Mark I. Pinsky, a former religion reporter for Tribune Co.’s Orlando Sentinel, makes a modest proposal in TNR.com for a government-funded program to hire out-of-work journalists.
The historical precedent is the Federal Writers Project, which hired 6,000 writers from 1935 to 1939 – among whom were some rising American literary superstars, including John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Now, with 15,000+ jobs lost in U.S. newspaper companies in 2008 alone, along with thousands of others at magazines, web sites, book publishers and ad agencies, Pinsky says the U.S. needs a new program to put at least some unemployed writers to work.
Like Detroit’s troubled Big Three automakers, federal intervention to save the newspaper and magazine industries are highly problematic, at best. Ink-on-paper periodicals are never coming back, and it may be some time before the web can provide well-paying jobs with health benefits – if it ever will. Until then, providing some way to provide young journalists a way to get started, or displaced media workers a way to transition to new occupations, or to retirement, might help – and serve the nation in the process.
Is this desperation or inspiration? I’m a writer and know many others. But my kids go to schools facing drastic budget cuts, including teacher layoffs, elimination of arts programs and more. Would I rather see 6,000 writers hired, or 6,000 teachers? Honestly: Teachers.
There’s an unspoken implication to Pinsky’s bailout pipedream: that the business case for journalism has vanished, so non-commercial subsidies – government, charity, whatever – will need to fill the void. But there’s a big difference between today’s market and 1935. For starters, a number of U.S. philanthropies built from 20th Century business empires – Knight, McCormick and MacArthur, for instance – subsidize journalism, writers and the arts on a scale that was unheard of during the Great Depression. And new non-commercial sources of journalism are on the rise: like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Witness, both of them finalists for 2009 We Media Game Changers Awards. And there’s much more to come. Every company is a media company in the connected culture.
I hear in Pinsky’s words a prayer for those who can’t see the worldwide proliferation of story-telling and social entrepreneurship as anything other than the end of good times.
Pinsky’s bailout pitch implies but misses some good questions. What’s the right number of paid, trained professional journalists necessary for a vibrant, functioning democracy? Or unpaid, part-time muckrakers, video bloggers and opinion makers who work along side them? Or writers, researchers and policy activists who are often at the base of the journalistic food web – and who no longer need to channel their work through institutional journalists to get attention? Or poets, painters, photographers, designers, sculptors, actors and dancers, for that matter?
The deeper truth of Pinsky’s proposal is its pathos – disorientation and dissociation from a profession and an industry that once made such simple sense. Newspapers employed, journalists worked. Never mind the nasty business that made all that possible – or the fortunes amassed along the way. Pinsky and many others were once part of a simple, comfortable story that could be passed from one generation to the next. That story is over.
