When Will We See This in Chicago?

after these 23 "highly skilled newspaper veterans interested in taking on freelance assignments" starve, i don't think you will.

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The Web site should describe the "epic financial crunch" as one "pointlessly imposed by clueless outside forces openly hostile to journalism."

I wish these guys luck, but DeBartolo is probably right. Where is the market for those skill sets?

By the way, for about 1 percent of the $23.7 trillion being thrown at the banks, one could set up all the nation's unemployed journos in a variety of independently endowed newspapers no longer subservient to big corporate advertisers that, in turn, would hold great promise to utterly and forever transform American journalism into a truly vital institution that would spur a national regeneration, elevating the United States, at long last, to that shining city on a hill to be admired and emulated by all humanity.

Actually, I'm just making that up. But 1 percent of $23.7 trillion applied to actual working human beings--as opposed to bankers--would make almost anything possible.

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The skill sets that got journalists in the game will not keep them in the game. Great thinking, reporting, writing, editing are the simply the price of admission. Successful journalists today and tomorrow need to embrace media business: Audience development, marketing and even sales all need to be in the reporter's toolkit these days. Those who can adapt... who love media... will find, or, better, create opportunity. Those who can't will find their way to PR.

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Eric's list is sobering. Make that horrifying.

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I'm in PR and I love media. Don't be a snob.

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First time I've seen a composite Tribune list. There are still plenty of good people at the newspaper -- and plenty of reasons to keep buying it (as I do) -- but that's really startling.

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To the Tribune list add (I'm told) from the Metro copy desk:

Mitch Dydo
Ken Kozak
Mike Crescione
Chris Latham

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Two thoughts: First of all, I respectfully disagree with sjd312. Having worked in journalism, I believe that marketing and sales skills are completely anathema to basic journalistic skills. If you have one skill set, you compromise the other. People do the best journalism largely for reasons other than those that can be valued in any kind of marketplace environment or mindset.

Having said that, I would agree that this is a problem. In a hyper-marketized environment--a very peculiar, corrosive, soul- and society-deadening place--marketing and sales skills are top-of-the-list necessities. Journalism as we used to know it, unfortunately, withers here.

But journalism isn't alone in this. I finished a little book earlier this summer titled "Shop Class as Soulcraft" (a kind of unfortunate title for a very serious, perceptive work), in which the author nicely describes "cubicle work," the kind of employment that most people are mired in every type of profession. Essentially, even though the work done in cubicles may be valuable, there is no way to even remotely attach a meaningful dollar sign to it. Thus, such jobs leave the worker in constant uncertainty about his/her value to the employer. And the employer can easily eliminate such jobs overnight.

This summarizes much of journalism very nicely. Sure, a reporter can do great work consistently over a period of years. But is he/she really necessary? As we see locally, dozens of people can be chopped from the payroll in one go, but the papers look basically the same. Clip art, wire copy and various other gimmicks fill the space around the ads quite nicely. So how can you, in a competitive market, justify paying megabucks--or even plain old bucks--for reporters to expensively and inefficiently fill the same space?

Which brings me to my second point, having to do with the value of non-transparency. The genius of newspapers as a concept was their ability to maintain a deep bench of veteran and talented journalists who could take the time to do well-crafted work while actually hiding the enormous inefficiencies of maintaining such a staff from the scrutiny of the marketplace. As long as the market looked no further than the highly profitable final product of a collection of excellent and sometimes quirky professionals, everything was fine. Now it isn't.

You could say the same for the health care debate. One of the objections of the right-wingers to proposals for a public option is that somewhere along the line, there's likely to be some kind of rationing. Of course, there's rationing now--an especially pernicious form imposed by the health insurers based on pre-existing conditions, rescissions and, broadly speaking, ability to pay.

The great, unspoken advantage of such private rationing, however, is that it's mostly invisible. Society or government doesn't have to step forward in the full, antiseptic light of day and say, "OK, grandma's not going to get a liver transplant because she probably doesn't have much longer to live anyway."

Such decisions, of course, would be rational and prudent. They would also be inhuman and soul-deadening. The two things are not mutually exclusive. So even though I'm all in favor of public health care and I despise private insurers, I'm also concerned about what form rationing will inevitably take, and I can sympathize with this one important objection of the right-wingers. The loss of non-transparency is no trivial matter.

As for newspaper journalism, the non-transparency that kept the best journalists productively employed was, for the most part, a positive. If the outstanding people among those listed here are to have a future, we'll need to formulate a way to restore for them a durable insulation from the idiocy of the market. (Or we can demand that they transform themselves into market-driven idiots like Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. But what would be the point of that?)

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