Journalist naivete 101

I pity every under-35 journalist, even more, under-30 journalist, like this one, who thinks he, as compared to all the others now on his own, actually WILL "make it" as a-Net based freelancer.

Sheelah Kolhatkar tells a great story of the descent of all the Paul Smaleras:

You can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging,

transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”
Beyond that, writing a blog that amounts to little more than a search engine optimization tool?

Just as Google Ads is killing a lot of online advertising, the fragmentation of news/content/analysis and whatnot online is going to kill salaries, too.

Keep dreaming, Paul Smalera. Until you wake up. Or, until you OD on the Kool-Aid of the Jay Rosen types who keep hawking the Net, including the free-range, unpaywalled Net, as the salvation of media.

Read like this one to get more of a sense of how he's scraping and scrimping by. Paul, half the job dumps and revenue losses may be recession-related, but the other half? As long as print media keep repeating the same non-charging-for-online-content insanity, the other half is gone for good.

Of course, in partial degree, if not in kind or way at all, the Smalera attitude is part of journalism writing's bloodstream for decades. Which is why the increased codependency abetted by the Net smackdown is kind of predictable, actually.