| This is called exclusive unionism and historically it's been
| used for everything from keeping racial minorities out to
| keeping the secrets of bagel-making under wraps. Here's the
| latter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338
| bjourne wrote:
| I can believe journalist wages are not growing though your
| source in eight years old.
|
| The thing about bagel recipes seem to be about trade secrets
| not labor supply restrictions. How to make bagels is not a
| secret. I checked the sources the Wikipedia article cites and
| none of them mentions anything about secret recipes.
| gen220 wrote:
| The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have
| available.
|
| For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they
| ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are
| working for them in the last few years). They also are
| employing more people as journalists than they have
| historically.
|
| It appears that we're going through two trends in news.
|
| One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e.
| newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who
| ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find
| themselves outside.
|
| The other trend is decentralization at the news production
| level (individual journalists), which benefits the small
| number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for
| themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes
| because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot
| collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on
| companies for news aggregation.
|
| There are a lot of people in this second category who would
| not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still
| "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since
| they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as
| journalists.
|
| Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the
| pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and
| increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult
| universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree
| with reality for a while.
| px43 wrote:
| As a general rule, if someone is complaining about "the left",
| they aren't a person who actually cares about accurate
| statistics. In the dopamine economy, it's all about coming up
| with seemingly witty hot takes that reaffirm the world view of
| a group of people who take pride in their lack of critical
| thinking.
| tandymodel100 wrote:
| malandrew wrote:
| The right as well.
|
| My observation is that generally only people who complain
| about neither or both tend to care about statistics.
| px43 wrote:
| You are correct that rage addicts exist all across the
| political spectrum, though I don't think "the right" is
| nearly as much of a trigger phrase as "the left". There are
| plenty of other phrases used by left leaning rage mongers,
| but "the left" has for years been curated to trigger strong
| negative emotions towards half of the US population. People
| who use that phrase know exactly what they're doing, or are
| at least parroting someone who does. People who
| intentionally use negative trigger phrases to gain traction
| are not typically people whose opinions are worth spending
| much energy on.
| [deleted]
| bityard wrote:
| Are you saying that nobody on the left (okay, sorry, the
| "not-right") ever uses negative trigger words in
| reference to their political rivals?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Are you aware that from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the
| word "liberal" was worthy of enough derision that people
| would openly cringe at the term? Republicans were
| fantastically successful at two things politically: tying
| the support of social programs to the Red Scare and
| gathering support of trickle down economics by opposing
| desegregation efforts.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I don't think "the right" is nearly as much of a trigger
| phrase as "the left".
|
| I dunno, "the left" has their own terms to incite rage:
| far-right, white supremest (rarely any evidence), racist
| (same), right-winger, evangelicals, Nazi, deplorable,
| redneck, etc.
|
| "The right" uses terms: liberal, socialist, communist,
| SJW, etc.
|
| If you are strictly speaking in terms of which is more
| insightful and limit it to "the left" or "the right," I
| guess it depends on which circle you are closer to. I can
| see the argument for "the left" as being more insightful,
| but that might just be because of the circle I'm
| currently closer to.
|
| I try to use terms such as those as a red flag. Anyone
| who tries to make a generalization for a spectrum as
| broad as "the left," or "the right," is trying to sell me
| something. I try to stick to policy, everything else is
| usually just theatre to distract from policy.
|
| Somewhat related, Hillary Clinton was talking with BLM
| members about how to change things in 2015. She caught a
| lot of flack about it, but she was absolutely right when
| she said, "I don't believe you change hearts. You change
| laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the
| way systems operate." That's why I tend to stick to
| policy. Full disclosure, I don't particularly care for
| the Clintons.
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/8/19/9174077/hillary-clinton-
| black-...
| bitwize wrote:
| Clubber wrote:
| Are you sure there are not two boogie men rather than
| just one?
| slibhb wrote:
| > white supremacism has enjoyed profound resurgence and
| evangelicals constitute a huge bulk -- up to half -- of
| the population.
|
| There has definitely been a resurgence in people using
| the term "white supremacy". Whether that is tied to a
| resurgence of white supremacy is doubtful.
|
| The statement that up to half the population are
| evangelicals is just wrong.
| Clubber wrote:
| It's amazing to me how much political capital is spent on
| this sort of thing. Meanwhile, we are no closer to
| anything like universal healthcare, or even lowering the
| medicare age. The wealth gap is expanding, and jobs are
| still being sent overseas. Housing is getting more
| expensive, inflation is wiping out any wage gains, and
| healthcare is even more obscenely expensive. But hey, we
| may or may not have identified some additional white
| supremacists.
|
| This analogy just hit me. It's as if people who get into
| this trap are like addicts. They are spending all their
| political capital (money) on heroin (rage culture) and
| not spending political capital on feeding themselves or
| their families (healthcare, jobs, wages, UBI, etc). All
| the while, the machine keeps on enriching themselves at
| our expense. Pay no attention to the man behind the
| curtain, we keep tilting at the windmills the elite class
| convinces us are actually dragons.
|
| The GOP will probably take the house and/or the senate,
| effectively neutering Biden. Expect 2 years of
| retaliatory impeachment hearings to distract everyone
| from our goals. The D's had two years of power and almost
| nothing to show for it, except maybe higher blood
| pressure.
| nostromo wrote:
| Giant corporations love identity politics. It completely
| distracted the left from expensive things that would
| actually help low-income people.
|
| Big corporations woo the left with BLM retweets and pride
| flags -- which costs them $0 -- while utilizing the
| global poor stuck in grueling jobs with low pay.
|
| It's so convenient I wonder if it's intentional. Getting
| pressured to unionize from the left? Just retweet BLM,
| name an arena Climate Pledge Arena, and then move on.
| lariati wrote:
| tharne wrote:
| My God, I wish I had read an article like this when I was 22. I
| started out in one of these high-status low-wages - HUGE mistake.
| I intuited some of the things the author is saying here, but it
| took many wasted years for me to be able to articulate these
| thoughts in my own mind and change course.
|
| Very impressive article that clearly explains the issue.
| bertr4nd wrote:
| As someone with small children, I found myself wondering whether
| the parents of these Brooklyn writers have actually done their
| children a service or disservice by funding a financially
| impossible career.
|
| While there is something to be said for being able to follow
| one's interests unconstrained by the need for money, it also
| seems like a hollow, grasping existence to chase status and
| popularity amongst a clique of likeminded fellows.
|
| I suppose one could say something similar for a career spent
| chasing money, but at least money sometimes vaguely (vaguely!)
| approximates creating value for other people.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I knew a few folks like this. 20 something, out of college,
| entry level job in some field that doesn't pay them nearly
| enough for where they are living. And mom and dad are
| subsidizing the apartment and lifestyle.
|
| When I talked to a few of them about the situation, my burning
| question was always "what is your plan". I think for many of
| those folks there was no plan, this was the plan, and your
| parents helping you out was just normal.
|
| Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to happen to
| all those people when the checks stop coming, when the credit
| card stops getting paid. Some of my less privileged friends
| hated that group for their privileged but I honestly just felt
| bad for them. I don't know when, but under this current system,
| at some point in the future, you are going to be royally
| screwed.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| They just join the labour force like everyone else. They'll
| just be 41 doing the job that other people did at 21.
|
| I have a friend whose family weren't wealthy but they
| tolerated him playing video games and bumming around not
| doing much else for 15 years after he finished uni. He
| eventually had to get a job. Sure, he's behind his peers in
| terms of salary/career advancement now but not by so much
| where I'm even sure he made a mistake by avoiding work for so
| long.
| [deleted]
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Personally it always bugged me. Like what is going to
| happen to all those people when the checks stop coming, when
| the credit card stops getting paid. Some of my less
| privileged friends hated that group for their privileged but
| I honestly just felt bad for them. I don't know when, but
| under this current system, at some point in the future, you
| are going to be royally screwed.
|
| They'll get a nice inheritance, like a $500k+ house. Then
| they can either sell and invest, or live there mortgage-free.
|
| The checks really won't stop coming. But if you're not a
| complete moron, it would be hard to very quickly squander the
| wealth your parents built up. Some will, inevitably, but most
| will keep going. Some of them will get higher wages too.
|
| But it's going to be a looong time before the "check stops
| coming".
| humanrebar wrote:
| They don't stay 25 forever. In the long run, they often
| settle down with another professional. Maybe one with a
| better salary and/or better benefits. Then they have less
| than two kids. Maybe just a couple cats.
|
| The big question is what they do after the divorces that
| 30-40% of them will have. Maybe they get jobs in HR or PR?
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| I thought about teaching as a career. I'm passionate about
| science and math, I'm great with kids, I'm a decent teacher...but
| the stress was insanely high for the compensation and benefits. I
| was doing entry-level assistant work at age 22-25 to see if I
| liked teaching, getting paid $20k a year with no benefits to
| mostly deal with the 10% who are crazy bad kids every day...not
| worth it.
|
| One example, I had an 8th grader jump on a desk and scream "I
| LOVE TACOS" repeatedly. I told him to get down and be quiet,
| we're trying to learn about robotics. He then called me a racist
| (because I'm white and I don't love tacos? I do though). I talked
| to him after class, turns out his family life was in chaos and he
| needed help at home.
| nolroz wrote:
| I would absolutely love to be a teacher but the compensation
| and horror stories about the administration and parents is very
| disheartening.
| letmeinhere wrote:
| > [Unionization] will only heighten the favoring of those who can
| get their foot in the $3200/mo Brooklyn rent door while dressing
| fashionably and using "semiotics" correctly in a sentence, but
| that's neither here nor there.
|
| Unionization leads to higher and considerably less stratified
| wages, which means that people from less means can afford to
| enter the profession. So, sure, the people who can afford rent in
| the cities where they work will have "heightened favoring" (aka
| better jobs), but they will be a different, more representative
| group.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I'm willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and
| followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the
| prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist
| community.
|
| I would not argue that, not among peers. Like any profession I
| suspect writer's peers may be _jealous_ of one another 's page
| views but are still going to be ultimately judged by the quality
| of their work. And their peers will likely judge better than most
| what is thoughtful, thorough, researched writing and what is
| hackish.
|
| > Status skews even less equally than income...
|
| > Status can't pay the rent...
|
| > Twenty-two year-olds will often accept status in lieu of
| wages...
|
| I guess I don't see the world through status-colored lenses or
| know anyone who does so the rest of the article and its points
| were built on a premise foreign to me.
|
| The author also appears to misrepresent unions in my opinion,
| portraying them more as a "protectionist" mechanism for workers,
| a way to fend off other workers with lower skills. When
| corporations held (hold) all the cards a collective of workers
| was the only way the worker had any bargaining power.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| > _You want to get paid: move to cheap suburb of a medium sized
| city and start writing heresy, the more inflammatory the better.
| Accusations of politicians and celebrities. Cheap pablum for
| frothing basement trolls and listicles of reasons never to let
| your kids leave the house. Election conspiracy theories and a new
| expose on why red wine and chocolate will cure Covid. Corporate
| public relations expressing the deepest committment of the NFL to
| protect everyone and only good from here on out. Anything that
| someone is willing to pay you to write because nobody else will
| write it for free._
|
| This escalated quickly. I somehow expected a more nuanced take at
| the end than this rushed version paradoxically reinforcing a
| superficial stance critiqued before.
|
| Well, the overall point comes across and is an interesting take
| but fails to be substantial i.e. backed by some more convincing
| data instead of an initial gossip over the gossip.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| There's probably something to this analysis, but to go from "jobs
| that depend on cultural as opposed to financial capital can lead
| to overly homogeneous groups with strong and at times bizarre in-
| crowd behaviors" to the idea that a majority or at least a very
| large group of writers and journalists are "a hilariously
| homogeneous monolith of progressive cosplay, often producing
| little in the way of insight or information, surviving
| emotionally off the status returns of living in a bubble of
| mutual-affirmation and shared anxiety", well, that's like, just
| your opinion, man, and rather ironically an opinion that depends
| not on any honest attempt at assessing the prevalence of the
| problem but is constructed for the sole means of pandering to an
| in-crowd.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| "can lead to" is the sort of statement that is only slightly
| more modest than "will lead to", in practice. Like, it could
| also be that it can lead to both heterogeneity and homogeneity,
| depending on other factors (or even chance). If the author
| believes the one, the author should put a probability on that
| outcome, rather than just assume the worst.
| notahacker wrote:
| It also misses the other rather obvious factor: newspapers have
| owners, editors and readers. Owners often are very open about
| their agenda, editors have owners to please, historic
| reputations to uphold and their own politics (which is often a
| bit more firmly established than a twentysomething first
| jobber's) and the subset of the population that actually pays
| for newspapers has their own opinion of the sort of content it
| wants to read.
|
| Most of the stereotypes about bubbles of young underpaid,
| overeducated middle class status-chasers living in the capital
| and associating mostly with other young people, journalists and
| politicos/intellectuals could be applied to the UK, but our
| mainstream print media leans right (with a couple of very
| outspoken exceptions, whose journalists live in the same
| bubble!), as you might expect from the personal politics of
| their owners, and newspapers are bought in much greater numbers
| by older, more right wing people
| ianai wrote:
| Yes, I think the author got stuck in the mire. I took the
| point: The current situation is making a group of people
| incentivized to fall in-line with the "established truth".
| Things like groupthink, authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism
| thrive on such insularity.
| mherdeg wrote:
| I've heard an opinion from people on Team Right that "it's
| just our bad luck that we got stuck with the antivaxxers and
| Capitol stormers this time around, this could just as easily
| have come from the other team".
|
| That's how I read this article's conclusion, and then the
| rest kind of works backwards from that conclusion:
|
| > It'd all be pretty innocuous if I didn't worry that today's
| progressive writer's commune is also a breeding ground for
| tomorrows purveyors of reactionary fearmongering and
| misinformation.
|
| My own worry about the drying-up of print display ads and the
| end of classifieds, which led to the demise of the steady
| union career at the midmarket metro daily, and everything
| that happened afterward, is different. I worry not that
| people are reporting the wrong thing, but that there are too
| few people doing the job to even have a "right" or "wrong"
| set of journalists to read on a topic. In a US metro area of
| under 500k people there may not be any reporter who is going
| to open-to-the-public committee meetings and small-scale
| corruption can basically happen in public. This doesn't seem
| healthy for democracy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > "it's just our bad luck that we got stuck with the
| antivaxxers and Capitol stormers this time around, this
| could just as easily have come from the other team".
|
| The bulk of the "right" has been anti-intellectual for a
| long time - there are some sensible and nuanced points of
| view coming from that side of the political spectrum, but
| they've always seemed to be in the minority. You do also
| see a lot of anti-intellectualism on the left these days,
| especially with the new "woke" craziness, but that's a much
| more recent phenomenon and we have yet to see a proper
| reaction to it.
| [deleted]
| grapescheesee wrote:
| You do understand, you just called out the "Right" (one
| of the 'two' affiliations) as .. "anti-intellectual for a
| long time"
|
| I also wish everyone told me their favorite color was the
| one I like.. Since we only have two colors in the world!
| It has just turned into such a reductionist petty
| immeasurably false set of talking points. We need to stop
| this, we need it to stop immediately!
| ghaff wrote:
| And that's a midmarket city. You can imagine what reporting
| in most 10K to 20K towns looks like.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > well, that's like, just your opinion, man, and rather
| ironically an opinion that depends not on any honest attempt at
| assessing the prevalence of the problem but is constructed for
| the sole means of pandering to an in-crowd.
|
| Fully agreed. Markets exist to convert the various forms of
| capital.
|
| For example, you participate in the labor market, where you
| convert your education and know-how into liquidity.
|
| Cultural capital is already exchange for financial capital: art
| is sold, and people pay to visit prestigious museums.
|
| What's missing here is a market where social capital can easily
| be converted into financial capital, at low cost and with as
| little friction as possible: the elusive "micropayments".
|
| Remember the old idea of "commoditizing your complement": for
| web2.0 (social media), tech companies have commoditized the
| participation that create their core value. They benefited
| tremendously through network effects, sending these profits
| mostly towards the shareholders, with a few crumbs sent to the
| tech workers (I know a lot of people think developers are
| "highly" paid because they get paid low 6 digits wages, but in
| a company with over $1M in ARR per capita, I politely disagree)
|
| I believe NFT/cryptos/etc. will pave the way for inverting this
| commoditization: well known authors/influencers will want to
| commoditize the tech companies, who'll have to respond by
| offering deals.
|
| We are starting to see that: look on the gaming forums where
| people say they use Bing... because it pays for their free
| gamepass every month!!! Bing is good enough for what they do,
| so people react to the incentive and switch!
|
| If you have the choice between, say instagram and tiktok, and
| it's essentially the same thing for you, you may decide to
| share content on instagram if they can compensate you in a way
| that's meaningful to you. It may be hard for them to give you
| cash, but it could be easier to give you something else that's
| essentially the same to you, or that can be traded for cash.
| dogleash wrote:
| A complicating factor that I hear from some of the disillusioned
| journos is that journalism works best when it's blue collar.
| Seeking status, and the kind of compromises made to maintain
| status contribute to the fact journalism is in the dumps. It's
| not my opinion, but it's an interesting one.
|
| Maybe the bottom needs to fall out for a few years for journos to
| get their act together. But signs point to that's exactly what's
| happening and all we got was a bunch of bitter and vindictive
| twitter addicts trying to hold onto what little glory they had.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of those
| as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm alone here.
| I thought he was going to focus on roles like non-tenured
| professorships and post-docs, mid level non-profit jobs, and the
| clergy.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| alisonkisk wrote:
| ghaff wrote:
| Oh there's clearly status to being a published author--at least
| in many circles. And I would say also an NYT or WSJ journalist.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| There is status to being a published author people have heard
| of or with some acclaim. Not really outside of it. Poets with
| published chapbooks, or novelists published indie, or even
| mid-list authors don't really have much status. Also if you
| write romance, forget about ever getting respect from anyone,
| even other authors.
| YEwSdObPQT wrote:
| > This seems to be only about writing jobs. I don't think of
| those as "high status" apart from the wages, but maybe I'm
| alone here.
|
| You and I don't think of them as high status. However there is
| a proportion of people that do pay attention to writers, these
| maybe TV, films, media, politicians that are all within the
| "Cathedral". You see this a lot of Twitter. Politicians pay a
| lot of attention to Twitter and tbh I doubt many normal people
| ever pay attention to what people see on twitter.
|
| Those writing jobs are seen as high status because you _can_ be
| influencing on "important" things. If you ever watch clips of
| corporate news talking point shows they end up inviting a lot
| of the same people on. Many of these are writers for smaller
| publications that are safe enough i.e. inside the Overton
| window to present "balance" or be presented as "experts".
| Simply being on TV for a few minutes is seen as a big deal
| (especially to older people 50+).
| ghaff wrote:
| >If you ever watch clips of corporate news talking point
| shows they end up inviting a lot of the same people on.
|
| Both individual reporters and TV show producers develop a go
| to list of people who at least seem to know what they're
| talking about, usually don't have too much of an axe to
| grind, are presentable in the case of TV, etc. And, yes, to a
| lot of people they can't really imagine being invited on a TV
| show so someone who is "must be a real expert" which often
| isn't the case.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you
| are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are... The problem
| isn't that writing generates status, but rather that this status
| is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the
| market.
|
| I feel like there's something implied here that says we should be
| listening to those who have the most money.
|
| But in fact those journalists whose status/audience is out of
| proportion to their wages... are _more_ representative of America
| than wealthier people. The median income of these journalists
| /pundits may still very well be higher than the median income of
| America.
|
| If they have a monolithically wrong idea of what is going on in
| "America" or are monolithically unrepresentative of America (I
| think that's the complaint?), it's _not_ because they
| homogenously have wages lower than other "high status" people --
| and it will not be solved by increasing the wages of
| journalists/pundits, and or changing the set of who is listened
| to, to higher income people.
|
| Some of the explanations in the OP are more interesting, like:
|
| > Unlike wages, status is extremely difficult to directly
| exchange for goods and services. You need an intermediary, such
| as a person desperate to market their latest brand of protein
| powder or neo-fascist authoritarianism, who will pay you for
| access to your status.
|
| Chomsky and Herman's 1988 _Manufacturing Consent_ is about the
| pressures journalist have to just take the statements of powerful
| people (whether in government or industry) and report them as
| facts (or at best as the story) without doing more investigation.
| But it was written in a more innocent, pre-social-influencer era,
| where they never would have conceived that journalists or pundits
| were actually taking outright _payment_ (which they would have
| called bribes) for this -- even though I don 't think journalists
| made _substantially_ more then. Rather, they explained and showed
| how it just made the journalists job _so much easier_. The
| journalist didn 't have _time_ to do actual investigation, it was
| so much easier to just go on press conferences and press release.
| Which is surely even more true today with newsrooms that have
| been (often literally) decimated since 1988.
|
| I think the OP is onto _something_... but I don 't think it
| actually has much to do with journalists _wages_ , the central
| thesis of OP.
|
| In general, if we were somehow able to magically shift the
| journalist/pundit class to be higher-income -- and thus even
| _less_ representative of the country as a whole -- I don 't see
| this leading to improvements in any way.
| throwhauser wrote:
| The author of the piece seems to be taking the tweet about half
| the journalists under 40 living in that area pretty literally.
|
| I don't know if the author of the tweet intended it that way (and
| if he was speaking figuratively I wouldn't fault him, it's just a
| tweet), but I don't quite buy that anyone could really estimate
| the number of journalists in an area drawn by someone else by
| eyeballing a map on Twitter. I also don't quite buy that half of
| the journalists under 40 live in a specific part of New York
| City, when Washington DC, Los Angeles and (for nerds) San
| Francisco also have their own share of that population.
| richk449 wrote:
| Is it true that a large amount of the journalists in the US live
| in Brooklyn? That doesn't match my understanding, even at the
| "everyone knows ..." level. When I think of the pundits, the
| Washington DC area comes to mind.
| jelling wrote:
| The journalists with access to political power are in D.C. The
| cultural and business journalists are in New York and the
| entertainment "journalists" are in Hollywood. All speaking in
| the main, of course.
|
| I moved to NYC from Chicago, no cow-town, and there was a
| massive increase in the number of cultural journalists and
| writers I meet.
| j7ake wrote:
| On the flip side, are there dangers of "low status, high-wage"
| jobs?
|
| E.g. certain blue-collar jobs can pay as high as any white-collar
| jobs.
|
| Another example would be programmers can be seen as a low-status,
| high-wage job. They are paid a lot and trusted to do their job,
| but the main high-level decisions are still made at higher levels
| above the programers.
| stereolambda wrote:
| One loose idea that I like is local community (the smaller, the
| better) hiring a journalist (or even better, a diverse group of
| journalists) directly. They would cover the local events and
| politics and maybe give some digest of the national/world level
| from other sources. Apparently in the US officials like sheriffs
| and school board members are elected, so maybe it could work in a
| similar way. This would probably need a bunch of stringent rules
| to ban collusions with politicians (which has been of course a
| problem even with commercial journalism).
| flerchin wrote:
| I haven't left my house in over a week. The insulation is real.
| Animats wrote:
| The author has a very narrow focus on NYC pundits, but the
| problem is more general. Other high-status, low-wage jobs include
| much of Hollywood. If you've spent any time in LA, you've
| probably met actress-model-waitress types. Game developers are a
| somewhat similar group - too many people want to make games, and
| as a result salaries are low for the level of competence
| required.
|
| What else?
| crackercrews wrote:
| For a deeper dive on the topic check out the book Bad News. [1]
| The title references "woke media", which might turn some off. But
| it's actually written by a liberal, not a conservative out for
| blood.
|
| There is a lot of very interesting history, including a bit about
| how the Jewish publisher of the NYT insisted that "because Jews
| were not a race, Hitler's persecution of them was not a Jewish
| problem but "the problem of mankind"".
|
| I bet Whoopi wished she her crisis management team was aware of
| that quote last week!
|
| 1: https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-
| Democracy/...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Is this really a high status job? Or is it the journalism
| industry relies on internal status?
|
| If it is about general status, then these individuals should be
| able to leverage that status and connection into better jobs or
| wages, including outside of that industry.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| High status to whom? Anyone not an east-coast academic or urban
| professional?
|
| I don't think journalism is widely-respected by the general
| population. Most local TV news anchors are an embarrassment
| because they to regurgitate Sinclair's "must airs" and
| bleeds/leads gore.
| schnable wrote:
| The bigger problem occurs when the high perceived status/low wage
| folks decide they deserve a lot more than they have and foment
| revolution. Academics and those steeped in academia are more
| likely to lead this, but then the journalists quickly follow and
| amplify. Also applies to people getting degrees from universities
| then being unable to get a job much better than barista.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Also applies to people getting degrees from universities then
| being unable to get a job much better than barista.
|
| This is a real problem for an entire generation. If those in
| power don't wise up and listen they're inviting "revolution". I
| fundamentally don't understand why the wealthy ruling class is
| unable to grasp that their long-term welfare is entirely
| dependent on the welfare of the working middle class.
| Unemployed and underemployed middle class people are a leading
| indicator that the system that props up wealth in America is
| buckling. Somethings gotta give. And yet our leaders ignore it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I doubt that revolution this time will come from journalist
| or academic class. It seems they are currently against the
| working class which is important power behind such event.
| Just see how positive the messaging about protests by those
| are...
| KoftaBob wrote:
| This idea is basically the background behind the recent "wordcel"
| term/meme that's been making the rounds.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Meh. A lot of the low-wage journos discussed in the blogpost
| are less "wordcel" and more like "word salad".
| dnautics wrote:
| this is exactly also true for grad students in the physical and
| biological sciences.
| achenet wrote:
| Really? I'd have thought they would be out there inventing the
| world of tomorrow.
|
| The entire clothing industry is applied biochemistry.
| Electronics is applied physics and chemistry.
|
| How can there not be a demand for that?
| dnautics wrote:
| yep. You get paid higher if:
|
| - you go straight out of undergrad to industry
|
| - you only do a masters
|
| - you "drop out" after a masters
|
| - you are sponsored by industry to take a 5-6 year
| "sabbatical" to get a PhD (which is status-driven, but still
| tied to "demand", as you say).
|
| - you go to industry without doing a postdoc
|
| If you are in the PhD program to get into academia, it is
| very much a status-driven, low-paid pursuit (I got paid
| 26k/yr for ~80h/wk average 6 years, probably generally was
| working 100-days-straight) and all of the problems in the
| article apply (including tendency to groupthink in the
| service of promotion, attracting status-seeking; stupid
| 20-something men). As a grad student, the undergrad
| "dishwasher" lab tech was getting paid more than I was (raw;
| not dividing by hours). Even for postdocs the misery is true.
| I gave myself a pay raise and hours reduction when I quit
| being a postdoc and started driving for lyft full-time
| ~50h/wk on the road, but carve out about 10-ish for like
| logging off to do social things with friends because I was
| "in the city anyways".
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Although I agree with the general sentiment of this article-
| journalists gravitates towards their career not for the job
| itself. I think he's making a pure speculation on the
| "journalists have rich parents" point.
|
| I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists
| often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent
| degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low".
|
| Of course, when the barrier to entry is low- and most candidates
| are indistinguishable- you hire your friends; which inevitably
| leads to homogenization.
| pmorici wrote:
| There was a thread on Twitter a while ago pointing out a slew
| of journalists who frequently wrote articles attacking tech
| companies and specifically how each of them came from wealthy
| families. This idea that journalists are by and large people
| from well to do backgrounds is an idea that has been floating
| around for a couple years now.
|
| Edit: Here is a tweet in that vein Balaji in particular had a
| lot of tweets on the journalists are often from wealth idea.
|
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1256819545546735616
| asjldkfin wrote:
| Yes, but how much is a "slew" relative to the entire roster
| of working journalists?
| jeromegv wrote:
| I love it when "critical" of tech companies is transformed
| into "attacking". The tech industry is now the biggest
| industry in the world, ranking billions in profits every
| year, having the power to influence elections, human rights
| violation, etc. Of course they should be criticized and not
| get a free pass. Too many years they were only reported as
| "startups" doing "good".
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Being critical of something immediately makes you into a
| "hater". People have been trained to either be all in on
| something or to completely reject it. It's really not
| allowed to be in the middle. "Pick a side".
| pmorici wrote:
| People were specifically upset with unfair negative
| articles it wasn't about factual criticism.
|
| The New York Times doxing a popular pseudo anonymous
| blogger for example Slat Star Codex, there were articles
| dragging people for making charitable donations just a lot
| of stuff that was more gossip and hit pieces injected with
| the journalist's opinion and not news.
|
| Also articles dragging tech for not being "diverse" when
| journalism has a much bigger lack of diversity problem.
|
| https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-
| diver...
| sgift wrote:
| > there were articles dragging people for making
| charitable donations
|
| You mean articles stating correctly that donations are
| not a sustainable way of financing and tech billionaires
| should instead pay higher taxes? Cause that's the
| articles I remember and that's not an unfair article.
| Just one you and others may not agree with.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If every billionaire gave 50% of their net worth to the
| government, we would still have massive deficits.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It would be unfair if the article was demonizing, say,
| Jack Dorsey for not paying enough in taxes, unless Jack
| has gone out of his way to lobby to get his tax burden
| lowered. Otherwise, he is merely living within the rules
| of the system, and the article should be attacking the
| politicians who are responsible for our tax laws.
| pmorici wrote:
| Then why not write an article advocating a higher taxes
| policy? Taxing doesn't magically make money multiply in
| fact a donation managed properly can endow a charitable
| organization indefinitely that is never the case with
| government taxation since taxes are always spent and
| never invested. Your argument makes no sense.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I don't understand how reporters apparently don't
| advocate for higher taxes. Wealth tax has been a radar on
| political reporting beat for ages. Elizabeth Warren
| campaigned on it and tons of ink was spilled analyzing on
| if it would work, how it would work, and headlines made
| over bill gates being "scared" of it or whatever.
|
| Additionally, it can be true that one endowment to a
| charity can keep the charity perpetual while also
| criticizing that charity overall is not a sustainable
| model of good in society broadly. One of the things that
| come to mind is that a billionaire is unlikely to fund an
| anti-billionaire charity, for example a charity for
| renters rights and renter organization Eg. Rent strikes
| and the like.
| pmorici wrote:
| What does advocating for that position have to do with
| dragging someone for donations to charities?
|
| Also why are journalists advocating anything they should
| be reporting facts. Advocacy belongs in the opinion
| section.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Reporters are always advocating based on what they
| believe are facts from their backgrounds. That's why
| media in America are always covering less wealthy
| countries as "war-torn x dealing with militant y" and
| never the same language to America. There was a hilarious
| thread in which a Kenyan reporter did headlines on
| America the same way America reported Kenya.
|
| And it doesn't have anything to do with the other. I
| don't even know why it was brought up as an alternative.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >since taxes are always spent and never invested
|
| Are not the road networks and other such infrastructure
| investments? What about the basic science research the
| government funds?
| watwut wrote:
| The New York Times wrote article about the blogger in the
| same exact way articles about people in journals have
| always been written. Just because the blogger is
| generally in tech does not mean the New York Times has to
| treat him in some complete different way then any other
| subject.
| NavinF wrote:
| > The tech industry is now the biggest industry in the
| world
|
| Is it though? I can't find reliable sources (likely because
| "tech" isn't specific enough), but some site says tech is
| 10.5% of US GDP. That's not even close to being the biggest
| industry.
| syshum wrote:
| The problem is that alot of the "criticism" seems be around
| economic protectionism not actual criticism. They are
| critical that a tech company dare allow an a person from
| the unwashed masses to have as big of a megaphone for their
| speech as the gilded elites from an established
| journalistic outlet
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Do you happen to have a link to that twitter thread? I'm
| curious to read it.
| pmorici wrote:
| It wasn't just one but look at Balaji Sirinvasin's timeline
| starting around summer 2020. He was a big proponent of the
| idea.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Is it attacking people like Elon Musk to point out that he
| wants others to not be able to benefit from the same sorts of
| government assistance his companies have benefited from or is
| it simply pointing out he isn't being consistent?
| pmorici wrote:
| No I believe the specific thing that set people off was a
| hit piece against the female CEO of Away a relatively small
| company that sells luggage. They tried to cancel her
| because she tweeted something about how she though many
| media outlets had low standards of reporting and much of
| their content bordered on liable.
|
| They then wrote negative articles about her saying she
| should have been using her time to talk about other issues
| like BLM or Gay rights. The whole premise was ridiculous as
| if tweets are a limited resource.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Here's a few from the UK, mainly on the Tech Side
|
| https://issuu.com/futurepublishing/docs/tvb87.digital_janfeb...
|
| "Media and Journalism are essentially hobbies for wealthy,
| young people"
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > "journalists often can't find another job based on their
| english-adjacent degree; and the barrier to entry for
| journalism is very low"
|
| Y'know, maybe journalists should learn to code. Tim Apple said
| that learning to code is important.
| suifbwish wrote:
| The barrier is extremely low; now anyone with a wordpress can
| call themself a "journalist" and there isn't anything anyone
| can do to stop them. They really don't even need the English
| degree although sometimes it can be evident when they do not.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> you hire your friends; which inevitably leads to
| homogenization._
|
| This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with
| journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry).
|
| Also "you hire people that don't make you uncomfortable."
|
| I strongly suspect that this also happens with software
| development. "Cultural outsiders" (like me), have a _very_ hard
| time getting in the door. I am quite sure that one reason that
| many older folks don 't get hired, is because CEO <= 30, and
| doesn't want people around, that make them even slightly
| uncomfortable. Since they're the boss; what they want, they
| get. In "classic" corporations, CEOs are generally in their
| 50s, or older, and don't feel particularly challenged by older
| folks. They have to hire younger folks; even if it makes them
| uncomfortable.
|
| I've learned the value of a "heterodyne" workplace. There is
| definitely friction, caused by clashing cultures, but the
| product is often wonderful.
| ghaff wrote:
| >This is very common, in many industries. Maybe moreso, with
| journalism (I am not very familiar with that industry).
|
| I am somewhat familiar being on the board of a student
| newspaper. And it's extremely true in journalism. The
| students who went on to being journalists (or editors etc.)
| all did it through connections. You probably don't get a job
| on something like the editorial page of the WSJ by sending
| your resume around.
| dsign wrote:
| > I think it might be something much simpler, like "journalists
| often can't find another job based on their english-adjacent
| degree; and the barrier to entry for journalism is very low".
|
| I have read enough bad documentation to know there is a hot
| market for documentation writers. Now, if only english-adjacent
| degree holders knew about ... well, the documented stuff.
| ghaff wrote:
| A _lot_ of journalists and would-be journalists end up doing
| corporate stuff like tech writing, content marketing, PR,
| etc.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| This article is extremely on pointe with respect to insight...
| But missed the mark to the Northeast by a few hundred miles.
|
| Replace "New York" with "DC" and "writer/conspirist" with
| "legislative aid/lobbyist" and you begin to comprehend the true
| scale of this horror. Reporters are relatively insignificant by
| comparison.
| [deleted]
| evancoop wrote:
| Academia risks becoming another such field. Professorial salaries
| are not commensurate with the educational years, as there is
| little demand for published research in journals. As a result,
| journals demand payment from the writers themselves.
|
| While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy
| family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly
| homogeneous views.
| chaosbutters314 wrote:
| just as a data point to this. I worked for a PepsiCo, massive
| company. The position requires a PhD and you have to live in
| metro NYC, pay was only 80k.
|
| So not just professors, but a lot of positions that "require" a
| PhD pay poverty wages when someone has given up any kind of
| earnings for 5-6 years developing skills getting a PhD.
|
| There is a big problem with east coast jobs (mid-atlantic to
| NYC) from "older" companies that require tech experience and a
| PhD but do not want to pay accordingly because theyre stuck in
| an 80s mindset.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| As a PhD you might aspire to better but a position in NYC on
| $80k is hardly "poverty wages".
|
| For starters, there's this little thing called "commuting"
| you may have heard of. Ordinary people, without PhDs, do it
| plenty. The NYC Pepsi offices seem to be a medium-short walk
| from Christopher St. PATH; you would have no trouble living
| in Jersey City or Hoboken on the ( _computes_ ) ~$2000/mo
| rent that would be 'affordable' at such pay. I bet you get
| tax-deductible transit benefits, too, and a monthly pass is
| around $100.
|
| There are people in New York working full time jobs to make
| $15/hr, $30k a year. That's a lot more like the "poverty
| wages" you name.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 80k a year minus student loan payments.
|
| I couldn't imagine living in any HCOL city with less than
| 100k minimum. If others want to struggle, fine.
|
| But logically why not live in Chicago off that 80k, and
| take a 20 minute L ride to work.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Big time. I remember hanging out with the AI team here in
| Toronto before deep learning took off. Then it took off and
| Microsoft just bought the research team out from under UoT's
| feet. It was a sky high payout.
|
| Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so
| I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the
| Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are
| they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the
| Canadian Supreme Court?
|
| Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting
| companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly.
| But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
|
| But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at
| least until AI replaces us then who knows.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Here in the US, politicians, especially on the right, love to
| highlight and criticize public employees, especially if their
| salaries seem too large. But Federal employees salaries are
| not too large, barely competitive with the private sector. If
| you want government to work well, attract talent by paying
| them what they'd earn outside of it. But all that just comes
| from an ideological interest in shrinking government so they
| can drown it in a bathtub. If you make sure government
| doesn't work well, then you have an excuse for eliminating
| it.
| yibg wrote:
| I think the problem is the distribution. SOME government
| employees (at least in Canada) are seen as being paid too
| much because the pay is clustered really closely together
| and often don't reflect market pay.
|
| You get software engineers that get paid 70k a year but
| also janitors that get paid 70k a year with the same number
| of years in.
| dmurray wrote:
| > But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief
| Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
|
| Pay your consulting firm 100x more than they would pay any
| one government employee, and not ask questions about how much
| of that goes to each consultant.
| everforward wrote:
| From what I've heard, another part of why the government
| struggles to get good IT workers is that the processes for
| getting anything done are Kafkaesque, even compared to large
| enterprise roles.
|
| There are other things governments could do though.
|
| Coming from a US perspective, the biggest one would be to
| pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent
| you moonlighting for the government. I'd probably be willing
| to pick up some contract work to do on the cheap, but I can't
| because of my employment contract.
|
| Another is that the government already has access to a lot of
| things I don't, and I'd be willing to trade my time for
| access to some of those things. Free flights on army cargo
| planes would be a great perk. I would totally do some work if
| they'd let me drive a tank for like 30 minutes and fire the
| cannon down the range a couple times. They probably have
| access to HPC clusters that would tempt some (I don't have
| the skills to have the interest, but I'm sure many do).
|
| Government pensions are another option, although they'd have
| to require less than 40 hours a week of work to qualify. It
| might end up being more expensive than just paying more.
|
| Tax breaks are another option. Someone would have to figure
| up the demand curve, but a 10% cut to my effective tax rate
| would be tempting depending on the amount of work required.
|
| Free education would be another option if they could offer it
| for part time work.
|
| I don't feel that the government has gotten particularly
| creative in trying to attract talent. The pay is bad, the job
| is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the perks kind of suck other
| than the pension.
|
| The downside is that a lot of those are likely to piss off
| the rest of the government employees.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| There is red tape, yes, but there are upsides to doing
| contract work for them too. The sheer scale of impact is
| daunting. Millions of people looking for work and you help
| them figure out the areas their recommender system needs
| improvement? That's tens of thousands of homes that now
| have employment where they wouldn't have. Just think of the
| cascading impact.
|
| I don't know how to do it in the US, but in Canada you
| should be able to get these types of short-term gigs if you
| do a bit of networking in Ottawa and mention that you're a
| specialist in X, and that you want to help out here and
| there to give back. Wont take long. People want to bring in
| experts that will take occasional lower pay for impact.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also, the servers are BEEEEFY, haha. They might be cloud
| first these days, but when I was there it was still all on-
| premises and man alive are those machines huge.
| mabub24 wrote:
| I think the Public Service in Canada also suffers from
| extremely opaque hiring practices. Unless you're aware of
| what they're looking for in a resume or the PS style
| cover letter, you're just sending in your resume to the
| void. FSWEP is the unofficial actual hiring route. Then
| the average time for a lot of hiring outside of getting
| "bridged in" is 9 months or more. Most people find that
| absurd.
|
| I do know some CCs and branches are trying to make
| changes but the PS in general is an absolute dinosaur for
| hiring and shows no signs of improving to match the bleed
| they'll have as people start retiring out.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's also one reason most Senators are millionaires.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You wrote: <<to pass some kind of law that employment
| contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the
| government>>
|
| This is a brilliant idea. In some sense, the gov't is the
| biggest non-profit in any modern nation. Large corporations
| love it when you "moonlight" at a non-profit. Your are idea
| is not so far-fetched! I'm sure lots of techies would love
| to pitch-in and help to improve an online gov't service --
| be it local, regional, or national.
| xxpor wrote:
| >Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme
| Court?
|
| Yes. Why not?
|
| One is a job in a market, with no "external" validation to
| make up for the lack of pay. The other is one of the most
| elite legal jobs in the world.
| derbOac wrote:
| Not risks, has become.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Paying for journals to publish your papers is a thing academia
| did to itself. Publish or perish, demanding papers in a few
| cherry-picked journals to continue your career, and basically
| funneling grant money into journals hands is something that can
| only be changed from within academia.
| dmix wrote:
| A lot of industries make sense in the context of their time,
| I'm sure having a few papers with esteem and influence as
| primary status indicators made a lot sense back in the day.
|
| There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging
| organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant
| or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best
| example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the
| world.
|
| Just like how lawyers still use fax machines.
|
| It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out
| in those organizations. Which also relates back to the
| articles point about cultural insularity.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Somewhat comparable to F/OSS, except without the grants.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| How is that similar to foss?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes just like every open source project must pay a grand
| to github to host their code. /s
|
| What are you even talking about?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I don't have to pay anything to publish code I wrote. Peer
| review only happens in Linux distributions.
| ebiester wrote:
| However, professors were historically from the gentry. It was
| always a position of status and privilege, especially before
| World War 2. It was only when the demand for higher education
| surged (largely by the GI bill but also by the computer
| revolution that created the white collar jobs today) that this
| changed.
|
| Further, the amount of published research has also exploded as
| the supply of qualified applicants has surged. That said, I
| think eventually the journals problem will solve itself -
| people inside academia are trying to figure a way out already.
| asdff wrote:
| Grad students are so terribly underpaid in Academia. Salaries
| should go up 3x at least across the board for stipends. Grant
| funding agencies are spending millions of dollars on scientists
| who are only seeing salaries of at most $35k in the highest
| cost of living areas to do things like study cancer or climate
| change.
|
| It's kind of an open secret, but usually grant aims are
| somewhat vague. It's up to the grad student saddled with those
| couple of aims for their thesis work to identify what exactly
| to do. To vet the literature for methods. To order equipment or
| reagents. To conduct the experiment or analysis. To write up
| and interperete the results. To outreach to collaborators and
| set up meetings. To draft up the results into a published
| paper. Sometimes grad students are even relied upon to pen the
| next grant. The big joke is by the time you are done with your
| PhD project, you know more about the topic than anyone in the
| department or your professor or your committee. I think that
| actually typically happens by third year. Professors are tied
| up with administerial duties, class, and several other projects
| they may be juggling, along with their personal lives. You are
| lucky if your professor has five hours a week to devote to your
| particular project.
|
| It is so shameful that grad students are the backbone of modern
| research yet we pay them competitive salaries with In n Out.
| It's no surprise how grad students are so likely to have
| significant mental health issues considering the workload doled
| upon them for pittance pay that they have to figure out how to
| make work over years of other costs rising, while they are
| often without a raise.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Why should they increase? Please don't shoot the questioner,
| but is your thought that this would increase the quality of
| scientific output?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > as there is little demand for published research in journals
|
| Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia
| this is 90% of what hiring or promotion committees demand.
|
| > journals demand payment from the writers themselves
|
| From the institution, not the authors.
| jbsimpson wrote:
| > From the institution, not the authors.
|
| Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own
| funding.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well I'd call that institutional money. 'Writers have to
| pay' makes it sound like they're paying from their own
| personal cash.
| derbOac wrote:
| Sometimes they do. Regardless, if it's often coming from
| funding that implies the authors have to have grants or
| come from institutions that are willing to pay, which
| disadvantages individuals without resources (they often
| have discounts for those without resources but in my
| personal experience the discount is absurdly small, like
| 15%, which is a lot for someone who just doesn't have
| external resources to publish under that model, if
| they're asking for 2k+ per paper).
|
| Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of
| pay to access.
| derbOac wrote:
| Nowadays though the research is secondary to grant funding,
| so hiring and promotion committees don't even care about
| that.
|
| I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large
| grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the
| response from significant segments of the department every
| year was literally something like "they have a large grant,
| it's fine, of course they'll publish".
|
| Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and
| issues about replicability and so forth have just added to
| the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along
| the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and
| high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay
| for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea,
| that true value is revealed only when money is on the line.
|
| I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in
| the US. I personally think the current funding system creates
| distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original
| idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least
| provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models.
|
| If something doesn't change I think this trend will only
| accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant,
| with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually
| rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form
| of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders.
| Again, whether that's the _best_ model for funding anything
| in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a
| different issue.
| unemphysbro wrote:
| Universities take a cut (30 - 50%) of grant money brought in by
| profs. The incentive structure for good science is broken.
|
| Academia is a racket.
| asdff wrote:
| They also charge tuition that doesn't exist for grad
| students. Your classes year 1 or two in most stem phd
| programs are going to basically be the professors from the
| department giving research talks trying to get you to join
| their lab. Then they end and you are doing research or TAing
| for the department for the next 3-however many years. Only
| the thing is, the school still makes you sign up for tuition
| units, for a special class that only has grad students in it,
| and when you look at your bill you are charged full tution
| for this nonexistant class that just exists on paper. Your
| funding, whether it be the from your professor in an RAship
| or from the department in a TAship or an outside fund like
| the NSF, has to pay for this nonexistant classes tuition. You
| might be a line item of 90k a year on the grant budget, but
| you only see 35k from the nonexistent tuition. The rest just
| poofs into smoke into the inner workings of the school
| bureaucracy.
|
| It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there
| is no way out because literally every school does this and
| too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.
| HPsquared wrote:
| This could be a reversion to the mean. Historically the arts,
| science and philosophy were mostly hobbies of the wealthy -
| either doing the work itself or sponsoring it. Not really a
| "money-making" activity but a hobby or clout-chasing activity.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| this is the answer, STEM could easily fund itself in a free
| market. The same can't be said of the many other college
| degrees that are now funded mainly by student loans.
| Government created a distorted market that ruined many
| people's lives by trapping them with debt for a degree that
| provided no real world value
| asdff wrote:
| I feel like the student loan issue wouldn't have been so
| bad if they were mandated to be used in state for public
| schools. You aren't going to be six figures underwater with
| an in state tuition bill of what like $14k before any aid
| or scholarship at UCLA. If you work full time in the summer
| you can put a huge dent in that too. Landing a favorable
| internship in a summer can actually net you ahead.
| ghaff wrote:
| STEM covers a lot of ground. Undergraduate biology and
| mathematics degrees probably don't confer any great
| employment advantage other than as a generic degree that
| demonstrates you have some facility with technical stuff--
| which isn't necessarily _that_ much better than an English-
| adjacent degree depending upon what you want to do.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Undergrad math degrees pay off pretty well. As a group
| math degrees are second after engineering degrees for
| highest median starting and lifetime salary for people
| with only an undergraduate education.
|
| Relevant graphs on pages 12, 13, and 19. Math,
| statistics, and computer science are lumped in together
| on pages 12 and 13, but the graph on page 19 shows that
| the median salary for all three is very similar.
|
| https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-
| ssl.com/wp-...
| ghaff wrote:
| That makes sense I guess. Even if you don't go on to do
| grad-level math or physics, it's a good foundation and
| preparation for a lot of other quantitative occupations.
| Whereas chemistry and biology have often been considered
| being "pre-med" majors to a non-trivial degree. They're
| less of a foundation at the undergraduate level for well-
| paying jobs.
|
| >the median salary for all three is very similar.
|
| Though note that this data is almost 10 years old. It
| wouldn't surprise if computers rose more than the
| average.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| if you have a math degree you can do pretty much anything
| you want. Pure math as an academic probably isn't great
| pay but FAANG and hedge funds will pay massive money for
| people good at math who are willing to learn to code
| soniman wrote:
| There was an academic fellowship with something like a $40
| application fee and it got like 1000 applicants so the
| fellowship was funded by the application fee! That is literally
| a circular prestige economy.
| brian_herman wrote:
| I really like my low status high wage job!
| iratewizard wrote:
| > And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half
| of them as White children of the upper-middle class
|
| Did the author learn nothing from the recent Whoopi Goldberg
| incident? They don't want to be identified as white anymore,
| because they don't want lose status or oppression points.
| kosyblysk2 wrote:
| `journalists`? hahahaha
|
| i actually live in this area, they are mostly corporate sell outs
| or small time `progressive` emos/flakes
|
| the hood ain't cheap either.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-09 23:01 UTC)