Richard Gingras, Head of News Products, Google, came to talk to my John S Knight Journalism Fellowship class yesterday. He’s a thoughtful man, whose hangdog, droopy-eyed expression belies a sharp mind and understated sense of humor.
I was struck by many things that Gingras said, which included his belief that current attempts to personalize news searches are pointless as they don’t accurately reflect people’s interests and personalities. The gist of what Gingras said was, “If I happen to have read six stories about Tahrir Square on one day, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m interested in Egyptian politics.”
Most palpable to a culture journalist, however, was his riff on business models for journalism, where he likened the work of a journalist today to that of a musician.
Gingras said that as in music, there will be a few people in journalism at the top of the profession who make a lot of money, a slightly bigger layer below that where journalists making a decent living, a layer below that where an even larger number of people are making some income, and a vast pool at the very bottom where, for no particular reason, journalism is created purely out of passion with little or no financial reward.
I think culture journalists, because they are close to the arts world both economically and socially, have been attuned to this reality for a while now so the comparison makes perfect sense. But perhaps this analogy comes as a revelation to journalists working in other fields and beats.
many of the arts journalists I know — especially those through the Jazz Journalists Association — work precisely as musicians do: freelancing, job-to-job, no pensions, only as good as their last article, and now with fewer places to publish (play) that pay anything. A lot of us self-publish (blogging, it’s called) just as today’s jazz musicians for instance produce their own records. The difference is that musicians can get paid for performances, but journalists are expected to give away content without charge on the web, and few have the connections or performance chops to perform (lecture) in person enough to sustain their careers. The work of culture journalists has a transient quality, also like music that is gone once it hits the air (as the Rolling Stones sang, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?”). It’s a hard row to hoe, but to me jazz and blues musicians especially have been an inspiration, becaue I thought “If they can survive this way, so can I writing about them.” And it’s proved to be mostly true.
Really well put, Howie (as we know you in Chicago). The passion that
musicians and artists invest in their art is the emotion that drives my blog too.
I make it out of the “pool” every so often now to freelance for the Tribune.
While Howie Mandel is perceptive about the transient nature of much of what we culture journalists write, my page views stats also show that a decent proportion of original content is evergreen. This is particularly true about historic musings about Sweeney Todd, or Samuel Beckett, or certain actors and writers with long careers.
Richard Gingras also has zoomed in on a strage phenomenon, People’s stated tastes do not always play out in real life. When I worked with the Theatre Development Fund we discovered that what people check off as their areas of interest bore little resemblance to what they ultimately purchased tickers for.
The reasons are complex, just as the people who fill our seats and galleries are not easily quantifiable.