Where is journalism going? Ask media workers, not elites

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This week, New York Magazine published a sprawling collection of anecdotes, interviews, quotes, and portraits about the “57 most powerful people in [news] media.” 

Among the incisive observations about the media business: “I don’t feel like employees understand how precarious it is at all,” said Carolyn Ryan, managing editor of the New York Times. 

Which employees? The journalists who are staring down the barrel of a year with record layoffs? Reporters looking at jobs with salaries that don’t pay nearly the cost of living? The ones pushing for fair coverage of Palestinians by signing civil open letters and facing retribution? 

If anything, what’s useful to learn is what many reporters have already experienced — that some editors and leaders don’t care whether they’re entitled and entirely out of touch with their employees. (Though they care enough to request anonymity.) 

Some editors don’t respect their writers (“My biggest pet peeve is when it feels like I’m the teacher and they’re in sixth grade doing a homework assignment.”). Others reminisce on dues-paying days of old (“The whole attitude [of younger reporters] is less servile than it used to be.”). 

And, unsurprisingly, people in power have little faith about bellwether progress with DEI and labor rights: “Between the years, like, 2016 and 2021, the relationship between employers and employees shifted, and it’s shifted back, basically,” says one editor-in-chief. “That was a temporary phenomenon that really strikes me as over.”

If the cover story was meant to give reporters insight into their own industry, it didn’t say anything particularly novel. The publication could have interviewed worker-led cooperatives — both local, like The 51st and Hell Gate, and national, like Defector and Flaming Hydra. It could’ve spoken to the leaders of the Movement Media Alliance who are forging a new vision for journalism. And it could have looked at writers and educators who have challenged newsrooms to do better like Lewis Raven Wallace, Steven Thrasher, or Carla Murphy. 

Instead, New York Magazine betrays how little many mainstream editors and newsroom leaders from mainstream publications have to say that’s of value. Considering the state of the industry, didn’t we already know that?

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James Salanga and Gabe Schneider are the co-directors of The Objective.