Monday, May 4, 2009

Journalism vs. toilet paper

This is why:

Pay starts at $24,000 with the opportunity to earn $30,000 annually after one year of employment.

That paragraph was part of a job listing I was looking at today.

It's depressing, but a reality all recent journalism grads face: they all desperately hope the cost of living wherever they work is low.

I know it's been said before, but we're definitely not in this for the money. Of course there are a few exceptions: the Katie Courics and Anderson Coopers of the world. But that's a long shot. But let's take a look at the economic side of it and try to figure out why we'll never be millionaires.

It's because people don't want to pay for information. Although there is a degree of entertainment in most forms of journalism (some forms of journalism being purely a form of entertainment), we are, for the most part, in the information business.

And to the people who are consuming that information, it has become for them a portion of their everyday lives - just like food, water and toilet paper.

One of my professors made an interesting analogy the other day. Suppose you put 100 pounds of toilet paper next to 100 pounds of assorted newspapers. Which one do you think costs more? The toilet paper, of course.

The kicker: the toilet paper is pretty much just raw material. The newspapers took thousands of hours to produce, and is the result of the heavy toiling of dedicated journalists. But you've actually decreased the value of that paper (the raw material) by printing a newspaper on it.

That's a hard one to swallow. But it does give us a little comfort that journalists are necessary for the smooth functioning of the world. Sure we don't get paid much to do it. And sure, we take heavy criticism even for award-winning stories. But taking away journalism would be like taking away toilet paper: they take it for granted now, but people wouldn't know what to do without it.

No comments:

Post a Comment