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In response to the buzz over Nate Thayer’s post last week on The Atlantic not being willing to actually pay for online content (at least from freelancers), Ezra Klein offers a bit of a brief for the defense—or at least an explanation of why it’s easy for publications to get content without paying for it. It’s all a matter of institutional subsides that used to go through journalists now going directly to publishers:
[B]ehind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free.
Call it the revenge of our sources. For a very long time, we got them to work for nothing more than exposure — and sometimes, we didn’t even give them that. Now they’re getting more and more of us to do it.
There’s no question that a lot of folk who are crucially under-cutting the market for political content these days have day-jobs that make writing for free—without or without the active encouragement of their employers—feasible. Ezra’s correct that some of them—think-tankers, academics, former politicians, etc.—used to be “sources” (named or unnamed) and now have their own by-lines thanks to the explosion of outlets, especially online. In that sense, journalists complaining about being undercut have essentially lost their power to command these institutional subsidies.
Working for exposure has long been a crucial element of how professional journalists made their money. It’s just that before, we were the ones profiting off of that work, at least in part, and now, we’re often not.
Now Ezra’s take on this treats “content” as a commodity that is possessed by the people who used to have to respect a journalistic oligopoly on mass-audience publication, and now don’t. After all, he says, “anybody can write.” So in a freer market for content, those enjoying day-job subsidies are really just cutting out the middle-folk, particularly when you consider that their day-job perches are what make them “experts” to begin with, providing them not only with credentials but of sources of their own, which no longer have to be shared with journalists.
The problem with the “commodity” approach is that there is good writing (which not just “anybody” can do), and there is also analysis, which places the “facts” that sources provide into an intelligible context. Not all of these subsidized former sources who are now content providers are that good at analysis, and many others have an analytical framework dictated by their day-job employers, which is a nice way of saying they are performing advocacy work at best and lobbying or “spin” at worst.
Maybe this all comes out in wash in the vast marketplace of words, but treating political journalism as just the gathering and writing of “facts” from “sources” misses an awful lot of what the better journalists—and ironically, Ezra Klein is a very good example of this—actually do.
In a piece on the declining glamor of the White House press corps by Buzzfeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro (didn’t know he had left TPM!), the New York Times’ Peter Bakers is quoted as making the crucial point:
[W]hile the most common journalistic criticism of White House reporters is that they serve as “stenographers” for the administration — dutifully writing stories about whatever the press secretary chooses to talk about — Baker said the quality of coverage is more a function of the journalist than the building.
“There’s a myth that all we do is take leaks on a silver platter. So the challenge is to be creative not just in uncovering information the press office doesn’t want to give out, but also in taking the information that is available and writing about it in a way that goes deeper below the surface and gives readers a better, sharper analysis of what’s really going on,” Baker said. “It’s only stenography if you choose it to be.”
Unfortunately, a lot of journalists are making that “choice,” and the answer to that particular problem isn’t to churn out a vast new class of shoe-leather who-what-why-when journalists (though they are valuable in their own right) or just to directly publish those who “dictate” the stenography. For all the content, smart journalism that explains as well as reports (or advocates or spins) still isn’t in over-abundant supply, and publishers just looking for the cheapest or more plentiful or most attention-grabbing words aren’t helping.
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golack on March 11, 2013 12:43 PM:
It's worse than you think. How many of the questions asked are really insightful questions vs just RNC talking points? Is there anything beyond "Well they said this, how do you respond?"
Sunday talk shows getting worse too. Completely false talking points routinely allowed to slide, or questioned only in the context of "Well, somebody else side something different..." Then must move on to next talking point.
Why are the professional press corps calling out those blatant lies? "I don't think that means what you think it means..." and force them to answer for what they are saying or end the interview.
James Conner on March 11, 2013 12:57 PM:
My question for Klein is: why are you accepting money from the Washington Post given the great exposure you're getting? Surely that exposure is far more valuable than a few dollars, which, after all, bring not fame but simply the ability to put bread on the table.
If The Atlantic wants 1,200 words from me, it can expect to pay for them, and to pay well more than $100 — and after reading Thayer's account of The Atlantic tried to rip him off, The Atlantic can expect to pay in advance.
Samuel Knight on March 11, 2013 1:14 PM:
It's only stenography if you choose to be a stenographer can be re-worded you are only useless if you choose to re-gurgitate.
Most of the elite press corps have chosen to be useless regurgitators stenographers and generally hapless. There really should be no tears shed about the loss of stature babblers on the Sunday shows or paid shills from AEI. Thank god people are figuring out how useless they are.
However, that reinfores how vital - and important - are 2 quslities that both Ed and Ezra have (in general, not always :) the ability to ask good questions and to write quickly and concisely about those questions.
That's what makes what you do journalism and most of what happens at the National Press club utterly useless.
paul on March 11, 2013 1:15 PM:
Ezra's comment is really frightening, because he appears to be completely ignoring the fact that essentially everyone working a day job and writing for exposure has some kind of axe to grind. Not just a point of view, but the economic and political interests of their current day-job employer and potential future employers.
If all the stuff appearing in publications is being subsidized by somebody else who wants to get a particular point of view across, then the publication really isn't worth anything in terms of information. Unless you're a dupe or a professional kremlin-watcher.
c u n d gulag on March 11, 2013 1:21 PM:
Actually, not just "anyone can write."
(Or, at least, 'not write well').
It only looks that way, since bad and insipid writers, who've never had an original idea, like Kristol, Friedman, Will, Brooks, Douthat, and others, can write total sh*t, and be loud and wrong on every single issue for decades, and STILL keep their damn jobs.
I really don't understand why anyone reads any of the people I've mentioned, since you learn nothing from the experience.
And, further, I don't understand why newspapers and TV channels employ these folks, who make meteorologists look look practically perfect in comparison.
Oh, wait, I just remembered!
Propaganda!!!
g on March 11, 2013 2:51 PM:
Taking leaks on a silver platter? Talk about elitist! (And messy)
Michael Robinson on March 11, 2013 4:48 PM:
"If all the stuff appearing in publications is being subsidized by somebody else who wants to get a particular point of view across, then the publication really isn't worth anything in terms of information."
Seriously?
You really believe publishers DON'T have an axe to grind?
That journalists merely follow their altruistic, public-spirited instincts for the common good, unhindered by editorial directives?
Wow.
smartalek on March 12, 2013 2:34 AM:
"Maybe this all comes out in wash in the vast marketplace of words"
I truly can't believe this was written here.
No, of course it doesn't "all come out in the wash."
Not in a world in which there are only two blocs of media by which 90+% of Americans get their "news:"
There's the wingnut conservasphere, at the top of which perch Fox, Limbaugh, and the other usual suspects, dispensing to their self-selected audiences blatant lies resting on a foundation of more lies (the worldview, theories, and attitudes that undergird the lies-of-the-day).
And there's the corporate mass media that does the same thing to the rest of us, but less blatantly and extremely, and with a veneer of seeming seriousness that permits the Publicans to get away with saying they're in the tank for liberals, when it's clear to anyone with eyes and ears -- and free of conservatard blinders -- that the opposite is true in practice.
Neither the left, nor the American people (the bottom 98%), have any voice, nor anyone providing actual, factual journalism (let alone analysis), at all... unless we ourselves actively seek such out on the 'net, or from international sources.
This is why, in 2000, when Gore and W argued over whether the vast majority of the W tax cuts would benefit only the top 3%, a USNews poll found that 19% (!) of voters thought they were in that top 3%.
This is why a majority of Americans STILL think Saddam's Iraq was involved in 9/11.
This is why over 90% of Americans don't know that Obama cut their taxes, or that he's shrunk the sizes both of the federal government and the deficit.
This is why a majority of Americans think there are crises in the national debt, in the current deficit, in Social Security, and in Medicare.
This is why most Americans have no clue that Democrats didn't have full control of both houses of Congress for the first two years of Obama's Presidency.
If this is how one of "our" major bloggers thinks of the current media situation, we may already be irretrievably, irreparably @#$%ed.
Where the hell is Secular Animist to knock this nonsense out of the park where it belongs?