Where Are All The Missing Journalists?

I have to think that Stacy tossed these paragraphs out as a batting practice fastball for someone else to drive high over the center field wall. As I am not long back from watching the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs drop Game 3 of the Atlantic League Championship Series in one of the ugliest games of baseball I have ever seen (and let me just say here that Somerset Patriots manager Sparky Lyle should have been suspended for the rest of the series and his comments don’t excuse his obscenities to the fans), I happen to still be full of the baseball spirit.

While I was checking out the story in Kentucky last week, I had an interesting conversation with Andrew Marcus of Founding Bloggers who asked me, Where are all these laid-off journalists who’ve lost their jobs in the Great Newspaper Meltdown of the past few years?

There is clearly an opportunity for entrepreneurial online journalism by resourceful reporters who can find a way to operate independently on a shoestring budget. And yet it’s hard to see where any of the people laid off from the big metropolitan papers have actually taken advantage of this opportunity.

Stacy and I have talked about this before. There’s a reason that you don’t find many dispossessed journalists doing things gonzo-style and that’s the “shoestring budget”. Most reporters who have spent the last few years working for big newspapers aren’t interested in going back to the beginning, as Inigo Montoya would say. They don’t want to have to rattle the tip jar for gas money to some podunk town in Kentucky to turn over a few rocks when they can mail one in from their desks. Their big goal is yukking it up at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, not amassing a career full of solid and unimpeachable news stories. They’re crusaders and, by God, they want to be paid bank whilst out slaying the dragons of injustice and oppression.

Yes, there are plenty of opportunities for journalists to hang out their own shingle, but there’s very little will. That would require a journalistic heart that most reporters thee days simply don’t have. And why should they? Since Woodward and Bernstein, journalists tend to see themselves more as crusaders who sally forth to slay the dragons of injustice and oppression. Mounting a crusade is really easy to do when you never have to leave your desk. All you really have to do is grab a few quotes from a wire report or press release, mix it with a little commentary, and slick it by a few editors who are down with the crusading too. Don’t believe me? Look at the front page of the Washington Post or New York Times and find two stories that required more work than that. My guess is that you might be successful once or twice a week, but not much more than that.

Journalism isn’t rocket science, but it does take some work and it doesn’t often bring standing ovations.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.