Dana Goldstein

Journalism's Elitism Problem

Journalism is a really fun job. Everyday, I get to research topics that interest me, call smart people and ask them to tell me about their ideas and beliefs, and then write-up what I learn. Sure, it's stressful: there's constant deadline pressure, sort of like being a student during finals week...forever. And if you can't write cleanly and quickly, forget it. But this job is so awesome that sometimes, I'm pretty astounded that I get paid for it at all.

So it's not hugely shocking that journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier (in terms of family wealth; salaries remain modest), and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and even the middle class. While journalism was once a career that didn't require a college degree, today it is highly elitist and dominated by graduates of selective colleges. In some fields, like political "think" journalism, the Ivy League schools are grossly overrepresented. (Yep, that includes me. I went to Brown.)

A report by the British Cabinet Office, "Unleashing Aspirations," now documents the trend. In the U.K., 98 percent of journalists are college graduates, and under 10 percent come from working class families. In fact, journalism has become the third most socially exclusive profession in Great Britain, just behind medicine and law. Another fascinating tidbit:

Between the 1958 and the 1970 birth cohorts, the biggest decline in social mobility occurred in the professions of journalism and accountancy. For example, journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5% above that of the average family; but this rose to 42.4% for the generation of journalists and broadcasters born in 1970.

At the blog Working-Class Studies, Alyssa Lenhoff and Tim Francisco focus on the problem of unpaid (and barely-paid) internships. These are, indeed, a culprit, but the issue is far more complicated. The average student debt burden in the United States is $23,186. Believe it or not, that's also a typical entry-level salary at a "thought-leader" magazine. It is economically irrational for a highly-educated person with that level of debt to choose journalism over law, consulting, advertising, or public relations. That's not to say journalists don't have student debt -- many do. But it's a difficult, sometimes discouraging slog, and you have to truly love this work.

What's the solution? Federal student loan reform, currently in front of Congress, would help. So would an agenda of actually pressuring colleges to decrease their tuition, which Michael Dannenberg outlined in our pages last month.

At Slate, Jack Shafer is critical of non-profit journalism, because donations from foundations often come with "strings." This is a fair critique, though the influence of social justice-oriented donors is hardly more nefarious than that of corporate advertisers or local elites, the kind of people who have been influencing the news for centuries. But one thing media-interested philanthropists can definitely add to the profession is funding for paid internships, and recruiting efforts that target low-income people of color. It should be a major priority.

cross-posted at TAPPED

Explaining Health Reform, On TV

Here's my half-hour segment on "Washington Journal," with host Robb Harleston. It was a lot of fun taking calls from viewers. It's interesting that although professional journalists usually ask about the political process of reform, regular people are really just concerned about coverage -- how they'll get it and and how much it will cost. They really are engaged on the policy level, if not particularly informed.

I was also on MSNBC yesterday, talking with David Schuster about the political side of health reform. I'll post that when I get the video.

Update: And here it is.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Two New Pieces -- About Sex!

Today, I review two new biographies, of sex researchers Masters and Johnson and of longtime Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown. What links them? Lessons on the complications of mixing sex and work:

"I've never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office."

So said Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine for over 30 years, in a 1982 interview. When the reporter asked Gurley Brown if she had any ethical or feminist compunction about sleeping with a boss, she replied, "Why discriminate against him?"

And yesterday, I reported on porn industry lobbying efforts during the economic crisis:

In a time of economic crisis, lawmakers are more likely to give the porn industry grief than gratitude. Legislators in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Washington state recently proposed stemming budget losses through various skin tariffs, ranging from a Magnum-sized 25 percent sales tax on X-rated movies to a $5 "pole tax" on visits to strip clubs.

At the Women, Action, Media Conference in Cambridge

I am tweeting the WAM conference for feminist journalists and media activists, in Cambridge. If you're at WAM, you can hear me speak at 4:00 p.m. today in room 32-141 of the Strata Center at MIT. I'll be discussing how I pitched, reported, and placed a series of articles on reproductive health topics, in a variety of different publications. Alongside a great group of national reproductive health leaders...

Why We Should Pay the First Lady -- and How

Check out my column from the Prospect's April print issue.

It is true that the Obamas don't need the money. But that's no reason to deny the president's partner compensation for her work. The salary for the first lady should be garnished from her husband's wages. Since we expect our presidents to be just one half of a 24/7 public-relations team, why not pay the president less--say $300,000--and make out the remainder of the check to his wife?

So, You Want to be a Magazine Journalist.

I've been meaning for awhile to write a long post culling the advice I regularly give students and recent college grads when they ask me how to jump start a career in magazine journalism. While there are some great websites out there for early career newspaper journalists -- my favorite is Joe Grimm's JobsPage -- there's a general hush-hush quality around magazine journalism career paths that, IMHO, does a grave disservice to the profession, maintaining its essentially homogeneous, insular quality. A lot of that, of course, also has to do with the crappy pay (or no pay) in this field. But that's a topic I've covered before.

Today we'll talk nuts and bolts career planning for the folks who are absolutely certain they don't want to go to law school. For those who have accepted that this is a highly competitive and contracting field rife with nepotism, yet who fall asleep at night dreaming of seeing their byline in the New Yorker. Who actually subscribe to the magazines they love and want to write for. This post goes out to you, my dear, fellow crazies.

News and Views

I've got two new pieces for you to check out. Top at The American Prospect today is my column on why Hillary Clinton might consider running for governor of New York -- not just because it would be politically expedient, but also because she might actually be good at the job.

And last week over at RH Reality Check, I offered seven possible policy solutions to battle the epidemic of sexual assault in our military. RH has been nominated for a Webby award in the category of best new political blog. At Slate, Jack Shafer has a bug up his butt about the Webbies, but hey, for small sites like RH, it's a real boon to be recognized for filling a new space in commentary and reporting. And it brings new readers! Seriously, nobody else is writing as comprehensively on issues of reproductive health and justice. It's a project I'm really proud to be part of.

In other news, I'm happy to report that I'm now officially a staff writer at TAP, after serving as a writing fellow since last July. Exciting! This also means that we are hiring writing fellows, so please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the program, which is -- hands down -- the best entry level job in magazine journalism.

Be Not Afraid of the Future!

Many journalists I know have been chatting this week about Eric Alterman's New Yorker piece on "the death and life of the American newspaper." Alterman focuses on Huffington Post as the epitome of the "new," newspaper-killing media, portraying the site as the bad cop to Talking Points Memo's good cop. TPM, of course, is a site that does real reporting and digging, while HuffPo's news gathering apparatus is secondary to its function as a gathering place for liberal punditry. The risk of all this online news, Alterman writes, is that eventually, with advertising dollars moving to the web, no one will be able to afford expensive, real-time reporting projects such as the New York Times' Baghdad bureau, which costs $3 million annually. Alterman, somewhat credulously, quotes Arianna Huffington's more positive forecast of the future of news:

"As advertising dollars continue to move online—as they slowly but certainly are—HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism—wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom—with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times."

Like Alterman, I believe the Times deserves more credit than that, but I'd caution against devolving into full on hand-wringing over the future of news. For one thing, online-only, analysis-driven news sources have been around for way longer than Alterman admits, since the advent of Salon and Slate in 1995 and 1996. Slate especially has a model that relies upon a parasitic relationship with the traditional press (see "Today's Papers"). Secondly, non-profit journalism is a business model that can yield excellent, independent reporting, from the St. Petersburg Times, to new projects such as Pro-Publica and the Washington Independent, to our very own American Prospect. And third, for-profit online journalism is actually becoming more and more reported. The Politico, for example, no matter what you think of their coverage, employs dozens of reporters who are traveling around the United States breaking news on the presidential election.

In other words, there are lots of hopeful models out there for online news gathering. Let's not be afraid of the future.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

I Admit It!

It feels like a coming-out-of-the-closet moment to admit I have more than a passing knowledge of some of the games described in this Slate article about Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Yeah, I know, I seemed like a healthy, well-adjusted young lady before this. But seriously, I'm not lying when I tell you that my friends and I who participated in role-playing weren't total dorks. For one thing, we weren't celibate. (Mom and Dad, please disregard that last sentence!)  We were the theater kids -- faux suburban hip hop culture just wasn't doing it for us. Most of us are pretty normal these days.

In any case, during my adolescence, it never really occurred to me to think about the ethics of D&D, mostly because I was a dabbler and not a hardcore fanatic. In Slate, Eric Sofge -- who, as an editor at Popular Mechanics, I assume is a far more typical former role-player than I -- argues that the massive killing of entire races encouraged by Gygax's gaming system is akin to genocide. Think of the hated, dark-skinned orcs from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series; those greedy (Semitic?) dwarves; or the high-cheek boned, delicate, Northern elves. This is partly what I was drawing from when I wrote an essay back in the day on how the Harry Potter books conform to some of the more conservative identity politics of the fantasy genre. Looking back, that piece seems over-argued (after all, I enjoyed the Potter books!), but there's definitely a there there.

By the way, if anybody wants to use this moment to also publicly confess they once role-played, I'll be your friend forever.

Annoucements

Beginning today, I have a twice monthly column at RHRealityCheck on the intersection of reproductive health issues and national politics -- look for it every other Tuesday. My first piece is about how Republican primary exit polls ask voters how they feel about abortion, but Democratic exit polls don't:

...some reproductive health advocates might argue that leaving abortion out of Democratic exit polls is helpful to the cause, since it clamps down on potentially divisive media coverage of abortion around election time. But in actuality, by including questions about abortion on Republican exit polls, but not Democratic ones, pollsters have guaranteed that the media pays extra attention to how conservative, anti-choice voters feel about the issue, while largely overlooking the majority of Americans' support for broad access to abortion and contraception.

And over at the Prospect, my latest piece is an examination of Obama's challenges in appealing to working class white and Latino voters.