Putting the value back in journalism

As if newspaper layoffs weren’t bad enough,  someone had to go and present an essay titled “Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.” Sheesh.

The provocative title isn’t one I would expect my journalistic brethren to embrace. Formal instruction has taught us that ours is a noble profession, one that provides an invaluable service by enabling an informed democracy. But as Robert G. Picard points out, that valuation no longer commands the tangible economic benefits it once did:

In the past, these journalistic benefits produced significant economic value, but today their value is diminishing rapidly. A significant reason for the reduction is value is that news and information producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, limitations on distribution mechanisms and the cost structures of operating media promoted monopolies and oligopolies in communication supply. This increased the economic value of content by excluding provision by other suppliers.

Today that additional value is gone because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist and all provide functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits. The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labour of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.

Picard argues that a lack of specialized knowledge on the part of most journalists and the proliferation of empowering technology have devalued the product:

Journalists are not knowledge workers, that is, they are not professionals with unique base of knowledge such professors, medical personnel, and engineers or even electricians and computer technicians. Consequently, they are unable to create value through the scarcity of and control over professional knowledge.

The fundamental challenge comes from technology that is deskilling journalists. It is providing individuals the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively without the support of a journalistic enterprise.

Software incorporates search and filtering skills and is integrating information and story selection skills that allow users to determine significance for themselves and to set their own selection and topical preferences.

Journalists’ low salaries, Picard observes, are the result of institutionalized professionalism, wherein the skills journalists employ in the execution of their duties are easily replicated among their set:

Average 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. Few journalists encounter skills-related problems changing from one news organization to another and the average journalist is easily replaced by another. This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low.

With technology enabling readers to locate valuable information, the sources of which are abundant, and journalists carrying out their function according to standardized skill sets, Picard posits that journalists need to distinguish their efforts such that their work is unique, scarce and thus valuable:

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.

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.

While I find much of Picard’s analysis persuasive, I don’t think the state of journalism as a profession is as dire as he would have his audience believe, primarily because he underestimates the value of finding, curating and conveying information. Just because a lot of people could do journalism, it doesn’t mean they will, technological advances notwithstanding. I would argue that the expanding terrain of  information and its sources will only make the efforts of talented journalists — who can find, filter, organize and write the news –  that much more valuable.