Further confirmation of the virtues of youth

'It's very very good time to be young'
Anne Spackman, Editor in Chief of the Times Online.

Parts of Anne Spackman's talk earlier this week made me think back to previous comments about the difficulty of getting media jobs in the UK at the moment. Editorial budgets are shrinking everywhere and there is a growing reliance on cheap agency copy combined with sexy interfaces and Google friendly headlines. Independent newsgathering is no longer a priority. Instead, money is being spent in a technology arms race that none of the newspapers feel they can rise above, even if their websites are yet to turn a profit. Everywhere money is being pumped into new distribution methods, but all this investment is still supported by revenue from the printed copy.

Anne identified a feedback loop to this process though, where the website strengthens the brand and directs readers back to the printed paper. She also noted that statistics gathered from the website are being used to improve the targeting and profitability of advertising in the printed paper. The example she used was the growth of advertising in business supplements targeting hard to reach demographics, where advertising had previously all been centred around the main news stories. The printed newspaper is still vital.

So the newspapers need solid reporting and technology on a tight budget. Step forward the youth.

Now is a 'very very good time to be young' says Anne. Young journalists have an advantage in the jobs market that is 'frankly due to age'. She described the difficulty for seasoned reporters as like 'learning a new language'; the language of the internet that the young already speak. While she was adamant that the 'same core journalism skills that have served us so well have lost none of their value', she was keen to impress on us the advantages of being able to quickly adapt to the web.

Of course the other advantage we youth have is that we're cheap. 'Tech skills as well as editorial skills make you a very valuable person', she said. Valuable to the newspapers perhaps, but is the value being passed on to these bright young workers?

According to the National Union of Journalists, 'Journalists’ starting rates are at least £7,000 less than the median starting salary for graduates'. You can snigger at the careful use of 'median' (which suggests statistical fudging to me), but it's undeniable that young journalists are underpaid compared to other trades. Again, the NUJ say that '75% of journalists earn less than the average wage of a professional worker'. We can't expect to be well rewarded then for our tech and editorial skills, even when we build enough experience to produce reliable copy. And by then we'll be to old to understand the Web 4.0 and too expensive to retain.

Still, flattery will get you anything; including budget labour. So thank you Anne for you kind words on youth, and can I have a job? I can dos teh blogs and everything,

Fax Operators

The BBC recently celebrated ten years of it's News website.
As part of a series of features about online news, they asked some 'leading lights' for comments about the future of news. This was my favourite, from Toby Young.

"If I were a young person embarking on a career today, there's no way I'd go into journalism. You might as well train as a professional fax machine operator."

Which is a lovely thing to read as a trainee journalist. I particularly enjoyed the way the unnamed BBC writer undermined Toby's comments, introducing him as being uncertain and disorientated by technology. It's a cheap shot at a man volunteering himself as a target, but Young's provocative warning seems to have touched a nerve. I know he stamped on mine.
When I look at media news I see sweeping job cuts, dropping audience figures and the growth of a medium that nobody can reliably make a profit from. Even as an online news trainee, future prospects can seem a little bleak. News organisations aren’t investing in journalism, but in technology that enables the audience to share information between themselves.

In some respects, a lot of middle-men are being cut out as the news goes straight from witness to audience. But everyone knows that the rise of citizen journalism can't completely remove the need for real journalists. Audience participation can't kill the news media, but we're waiting to see how badly it can hurt it. In the end there are many things that can only be done by professionals, and these roles will continue. But we know there will be losses along the way. In the UK, the early dominance of the BBC online over the newspaper websites is creating a difficult market for competition and diversity. In many media organisations the wasteful division of newsgathering for different platforms is ending as fewer journalists are increasingly expected to adopt multiple roles.

Fine.

As a young person embarking on a career today I'm well aware of this, and honestly, this is what excites me about it. The competition for roles might be tougher, but I don't think it's radical to suggest that passionate young people with an inate grasp of the possibilities might have an edge to compete with seasoned reporters. Experience is discounted as the rules of the game change. The unions might be struggling, but the trainees are rolling in to fill the gaps.

This might not be the best far-future outlook for our bright-eyed young trainees, but given the speed of progress, worrying about the future seems a useless task. Right now, the media is alive with possibility. Traditional roles might change and mutate, but it's the young trainees who can take advantage, survive and prosper. Training as a journalist now involves core skills and forward thinking.

As for Toby Young, we only have to look at his own example. In the 90's he went right ahead and did his own thing with the Modern Review, outside the conventions of ordinary journalism. There has to be self-belief in anyone entering a new and changing field. I could be wrong about everything, but the beauty of youth is that your dreams are yet to be crushed.

So thanks for the warning Toby, but I honestly think we've got it covered.



(That said, in a previous job I was the first person to coax the busy office fax machine out of it's incessant, attention seeking beeping. So maybe that's a good career path too.)