
Why Aren't Top Journalists Rich?  - marban
http://priceonomics.com/why-arent-top-journalists-rich/
======
pron
The problem, as I see it, is that newspapers (print or online) operate very
differently from other forms of media, like TV, radio and blogs, and make a
very different product. Newspapers are the only media institutions that
continually cover wide beats. They have a reporter in city hall whether or not
something interesting is happening there, one in court, and one in Germany.
This makes print reporters much more knowledgeable about their respective
beats than other kinds of reporters, and that's why most breaking stories
originate in newspapers. TV, on the other hands, is usually a secondary news
collection organization. It often lets the newspapers break a story before
covering it themselves. This means that they can afford to send a reporter to
Germany only when something interesting is going on there.

Newspapers have been able to support this model because their customers buy a
package. They pay the same price every day because they have to buy the entire
paper, though they are likely interested interested in a different story each
time. This means that when there's news in Iraq, people buy the paper for the
Iraq story, and that day the Iraq reporter subsidizes the supreme court
reporter.

But this model is a problem for online journalism, because revenue is
generated only from the articles that are actually read, and obviously, a
single article generates less revenue than a complete package.

Unfortunately, this would make it very hard to keep reporters on the ground
that slowly get to know their beats and wait for something interesting to
happen. Unless media comes up with a new way to support regular beat
reporters, we will lose the most essential information-gathering mechanism we
have, and the news will be even more controlled by PR than it is today (and
even today a large portion of the news is spoon-fed to the few reporters left
by PR firms).

~~~
kintamanimatt
What's probably more likely is that nebulous publications might fail, and
instead people may follow many smaller niche online publications. You might
read about tech news, supreme court rulings, and something happening in
Germany from three different, unrelated sources, but ignore local news about
things happening in Amsterdam. These would be run by people with an interest
in a particular topic, perhaps as a hobby part time. Hobby bloggers are really
quite common so it's not impossible to imagine this.

~~~
pron
But each of these publications won't make enough to pay good reporters to do a
good job. Hobby reporting is a nice idea, but as a former journalist I can
tell you that it's very hard to do serious reporting in less than full-time.

------
chaddeshon
It looks like the top journalists are rich. The article says Anderson Cooper
is making $10 million per year just from his show and Fareed Zakaria is
commanding $75K per appearance.

The article says they don't count because they aren't print journalists. Isn't
that like a orchestra violist asking why top musicians aren't rich, but then
saying Justin Timberlake and Rihanna don't count because they aren't orchestra
musicians?

It seems like the big money in journalism is in video, not print. Just like
the big money in music is in pop, not classical.

I suspect this is because it is easier for the casual viewer to quickly notice
the difference between two people on screen compared to two people's writing.
Being easier to recognize makes it easier to gain a following.

~~~
discostrings
But is Anderson Cooper making that money as a journalist or as a TV
personality?

I don't mean to demean him by saying that, as I'm not very familiar with his
background or his career. I would question, however, whether he is paid that
much because of the journalism he does or because of his status as a TV star.

Maybe there's currently a large market for TV personalities who talk about
things that are new but not a large market for actually discovering and
distilling facts about our world. Maybe appearance, not content, is where the
money and market is.

------
malandrew
I just wish they focused on profits per employee as a metric, or really any
actually meaningful metric besides gross revenues. You can make anything
impacted by technology look bad by looking at only revenue.

The music industry revenues dropped by half between 2000 and 2010, however it
doesn't talk at all about how much costs dropped in the same time period. More
specifically, the cost per artist brought to market (album creation to
distribution). As long as more music is being created and making to listeners,
then market demand is being satiated, and that is all that matters.

~~~
alexmayyasi
Author of the post here. I don't have any metrics like those up my sleeve, but
I would encourage you to check out the Pew survey i mentioned which (in
reference to print and tv) finds that:

"Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because
it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to."

[http://stateofthemedia.org/](http://stateofthemedia.org/)

------
mathattack
I always thought that the top ones were rich, they just made their money
elsewhere, like books and TV. Am I wrong?

------
salmonellaeater
_It’s worth noting that op-ed writers are generally the most well-known
journalists. [Their] picture is always printed, they write with a signature
style, and papers advertise their faces and perspectives. Reporters, in
contrast, write in an anonymous “this is news” tone fitting an institution
that did not introduce bylines until the 1920s._

This suggests a solution: print journalists' photos with their articles, so
they can be recognized and remembered more easily. I'd wager that some
newspapers would fight such a change, but it might actually be in the paper's
interest for their reporters become draws in their own right, much like op-ed
writers or reviewers like Roger Ebert.

------
johnnyg
> It's no secret that technology disrupted journalism’s business model, and it
> has yet to recover. What's puzzling is that the disruption seems to have
> created lots of losers but no new winners within journalism.

And I stopped reading...

drudgereport.com (~1.3M a year
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge#Drudge_Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge#Drudge_Report))

~~~
tokenadult
I try not to stop reading too early. Drudge is not a journalist. Indeed, I
have seen at least definition of "journalist" (a "reporter who writes for an
editor") that was described in the source I saw it in as an explicit exclusion
of Drudge from the ranks of journalists.

A blog post, "Blogs lead in critical thinking, but newspapers still matter,"

[http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6083](http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6083)

submitted to Hacker News earlier today to no discussion,

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907627)

illustrates some of the reach that "traditional" journalism still has. The
quality of professionally edited journalistic submissions to HN, as contrasted
with the quality of many (although not all) blog posts submitted here,
suggests that there is still a role for journalism in promoting more informed,
more thoughtful discussion of issues we all care about.

