The stranger thing about phone sex, though, was that the training program was more rigorous and extensive than any I’d encountered in journalism.
Just one of the insights from Maureen Tkacik – a journalist and writer, who started out in local news in Philadelphia before moving to Hong Kong, the LA bureau of the Wall Street Journal and, more recently, Gawker Media.
It’s a long, but worthwhile read, which compares and contrasts different styles and subjects of journalism (finance, gossip, youth) and considers the journalist’s own role in those stories and the demand for such reporting.
In the past, newspapers had made respectable margins selling a non-inane product largely because people had little choice but to herald their sublets and white sales alongside the journalists’ tales of human suffering/corporate corruption/government ineptitude. The times were prosperous enough that much of the print media even chose to abstain from taking a share of the demand-creation campaigns of liquor and tobacco brands in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, journalism, it went without saying, was about delivering important information about the world – information people (and democracy!) needed, whether they knew it or not. That journalism’s ability to deliver that information – to fill that need – ultimately depended, to an unsettling degree, on the ability to create artificial demand for a lot of stuff that people didn’t actually need – luxury condos, ergonomically correct airplane seats, the latest celebrity-endorsed scent – was an afterthought at best, at least in the newsroom.