Paula Hay's List: writing

• journalists often do see their work as important to society. But they’re not arguing that it is impossible to pay adequately for what they do. They’re simply saying that the work must be paid for to be done.
• Any occupation can face commoditization at some level. The problem publishing faces is that people expect the work to be done for nothing.
• The presumption — which he illustrates by writing, “Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians” – is that anyone can do the work, therefore it has no value to it. This commonly held assumption is incorrect.
• So long as people expect free material on the Internet and advertisers think that online should mean cheap, then it cannot happen. Expecting that journalists can drive their organizations in the face of timid and hidebound management is naïve. Ultimately, the public must value what it wants enough to pay. If it doesn’t, then perhaps the public will need a strong and sustained taste of doing without before any change is possible.

2 more annotations...

• Economic outcomes have traditionally held low priority for journalists. That's got to change.

   

  Journalists are not professionals with a unique base of knowledge such as professors or electricians. Consequently, the primary  economic value of journalism derives not from its own knowledge, but in distributing the knowledge of others.

• To create economic value, journalists and news organizations historically relied on the exclusivity of their access to information  and sources, and their ability to provide immediacy in conveying information. The value of those elements has been stripped  away by contemporary communication developments. Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge,  determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to  their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay. 

   

  Until journalists can redefine the value of their labor above this level, they deserve low pay.