Writing, Media & Blogs: December 2005 Archives

You've gotta love this essay by Daniel Gross about journalists coming to terms with their place in the social structure.

The New York real-estate boom is claiming a different kind of casualty, according to an article in Sunday's New York Times. Keying off a new report issued by the Center for an Urban Future, Jennifer Steinhauer noted that, thanks to high housing prices, many of the creative types who work in Manhattan-centered fields like advertising, publishing, and the arts are being priced out of the city. This, presumably, could damage New York in the long run, since it's an article of faith among nouveau-urban thinkers that the creative classes are a huge economic advantage, as the author Richard Florida has persuasively argued.

It could also damage journalism. The journalists who write these stories about people who can't afford to live in New York can't afford to live in New York, either. And that's a trend that may prove just as corrosive to establishment media as any disruptive technology.

The "disruptive technology" being, presumably, blogs and the internet media.

Journalists have long suffered from what David Brooks (in his excellent Bobos in Paradise phase) identified as status-income disequilibrium. Journalists received low wages compared to many of their peers and neighbors but enjoyed higher prestige and job security. But for employees of the media Big Three, both the prestige and job security are fading as the publications hemorrhage audiences, advertisers, buzz, and public esteem. Meanwhile, the wages for other professions that New York journalists' neighbors and peers work in (law, consulting, financial services, hedge funds) have been rising fast.

It's called reality. You may have come into peripheral contact with it while writing disparaging, condescending articles about those of us who have lived in it for our whole lives.

Most experienced reporters and editors at the publications in question earn salaries in the low six figures. They can expect salaries to rise by a few percentage points a year, if they're lucky. Salaries that barely pierce six figures certainly aren't insulting to most Americans. But everything is relative. A couple doing quite well—he's an editor at the Journal, she's a reporter at the Times—could make up to $250,000. But after New York taxes, New York child care, and New York housing, you're not left with much. In New York City, you can't buy a co-op or a condo with only 10 percent down. In most desirable suburbs, you can't buy a starter house for less than $700,000. When children arrive, the couple has to choose between living in an expensive town with good public schools (which means long, painful commutes), or the prospect of private-school tuition at $25,000 per kid per year. Given the types of lives many journalists wish to lead—and think they're entitled to lead by virtue of their education and positions—the wages aren't anywhere near sufficient.

Oh no! They have to make agonizing decisions between public and private school? The horror! These observations demonstrate, economically, that journalists' sense of entitlement is misplaced and that their actual value is far less than their perceived value. The real tragedy here is that media consumers have been overcharged for the past century.

Apparently Mr. Gross agrees:

Today, neither journalists nor their employers have aligned their self-perceptions with the wages they pay and the space they occupy in the world. For decades, companies like the media Big Three have seen themselves as among the elite employers of New York, analogous to Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, easily able to recruit and retain the best and the brightest. The Times, the Journal, and Time Inc. want to hire yuppies, the better to connect with their yuppie readerships. And reporters and editors want to be yuppies. But the economics of the business—and of the home town—no longer allow for the upwardly mobile portion of yuppiedom. (It's somewhat different in Washington, where the rich aren't so rich and housing isn't so expensive.)

We New York-area journalists shouldn't ask for pity, and we don't deserve it. As a class, we're bourgeois and ambitious. We like comfort and access, but we don't want to work all that hard. Working for clients, as our lawyer neighbors do, is anathema. So is taking on risk, the task for which our neighbors who toil in the financial vineyards are so richly rewarded. Most people who choose to become journalists have great advantages—good educations and the sorts of skills that can translate into other professions. Writers unhappy with their wages can always switch fields, seek other jobs, or leave. If housing prices continue to rise, and if wages continue to stagnate, the media Big Three may find that their captive creative class might quit for greener pastures.

It's optimistic to assume that veteran journalists will be able to find greener pastures and higher-paying jobs -- after all, those who can, do, and those who can't, write. Without a willingness to work hard for, you know, customers, it's hard to see how any of these journalists will even be employable. The real, precious irony will be if these elitists are forced to move into fly-over country just to find any pastures at all.

On the whole I think it's a great thing for our society that journalists are going to have to live in the real world with the rest of us; let's hope similar changes hit academia. Perhaps once our "thinking class" has a little tougher time making ends meet they'll come to appreciate the value of cutting taxes and the annoyance of governmental interference.

(HT: Rush Limbaugh's radio show.)

Yet another study has been issued that demonstrates the liberal bias of the mainstream media, this one from Tim Groseclose of UCLA who has compared news reports with political speeches.

"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."

"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

I'm not sure I agree with all of their methodology -- such as their quantification of "liberalness" that gives the average American voter a more liberal rating than the average member of Congress -- but any changes I'd propose would simply make the resulting measure of media liberalness even more pronounced.

Although I link to Wikipedia pretty frequently, it's important to take everything you read there with a grain of salt.

Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job at a Nashville delivery company and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr.

Chase said he didn't know the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.

The biography he posted--since replaced--falsely stated Seigenthaler was linked to the Kennedy assassinations.

But... is it really much less accurate than printed encyclopedias? I've got no idea.