All this stuff benefits in a way that isn’t quantifiable in a figure. If it means foregoing top-heavy corporate culture and the drudge of wire and PR infested cannibilizing to my mind that’s well worth a pay cut. The trade at present has degenerated to a pedestrian white-collar trade with most of its uniqueness and skills absent.

Pete

Whether the worst offenders in the drudge (of which there are thousands) should even be considered journalists is debatable. To quote a term coined by Nick Davies, they’d be better described as ‘churnalists’.

Pete

To me the crux of it all is creating good shit. Whatever ‘good’ is to the hack concerned in terms of predilections and skill.

Jonathon said: “The future of Journalism is not to become public service with the hopes of gratuity, but a professional service with professional expectations and results.”

There are other trades deemed professional that act in service of the public: this fact lessens the impact of this statement. That’s without getting into the semantics of professionalism, what that ought to or does entail blah de blah.

I see posts in blogs that are better than the newspapers in that they adhere to the principles that defined journalism before the presses were unearthed from the familial/paternalistic owners and replanted in the back yard of various big firms. Things like evidence, facts, checking, truth, accuracy, and as much impartiality as can be mustered – even if that historically perfection in that matter has not been acheived by any single journo.

If professionalism is in blogs and salaried hacks are doing subpar churnalist claptrap sourced from the wire – isn’t the officebound situation at present upended compared to what should be the case?

Economics will settle this. In the meantime I suggest journalism as an activity worthy of pursuit rather than theorizing diamond charts since most hacks won’t look at them with even less enthused enough to take it to heart in making journalism.

Pete, editor at Dirty Garnet.