Markets and Journalism

A slightly pointless discussion over whether or not journalists are subject to "merit pay" standards takes a turn for the interesting when Jason Zengerle rephrases his view as "I don't think journalists are totally immune from market forces." And obviously we aren't. On the other hand, it really is noteworthy how much of the more prestigious journalism out there is produced in a manner that's somewhat shielded from market forces. The American Prospect, National Review, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Washington Monthly, Harper's and Reason are all run as non-profits. The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Weekly Standard are run as non-profitable "for profit" organizations. The Washington Post (and Newsweek), The New York Times (and The Boston Globe), and until recently The Wall Street Journal were profitable but controlled by journalism-minded families willing to eschew some degree of profit-maximization in order to pursue some larger goals. NPR and its affiliates are a somewhat complicated non-profit arrangement. And among prestigious foreign outlets with a substantial American audience you see the BBC as a public broadcasting endeavor and The Guardian (and affiliated publications) is run by the Scott Trust.

On top of that, of course, a lot of people writing on serious topics will, at least for some portions of their careers, benefit from fellowships or think tank gigs that help subsidize their work.

All of which puts something like Jason's followup contention that journalism is a mostly meritocratic endeavor into perspective. On the pundit side, while it's true that to succeed you generally need to do "good work," the sense in which it has to be good has less to do with whether or not there's a large audience for your work than with whether or not your work is pleasing to potential funders, be they donors to non-profit publications, owners of vanity publications, or people in a position to hand out grants or fellowships.

Obviously, this sort of thing isn't like living under Communism so maybe you want to call it a form of being subject to market forces, but it's pretty different from being in a field where success requires you to meet some kind of objective standard of performance. Bill Kristol has had a very successful career in journalism as an editor and a pundit, but it's a career whose foundation is Rupert Murdoch's patronage rather than the objective merits of his work or some public clamor for a weekly neoconservative magazine. There are probably tons of people who could run a glossy magazine with the Weekly Standard's budget and a slightly larger audience that, nonetheless, couldn't get off the ground because nobody wanted to pay for it.

Photo by Flickr user Will Hybrid used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

...journalism is a mostly meritocratic endeavor...

I seem to have wandered in to a draft script for the Daily Show.

Posted by Monty | October 17, 2007 9:06 PM

You left out the New Yorker, which despite recent profits has been in the red for the most of the last 50 years. Oh, and the New York Review of Books, the great exception nobody mentions because it's somehow been profitable for most of its existence.

Posted by Charles P | October 17, 2007 9:07 PM

Market forces do boil down to being appealing to people with money or power. Some do it retail, some do it higher up the food chain. There really probably aren't that many things that succeed solely by some objective measure.
Zengerle himself echoes what MY is saying. Zengerle says the journalist has to be subjectively pleasing to his editor.

Posted by Doug | October 17, 2007 9:12 PM

Jason Zengerle wrote:

I think most journalists have a good sense--and many have even been told quite explicitly--what their bosses want from them. And they know their pay will be based on whether or not they deliver. That sounds like pay-for-performance to me.

If I worked for a magazine that had been owned for years by a batshit-crazy bigot I would probably be more careful writing about being paid to "deliver." That might explain, of course, why the Atlantic Voices features far more disagreement than ever surfaces at The New Republic.

Posted by ndm | October 17, 2007 9:12 PM

On the pundit side, while it's true that to succeed you generally need to do "good work"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ah yes, and what better place to look than the pinnacle of pundithood, The New York Times Op-Ed page. Here we can find the penetrating foreign policy insights of Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen, the lasting, profound psychological profiles of Maureen Dowd, and the nuanced and carefully-crafted sociological observations of David Brooks.

Posted by jonm | October 17, 2007 9:26 PM

>>On the pundit side, while it's true that to succeed you generally need to do "good work,"

Matt, you are delusional.

Posted by jim | October 17, 2007 9:28 PM

You seem somehow terrified of admitting that journalists do receive "merit pay." This does not mean that you work for a for-profit. It means that your salary increases, and even your continued employment, is contingent on your boss's satisfaction with your work.

This whole dispute originally arose with regard to merit pay for public school teachers, who obviously do not work for for-profits. Working for any of the publications you have named is not like working for the DC public schools. If you call in sick 20 times a year at any of those publications, and do no work on the days you show up, you will not have a job. And that's a difference. A big difference, some would say.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | October 17, 2007 9:29 PM

I think most journalists have a good sense--and many have even been told quite explicitly--what their bosses want from them. And they know their pay will be based on whether or not they deliver.

Wow. Well, there's the ballgame. I hope TNR leads with that quotation in the next subscription-seeking email.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 17, 2007 9:29 PM

This whole dispute originally arose with regard to merit pay for public school teachers

Right, so point to the "boss" and tell us that teachers don't get disciplined if they don't please the boss. Bet you're wrong.

No small part of the problem is that no one is sure who should be the boss as regards education--parents, the govt., the local community, etc.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 17, 2007 9:32 PM

There is another way to look at market forces as they apply to journalism. You can think about it as a market for information, with the readers being the consumers. Until recently there were relatively few sources of information--the local papers, the national papers, the news bureaus, news magazines (I'm leaving out TV news sources becasue they have mostly been garbage)--and all these sources overlapped to a high degree. If you wanted information about your local schools for example, you really only had the local newspaper. If you wanted information about a war abroad, you had the national papers and and the new bureaus, and the news magazines, which again, overlapped a lot. So if you didn't like the quality of the information, you really had no where to go. There were so few sources actually, you might not even realize the information you got was of poor quality.

Now, with the internet, there are many more information sources and you can actually shop around based on your perception of quality (or shared bias, much more common, I think). I think we are kind of at the beginning of a golden age and who knows what this will all evolve into. But one thing that is really encouraging to me: the more quality information there is out there, the stronger the democratic pressures on government.

Posted by cw | October 17, 2007 10:00 PM

MattY forgot the Socialist Worker, which is largely supported by advertising and the Tides Foundation.

But, seriously, I haven't seen much journalism from the listed sources concerning the presidential race. In fact, I have yet to say any of the front-runners confronted with the huge gaps in their policies ("confronted" as in cross-examined; I'm specifically thinking of their immigration policies).

I can think of a few explanations for that, and the major one is that most of those who call themselves journalists realize that asking too many questions could cause them to be put out on the street, because asking real questions about that would cost powerful people money.

Posted by TLB | October 17, 2007 10:38 PM

I think the point of using journalists and pundits as a counter-example was to demonstrate that so-called "merit pay" does not translate into objective quality.

Posted by Tyro | October 17, 2007 10:39 PM

Re Jason Zengerle statement:
"I think most journalists have a good sense--and many have even been told quite explicitly--what their bosses want from them. And they know their pay will be based on whether or not they deliver. That sounds like pay-for-performance to me."
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The same, of course, could be said of a crack whore giving a blowjob in a dirty alley.

Except that 3700+ US soldiers won't die --and thousands more won't be crippled for life -- because of the crack whore's business.

There are, after all, some things that crack whores won't do for money.

Would anyone like to argue the same for our prominent journalists and pundits??

People who --by and large --never saw an active battlefield but who beat the drums for an unnecessary war from safe offices and who are now much wealthier than they were a few years ago.

Posted by Don Williams | October 17, 2007 11:22 PM

Well, Matt's post puts journalism in a pretty narrow scope. I think, in that great meshing of the Petro-chemical industry and the military industrial complex called D.C., that the newspapers and tv should be looked at more in terms of necessary advertising cost. Journalism, as in reporting stuff truthfully and in context, is certainly not the point, and would get the aspiring reporter quickly canned.

Here's an example of the spirit of the thing. A few weeks ago, Dana Priest was asked, on one of those discussions on the Washington Post, why reporters did not concentrate on Saudi Arabia's contribution to the insurgents in Iraq the way they did on Iran. And she said something truly lovely, that got to the heart of journabongoism in America:

"This answer is not going to really satisfy you because your question goes straight to the heart of U.S. foreign policy, and how hypocritical it can be/seem at times. But the fact is, we still need the support of the state of Saudi Arabia to do anything in the Middle East. That is why we don't, say, declare we will invade if they can't stop the support to Sunni insurgents."

Notice, she wasn't asked about what the U.S. foreign policy should be, but why U.S. press coverage was as it was. She answered quite truthfully - her first impulse, and surely her last, is that U.S. press coverage should be thought of as part of U.S. foreign policy. Journalists are on the team. That we make a distinction between a journalist and a lobbyist or p.r. person surely has to do more with the vanity of the journalist than with the real situation of journalism.

Which is why, whenever one sees discussions of journalism among journalists, smug lies are almost always going to be flung around. Journalists being meritocratic - this in a world in which Charles Krauthammer has won a Pulitizer - is like saying you can trust the cigarette companies, since after all, they deal with organic products.

The real test of merit is: how successfully can you spin a line of lies for a particular powerful sector? And in 2002, journalism came through with one of its strongest years ever, putting over every lie they were called upon to spin in order to get the U.S. cranked for the Iraq war. Recognizing this fact, the media has pretty much promoted all the people who were 'wrong' about the war - because, of course, they did a bang up job of interfering with facts, changing the context of arguments to shape them so that they led to maximally delusional conclusions, and hiding inconvenient facts that they were forced to report in the B section. As far as Dana Priest's question is concerned, they've done an even better job: having no idea that our ally, the Saudis, have a couple of thousand American soldier's lives notched on their belt, given the money they have supplied to the insurgency, we can now, with a good conscience, discuss whether Iran is at war with us or not. Surely this omission of all context - a significant one, one that may inflect the way the U.S. is led into a war with Iran - is another journalistic triumph.

Aren't Merits a cigarette brand? Maybe that is what Zengerle meant.

Posted by roger | October 18, 2007 12:23 AM

Better to be beholden to a diversified field of the interested few than market forces which are prone to yield the titular and the titillating, I think.

Posted by John Aristides | October 18, 2007 1:02 AM

Opinion journalism is clearly a pure meritocracy. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain this week's announcement that John Podhoretz is becoming the editor of Commentary.

Posted by Steve Sailer | October 18, 2007 7:15 AM

Also don't forget that the liberal-leaning and non-ideological non-profits aren't the only publications that think getting their version of truth out there is more important than turning a profit. I believe many of News Corp's political outlets (Fox News, the NY Post) are only able to continue because they are subsidized by Murdoch's pure entertainment holdings.

Posted by tps12 | October 18, 2007 8:12 AM

Oh, and not to mention the Moonie-funded Washington Times.

Posted by tps12 | October 18, 2007 8:12 AM

And I'm retarded: like half the publications in the original post are right-wing. Sorry, not quite awake yet.

Posted by tps12 | October 18, 2007 8:14 AM

Journalists are paid on prestige, not merit. There are lots of very famous, and well paid writers, out there that no one reads. Because many writers earn their job early and phone it in for decades. (I'm looking at you Gore Vidal.) VANITY FAIR has an ongoing joke about a fake writer like this named Ed Coaster. The internet's doing a lot to change this, but we have a long way to go. TAP, for example, may be nonprofit, but its contributors get paid all different amounts, depending on how much Bob likes you, and maybe Bill Moyers (he's a big donor). PS. Most women writers will tell you that prestige also requires a penis, and possibly a Harvard degree. But definitely a penis.

Posted by Mr. Know It All | October 18, 2007 9:31 AM

Whereas the blogosphere is being subsidised (intellectually) by a cohort of expert bloggers who will soon decide they have better uses for their time. Here's the argument.

Posted by Robert Cottrell | October 18, 2007 11:59 AM

From Robert Cottrell's link: "One suspects that an economist like Greg Mankiw, or Dani Rodrik, or Brad DeLong has an absolute advantage in nearly everything economics orientated, relative to journeymen such as myself. But I think it's quite possible that their advantage in blogging is not at all as great as their advantage in producing world class research. There might then be gains from trade. Very good economists could produce very good research, and tolerable bloggers could analyse and blog about that research for those interested in reading about economics, and all would benefit "
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What about those of us who think economists are contemptible whores who --instead of working at an honest living -- develop laughable sophistry to justify the agendas of the superrich?

What do we do?

Posted by Don Williams | October 19, 2007 4:09 PM

what roger said.

Journalists who upset those in power (whether official power like govt., or their bosses/funders/sources) do not get ahead, and their uncomfortable truths are not disseminated and propagated by other journalists (see that Iran/Contra Mercury News guy, for instance). The safe, approved storyline--whether true or not, whether deadly or not--is what gets published, aired and reinforced by other "journalists", while truths are buried and/or left to wither.

Real journalism would entail actually getting at the truth and telling us all about it--no matter what, and no matter who it offended.

Posted by amberglow | October 20, 2007 8:08 PM