Abstract
In many ways, the story Scott Reinardy tells is a familiar one. The bloodletting in newsrooms over the last decade—the layoffs, the outsourcing of copy desk duties, the burnout, the incompetence and indifference of profit-hungry publishers—is well documented and seemingly unstoppable. It is a story that we all know, and yet there is value in this slim volume, which succinctly quantifies the extent of the damage and takes stock of the human and societal costs.
Reinardy, a professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas, set out to use data and interviews to examine the toll taken on news workers, whose ranks declined by roughly one third in the mid-2000s. The maxim that “print is dead” has become so accepted that it is easy to forget just how suddenly and recently the industry collapsed.
Reinardy observes that in 2007, newspaper journalists still numbered a healthy 55,000. A disastrous decline in advertising and circulation revenue fueled by a consumer exodus to the Internet and a recession slashed that number to 37,000 by 2014—5,000 fewer than in 1978. “Almost overnight, newsrooms became ghost towns,” Reinardy writes. “The empty desks strewn throughout the newsroom were reminders of what once was in American journalism.”
The remaining newspaper jobs have, unsurprisingly, become miserable. Reinardy chronicles how the imperative to do more with less—to “feed the [digital] beast”—on rock-bottom salaries drives both veteran and novice reporters out of small and mid-sized papers. The role of local journalist, which had once been a career for individual workers and, therefore, a source of institutional knowledge for the larger community, is turning into a starter job. Reinardy predicts that college graduates will increasingly spend only a couple years at a newspaper before jumping ship for more humane labor conditions.
This set of circumstances has been particularly bad for women, who, as Reinardy observes, comprise 64% of college journalism and mass communications graduates yet only 37% of newspaper newsrooms. But the author falters in his analysis of gender, dwelling too heavily on how socialization leads women to prioritize family and men to focus on breadwinning. While there is truth to that sociological argument, it is woefully incomplete.
Reinardy does not discuss paternal leave policies or daycare costs (although one of his interview subjects raises the latter issue). He also overlooks a strong literature indicating that women will exchange pay and/or career advancement for jobs flexible enough to allow for their caregiving roles. (See, for example, the respected body of research by Harvard economist Claudia Goldin.) Newsrooms, with their rigid working shifts, retrogressively hierarchical structures, and culture of self-sacrifice in pursuit of truth and the public good have traditionally been hostile to the notion of work–life balance. The question is whether the climate has worsened or improved as worker duties migrate online.
Likewise, one wonders what the current situation has meant for newspaper journalists of color, who make up only 16.65% of newspaper newsrooms, according to the American Society of News Editors. Reinardy is silent on the subject.
The book’s freshest insights come in the last chapters, when the author segues from chronicling what happened in the mid-2000s to discussing the current erosion of social responsibility in newsrooms. He studied newsrooms where web analytics—aka story clicks—“affected pay raise, promotions, and story assignments.” One journalist Reinardy interviewed talked about churning out “eye candy” at the expense of more civic-minded stories.
It is a deeply dispiriting state of affairs for American journalism, especially when you consider that all this pressure for journalists to capture the Internet consumer’s attention has yet to yield enough actual money to pull community newspapers out of their death spiral.
It also raises questions for journalism educators. Are the classic journalistic principles of verification and depth merely the quaint notions of academics that can never be replicated in the real world? Should we jettison the primacy of fairness and truth in favor of training future journalists to churn out one-source stories with the potential to go viral?
I do not think so, and although Reinardy does not tackle the economics of newsrooms, his book offers evidence that the current push to find journalistic salvation in social media is not sustainable. He references a 2013 State of the Media report that revealed that 31% of news consumers abandoned an outlet because “it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.” Those leaving outlets were overwhelmingly educated, wealthy, and older—the very audience news companies must capture if they hope to get consumers to pay for some of the cost of producing good journalism.
Reinardy’s book is an elegy for the watchdog newsrooms of the past and a chronicle of their demise. But it is, more importantly, a snapshot of an industry in flux. The restructuring of journalism, Reinardy shows, is far from finished. And it is not just the decrease in working journalists but their accumulated unhappiness—the small gripes driving human capital away from these reporting jobs—that may fundamentally change journalism’s core understanding of its mission and, in doing so, alter our democracy.