((Originally printed in the Christian Science Monitor. Hit the link — the CSM, if not this article, deserves the pageview.))

Why journalists deserve low pay
By Robert G. Picard

Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

((Actually, lots of us told ourselves this even before the industry tanked. It’s why we became journalists. I dare say it’s a better motivation than whatever drove Robert Picard to be a media economist.))

Actually, journalists deserve low pay.

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.

((Nobody’s ever suggested that blogging or Twittering were solutions in themselves. It’s a rhetorical straw man. And why dismiss micropayments out-of-hand when they haven’t really been tried?))

Where does value come from?

Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement, including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself, but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.

((Leaving aside the hairballs of intrinsic value — beauty can be cold, truth can be cruel, harmony achieved through disharmonious means, etc. — one could argue that enlightenment, social interaction and democracy are so important that whatever facilitates them is, in fact, valuable in itself, just as hands and lungs and eyes are intrinsically valuable to a body.))

Economic value is rooted in worth and exchange. It is created when finished products and services have more value – as determined by consumers – than the sum of the value of their components.

To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided when individuals identify with the publication’s perspectives or opinions, or when they’re empowered to express their own ideas.

These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today.  ((Really? So it’s okay to be ignorant, alienated and powerless? Thought so. Journalism’s benefits produce just as much value as ever. What’s changed is the price people pay for them.)) That’s because producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.

((This is a glib and misleading argument. It’s true that communication space has been radically opened; but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the internet went mainstream, when news scarcity still existed, print and network-broadcast journalism were already in decline.

The exceptions to this were talk radio and talking head-based TV punditry, which are less journalism than journalism-themed entertainment.  The same can be said of the round-the-clock, low-reportage approach that, having worked so well for O.J. Simpson’s self-destruction and Bill Clinton’s blowjob, became the dominant format of cable TV news.

As entertainment became cheap and plentiful — hundreds of channels for 20 bucks a month, etc., some of which offered “news” — people spent less time consuming genuine journalism, and paid less money for it. If the internet was still a 56.6k playground for geeks, we’d still be talking about the death of the journalism industry, only on a slightly delayed time scale.

In short, it’s not a “wider range of sources of news and information” that threatened the financial viability of good journalism, but a wider range of content of all sorts — the modern marketplace of information. A few diehards might cling to markets as final arbiters of value for socially essential goods and services, and suggest that journalism’s commercial failure is by definition deserved. Perhaps they also agree with, say, the market’s apparently high estimation of high-fructose corn syrup’s nutritional benefits.

Lastly and most importantly, it’s impossible to talk about the price of news without discussing the technological and cultural systems that have made it nearly impossible to charge money for online journalism. This is the 800 pound gorilla in Picard’s argument.))

The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.

((Take this moment to find a story that demonstrates the idiocy of this statement. My own pick is this NYT piece on the importance of investigative reporting by regional newspapers to exonerating prisoners who were wrongfully sentenced to death.))

The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don’t care about journalism – only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.

((Just because an editorial page doesn’t have much space for semantic nuance is really no reason to keep conflating “value” with “cost” and “price.”))

What are journalists worth?

Economic outcomes have traditionally held low priority for journalists. That’s got to change.

Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. ((Bullshit. A good journalist, one who’s been covering a subject at length, often has a unique base of knowledge. And if that’s not true, then most professors and electricians are hardly examples of uniqueness. They just happen to work in highly protected industries. Let’s see what happens if they’re forced to teach or wire buildings for free.)) Consequently, the primary economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others. In this process three fundamental functions and related skills have historically created economic value: Accessing sources, determining significance of information, and conveying it effectively.

Accessing sources is crucial because information and knowledge do not exist as a natural resource that merely has to be harvested. It must be constructed by someone. The journalistic skill of identifying and reaching authorities or others who construct expertise traditionally gave journalists opportunities to report in ways that the general public could not.

Determining significance has been critical because journalists sort through an enormous amount of information to find the most significant and interesting items for consumers.

Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.

((By “these,” I assume Picard actually means “this,” and refers to the ability to present information “in an interesting and attractive manner,” which he seems to lack. Maybe he could take lessons from a journalist.))

Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is “de-skilling” journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.

((Only two of Picard’s defined journalistic skills are challenged by technology — for the third, see the previous, ineffectively presented paragraph — and the challenge is hardly severe. Citizen journalists sometimes compare to professional journalists in their ability to gather and assemble facts, but these skills largely depend on the support of a journalistic enterprise — i.e., the time and freedom to report news. For every story uncovered and fleshed out by citizen journalists, professional journalists are responsible for a hundred.

To return to his “professors and electricians” example, internet curricula and a glut of literate adults “severely challenge” the worth of the former; Home Depot and men with spare Sundays, the latter. Nevertheless, I’d rather learn Shakespeare from someone who’s studied him, and leave wiring my home lighting system to professionals.))

To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped away by contemporary communication developments. ((Marginally true in terms of immediacy, but that’s about it. And does Picard really want to argue that economic value has historically been divorced from assembling and effectively communicating facts? Perhaps he can cite examples of news organizations staffed by journalists who, using their exclusive access to sources, delivered timely but inaccurate and illiterate stories. Fox News doesn’t count.)) Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay. ((Sure. And that’s why there’s so much great local and regional journalism produced by “ordinary adults.”))

Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay. ((This is a good moment to note that some journalism amounts to rewrites of press releases. That sort of journalism truly deserves low pay. But I suspect that even Picard wouldn’t argue that all journalism amounts to this sort of lazy regurgitation, nor is it the target of his article.))

Well-paying employment requires that workers possess unique skills, abilities, and knowledge. It also requires that the labor must be non-commoditized. Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. ((Commoditize: “To render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company.” Journalistic labor has not been commoditized. Journalistic output, on the other hand, has in many instances become commoditized, and in some cases the industry should be blamed for this. Journalism would be much improved were reporters covering and producing a far richer variety of stories. But this will require many things — most of all, more resources and support.)) Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages. ((Except for general assignment reporters, every journalist has “special expertise” — and GAs are pretty special, too. If Picard doesn’t think so, I suggest he apply for a general assignment gig at his nearest big-city daily. Let’s see how he does.))

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation. ((A whole paragraph devoted to restating what Picard said just two sentences ago. See: “effective presentation.”))

It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. ((Says the gorilla: a “highly competitive” market in which it’s expected that all goods will be sold for nothing.)) They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue. ((Some people think that trees, because they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, are intrinsically good and should be protected, even though they don’t produce revenue. The fools!))

A century and half ago, journalists were much closer to the market and more clearly understood they were sellers of labor in the market. Before professionalism of journalism, many journalists not only wrote the news, but went to the streets to distribute and sell it and few journalists had regular employment in the news and information business. ((So let’s turn back the clock to the mid-19th century! And why stop there? How about some mid-19th century medicine and jurisprudence while we’re at it?)) Journalists and social observers debated whether practicing journalism for a news entity was desirable. Even Karl Marx argued that “The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade.”

Adapt or die

If the news business is to survive, we must find ways to alter journalism’s practice and skills to create new economic value.

Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audiences and users are willing to pay a reasonable price. ((The gorilla just coughed.))

If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more useable by and relevant to their audiences. ((The irony, of course, is that Picard’s words appeared in the Christian Science Monitor — a publication built on the second-day, value-added story, in which depth and analysis were favored over pack journalism. The Monitor lost $6 million last year.))

One cannot expect newspaper readers to pay for page after page of stories from news agencies that were available online yesterday and are in a thousand other papers today. Providing a food section that pales by comparison to the content of food magazines or television cooking shows is not likely to create much value for readers. Neither are scores of disjointed, undigested short news stories about events in far off places.

((Note that the New York Times satisfies all these criteria, and it’s still tanking. The gorilla coughs again.))

Some news magazines have confronted the issue and are already changing and trying to provide unique news content. Newsweek has moved away from creating a compendium of events to a publication that explores the issues and implications of events and trends. ((And they’re no doubt doing so without any reportorial reference whatsoever to stories produced by daily news organizations, no doubt.)) US News & World Report has emphasized its consumer review and rankings activities. ((Now there’s a winner. Maybe they could add classified ads, too.))

Daily newspapers don’t have quite as much leeway with content but they can emphasize uniqueness. The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area. ((And if any other reporter in the country wants to cover their local schools or hospitals, then back off!)) Not only would it make the paper more valuable to readers, but it could sell that coverage to other publications. ((What happened to not expecting consumers to pay for the same stories as are available elsewhere?)) Similarly, The Dallas Morning News could provide specialized coverage of oil and energy, The Des Moines Register could become the leader in agricultural news; and the Chicago Tribune in airline and aircraft coverage. ((Second verse, same as the first.)) Every paper will have to be the undisputed leader in terms of their quality and quantity of local news. ((Finally, Picard says something sensible. Of course it doesn’t quite jive with the whole citizen journalist thing, but why quibble.))

Finding the right formula of practice, functions, skills, and business model will not be easy, but the search must be undertaken.

It is not just a matter of embracing uses of new technologies. Journalists today are often urged to change practice to embrace crowd sourcing, to search specialty websites, social networks, blogs, and micro-blogs for story ideas, and to embrace in collaborative journalism with their audiences. Although all of these provide useful new ways to find information, access knowledge, and engage with readers, listeners, and viewers, the amount of value that they add and its monetization is highly debatable. The primary reason is that those who are most highly interested in that information and knowledge are able to harvest it themselves using increasingly common tools. ((Too bad this paragraph wasn’t the entirety of the article.))

Finding the rights means to create and protect value will require collaboration throughout news enterprises. It is not something that journalists can leave to management. Journalists and managers alike will need to develop collaboration skills and create social relations that make it possible. Journalists will also need to acquire entrepreneurial and innovation skills that makes it possible for them to lead change rather than merely respond to it.

The demise of the news business can be halted, but only if journalists commit to creating value for consumers and become more involved in setting the course of their companies.

((Picard, looking at gorilla: “Does anyone smell a gorilla?”

The means to “protect value” appears to be an oblique reference to the fundamental necessity of devising a system in which journalists can expect to be reasonably compensated for the value of their labor. This system once existed, but it was supported in large part by advertising. Those revenues, along with revenues provided by point-of-sale and subscription fees, have been radically reduced in the transition to the internet, where advertisements are quantifiably ineffectual and fees mocked by consumers.

Not every discussion of journalism’s troubles need to focus on this problem, but analyzing the industry’s implosion without even mentioning it is ludicrous. At the very least, it’s a failure to apply the journalistic skill defined by Picard as “determining significance.” Some might call it “burying the lede.” ))