From The Underground

I kind of live under a rock. I'm either at work or school from 8 a.m.
until 11 p.m. every day, with homework occupying my remaining hours of
consciousness. I hardly ever watch television or listen to the radio
because I usually have something more relevant that needs doing. I
guess I could be listening to NPR in the car, but ever since I put
subwoofers in my trunk it just feels like such a tragedy to listen to
talk radio. So in terms of election media coverage, I might as well
be in a cave or buried under the Himalayas.

That's not to say that I'm completely oblivious. My housemates last
year always had the latest issue of Newsweek in our bathroom, so I
would get eight or 10 minutes of news exposure every so often. I also
get snippets here and there from the Internet or somebody sending me a
link to the Obama Girl video, but nothing I've seen so far has been
enough for me to form an opinion about any of the candidates. The
impression that my limited exposure has given me, however, is that of
a very different race from the past few I've been alive for.

In years past it seems that candidates were usually barely
distinguishable gray-to-white haired old guys that argued over lofty
concepts including but not limited to health care, foreign policy, and
other relatively impenetrable subjects—basically stuff that has the
same relationship with my life and understanding as molecular biology.
But in this election I haven't heard anybody singled out for a
particular policy (again, this may just be my ignorance speaking).
Mostly I see the potential candidates as opposing personalities.
There's Barak, Hillary and John Edwards for the Democrats, and I
couldn't have told you who was running for the Republicans until I
looked it up just now.

What I see in the media coverage of this race is a physical rather
than political separation of potential candidates—as far as Democrats
go, I only see a difference in how they look, not in what they think.
All I hear is that "Hillary has a health care plan," or "Barak has a
health care plan," not, "Here is the difference between the two." As
far as I'm concerned right now, this race is all about whether the
United States will keep a white male in office or elect the first
woman or first African American. It's a race of personalities over
policy. But, again again again, as I've said, I have about as much
credibility on the subject as the vagrant who lives under the bridge
has about differential equations. But this is the impression that I
get from the media that I've been exposed to. And I doubt that I'm
the only one in this boat.

Still Sweatin' the Stacks

I started college as a mathematics major because I figured that if I could wrap my head around abstract math, I could do just about anything. When the reality that I can’t fit high level mathematics into my head began to stamp me into pieces I decided to make a move to something that I always enjoyed. Writing was that passion-without-money thing, whereas math was more of the misery-money. Anyway, since making the change to journalism, I keep asking myself, what good, really, is a degree in journalism?

Unlike math or psychology or massage therapy, there’s not a whole lot to learn. I mean, you learn the style and the basic news values (which aren’t exactly rocket science), but after that it mostly boils down to practice. The difference between an 8^th year journalism student and a second year is the level of practice, not necessarily the level of knowledge. I guess one might learn how to extract information from sources or construct a clever sentence, but much of that just comes from doing. And what I have to wonder is, why do I need college just to tell me to practice something? It seems to me kind of like going to college to learn to play Frisbee. You’ll learn a little bit, but the main thing is practice.

Though it’s becoming more common now, it wasn’t long ago that most journalists didn’t have journalism degrees. I just had lunch the other day with a woman who has been an editor at Cincinnati Magazine for more than 20 years. She was a theater major in college. It seems to me that no matter what you do or study, if you have the motivation you can turn anything into a good background for journalism. And I wonder if “journalism” degrees might take away from the diversity of the field. Instead of having lots of theater majors, scientists, gourmands, etc., the field will be inundated with writers who just have a fuzzy recollection of the dateline city names.

This is all not to say that the networking and guidance you get in college are not useful. Without them it would be much more difficult to break into internship and job opportunities. But at the same time, I wonder if it’s worth it to pay more than $3,000 a quarter to have somebody tell me, “Write more stories!”

And it certainly doesn’t help that I can make more per year in my job as a waiter than most entry-level journalism jobs offer. Careers in journalism are definitely not set on a pay scale for university graduates.

When Do I Get Mine?

I sometimes wonder about how ethical unpaid internships are, especially when it comes to journalism. I mean, I only have experience in unpaid journalism internships, so I’m probably a little biased. But I’ve also built a pretty good amount of experience with them.

My first internship was relatively low-intensity as far as internships go. I moderated a forum and pitched ideas for stories when they came to me. Everything was initiative-based, which had the advantage of allowing me lots of freedom, but the disadvantage of being completely unstructured. This kind of internship can go legitimately unpaid, I think. In my case, I wasn’t doing anything of great importance to the publication – just nice little superficial extras. I got some decent writing experience and established some good contacts in the biz. But not a whole lot else.

My second internship, though, was what I’d consider high-intensity. At the magazine (and I’m not naming names in both cases just to keep my name and magazine names from being connected unpleasantly in words) the interns’ main job is fact checking. In an effort to make the interns feel important, our supervisor went to lengths to stress how crucial thorough fact checking is. Okay, I understand this. Fact checking interns are indispensable. So why then are interns with such an important job treated, well, “dispensibly?” It would be one thing if we were in the office five or 10 hours a week. But our minimum time there is 15 hours a week. That’s a serious chunk of time to spend without much to show for it. The argument is that we get experience and clips. But I don’t see how a clip or two, plus the experience of getting lectured for less-than-explosive enthusiasm for unpaid work is worth almost 200 hours (the magazine’s program operates on 13-week semesters, not quarters). That’s more than a month of full-time work in exchange for a 300-word clip.

If fact checking is really so important (and boy do you hear about how important it is when you miss something), then why don’t interns receive any more compensation. I would make the argument that, at my current internship, the interns really don’t gain any more experience in “magazine publication” than they would if they just spent a day shadowing an editor. I mean, interns are the only ones who fact check. How is fact checking giving us magazine experience? We’re only getting the experience of an intern, and the whole point of being an intern is to not have to be an intern any more when you’re done. I realize that there certainly are benefits to just being in a magazine’s office day in and day out and rubbing elbows with the editors. In terms of practical knowledge though, I really don’t think we’re being paid very well.

I’m not saying that I want an hourly wage. I’m saying that if interns have such a crucial role in the publication of the magazine, why don’t we see more compensation? Someone who isn’t worth paying shouldn’t be given big responsibilities. The kind of compensation I’m looking for is job experience. Editors should let editorial interns shadow them. They should show them the process of writing a story. They should at least attempt to pay them with learning. Not just dump on them the tedious work that nobody else wants to do. I think it’s fine if an intern’s job is mostly tedious work that nobody else wants to do, but there needs to be some light at the end of the tunnel. There needs to be something to redeem that tedium – help working on a piece, some constructive criticism, a ride-along, etc. But if at the end of 200 hours you’re left holding 300 words on a page and a stack of magazines that you know contain zero errors, I think you’ve wasted a lot of time.

Back in my day...

People always say that kids these days have it so easy. Maybe today's
youth can make an entire meal in six minutes with a microwave or write
a 20-page research paper without leaving their computer chair, but I
think advances like these never come without balancing challenges.
Maybe kids don't have to get up at 4:30 a.m. and walk 20 miles
barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, to get to the library, but we
certainly haven't reached information dissemination nirvana yet.

The advantage of an arduous journey to the local library was and still
is that you're as close to guaranteed as you can usually get of
finding reliable information – and if not 100 percent correct, you get
at least the conventional wisdom that passes as fact. Information in
print has usually withstood the scrutiny of fact checkers, editors,
copy editors, publishers or at least the guy who feeds it through the
copy machine. In any case, there is some accountability there,
whereas the Internet's wealth and speed depends largely on the absence
of accountability.

I think that a writer, particularly a journalist, earns his or her
money by being able to write for publication. I mean, I'm going to
school, emptying my pockets year after year to learn the rules of
journalistic writing so that print publications will put my words on a
page. Much of a journalist's skill is in writing a piece that can
pass through a line of editors without having to be completely
rewritten. So when this gauntlet of critics is absent, what
motivation is there to write factually and coherently? Sure, people
don't want to read false, ungrammatical garbage, but that doesn't mean
that some writers won't try to pass it off as news.

While I don't think that Arianna Huffington should be soaking up the
limelight for other writers' efforts, she doesn't necessarily have to
feel guilty about not paying her contributors. Her content consists
largely of the rejected ideas and material of print writers, so it's
not like she's giving assignments and setting deadlines. In a
follow-up to the Poynter story, Blake Fleetwood wrote, "paying writers
inevitably leads to controlling writers in what they say, and how they
say it." The degree of truth to this is debatable, but it's difficult
to say that it's not at least a little bit true in every case. An
editor's role is to censor (mostly mistakes, but it can and often does
go further), and the only way to be censor-free is to be editor-free.

Most of HuffPo's contributors are real journalists, but the fact that
they don't have to be puts the publication into the same category as
blogs, fansites and other potentially unreliable sources. The problem
here is that you can't really have an outlet for real journalists with
creative freedom without also leaving the door open for frauds. And
nobody wants to pay a fraud, or fork over money for a piece of writing
that may or may not be full of errors.

This takes me back to the give-and-take of the Internet. I think that
in an online world, true creative freedom – content coming unfiltered
from the writer to the screen – will always go unpaid. Otherwise
every hack and 14-year-old wanting a new pair of sneakers will pound
out stories for online publication. It's not fool-proof, but the
current system helps to keep the contributing population limited to
journalists who really care about what they're writing. But even this
writing is going to be subjective and less reliable than what you'd
find in print (as it hasn't passed through the usual channels).

So while contemporary students don't have to trudge through snow and
sleet to make it to the library, we do have to trudge through pages of
blogs and decipher opinion from fact and wonder whether or not a site
has an editor or even multiple contributors. We have information at
our fingertips, but we also have to be expert fact-checkers and
fact-collaborators. We can take nothing at face value. And I think
that this is the way of the Internet – and culture in general. You
pay for objectivity. You pay for hard facts. You pay for reliability
(or you get a library card). And this goes for both readers and
editors.

Information is everywhere. It's today's reader's job to be
discerning. Writers need to be discerning too, though. Asking to be
paid for a piece that must pass no tests for publication is like
asking to be paid overtime without an hourly log. Blogging in general
is an indicator that writers desire an audience more than they desire
money, and until this attitude changes, online publication is going to
be a low to zero paying industry. Huffington just happens to have
tapped that writerly weakness. She may not be a saint, but she's not
doing anything that defies Internet civility rules. She's just
further staking out the roles of readers, writers and editors on the
Web.

Bad Blogger

While journalism is certainly embracing online distribution fairly quickly, I wonder about the value of teaching new journalists to write for the Internet before teaching them to write for print. According to the Inside Higher Ed article, many college news publications are exclusively online. Many are also blog-style, where content revolves around columns that focus on student interests rather than actual news. While there is nothing really wrong with this, I wonder about using it as a learning ground for new journalists.

It seems to me that many of the crucial news values and skills that make good journalists develop while working with in print rather than online. For instance, concise writing is critical for journalists, whether on the Internet or in a newspaper. But in an exclusively online environment, motivation to keep to the point dwindles dramatically. There aren’t any length requirements and stories can span on for pages and pages without any real extra cost.

The emphasis on timeliness is also affected. While it could be argued that online media makes publishing news in a timely fashion even more of a race, it also skews deadlines. How long does a reporter get to cover a story? When do you publish stories? Unless content is updated at one specific time every day and all stories must be in by then, deadlines move to the backburner. There is always the safety net of “Oh, we can just upload that story in an hour, or in a day.” Editors can still enforce strict deadlines, but online publications lose the get-things-done-now element of print publications.

And while I couldn’t necessarily prove it, I think online publications may also cause journalists to lessen the amount of time and effort they put into the completeness of their stories. Print has a very definite element of finality about it. Once it’s in ink, you can’t make alterations. On the other hand, the content of online publications can be altered, trimmed or added to whenever anyone wants. Journalists for online publications may still go for the most complete, polished story they can on the first run, but they don’t have to. The ability to add details later or fix shaky facts could, especially for new writers, create dangerous temptations.

I think online publications are great. I mean no disrespect to writers who write exclusively online, but I don’t think it’s as good a place to learn journalism as print. It’s not impossible to learn good journalism online, but print forces you learn timeliness, conciseness and completeness, among other things. I think it’s better for writers to learn with print and then move online once they’ve gotten a handle on the craft. Now, whether or not journalism values will change because of the new rules on the Internet could change my argument completely. But that’s another blog post.

Popularity Contest

While user rated stories are telling of users' interests and reading
habits, I don't think that the absence of "hard news" on Digg,
Del.icio.us, and Reddit spells doom for serious journalism.
Television and even print news to some extent have become fluffier and
more popular interest-driven in recent years, but they still make hard
new reporting a priority. I think it's because of this reporting
priority that we see technology and quirk reporting getting the most
hits on Internet sites. While the newspaper or evening news isn't
going to have an in-depth story on the iPhone, a website or blog will.
Many people don't necessarily go to the Internet for stories on government and terrorism because they don't have to. They get all they want of it from mainstream news sources. This may change in the future, but I think right now the Internet is where people go for the light news and features that aren't deemed important enough to get mainstream headlines. This doesn't mean that people ignore the mainstream headlines. The Internet is just one half of our current information-dissemination dichotomy. It's like, if I need a new dirty clothes hamper, I go to Target. If I want a gallon orange juice, I go to Kroger. Both stores have both items, but one will give me more hamper options as well as similar items to browse, and the other is a better source for OJ and food... and stuff. I don't shop exclusively at one store.

Introducing

Andrew Welsh. Senior. Journalism/Asian Studies. I grew up in Dayton and moved to Cincinnati for college. I like to read and cook. And coffee. The first two help because my jobs involve both. I'm a server at Jo An Japanese restaurant, and I read textbooks for blind and dyslexic students at UC's Disabilities Services Office.

I hope to work in magazines and do cultural reporting. I like to write artful stories rather than hard news (which is very important, but I'll leave that to people who are good at stress management). Not that hard new can’t be artful, but I like to be able to spend time working all of the angles and really putting some polish on the language. I'm interested in stuff like the local independent record store that doesn't know if CDs will be a viable market in seven years, or the guy who makes his living delivering chicken potpies to hungry bar-hoppers downtown.