Lisa Hrabluk

The truth hurts, particularly first thing in the morning.

Why journalists deserve low pay, a longish piece in The Christian Science Monitor, gives it to us straight about the value of traditional journalism in a new media economy.

Oxford economist Robert Picard argues that journalists don’t deserve to get paid well because,

Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.

Ouch.

He makes the now-familiar argument that technology has ‘deskilled’ journalists because anyone with high speed Internet and average literarcy skills can source information and disseminate it to whoever they want in any number of ways.

From an economic standpoint, information, the traditional commodity that journalists and media organizations have sold, has been devalued because there is now so much of it and much is offered free of charge.

In other words, journalists have to get out of the commodities business and start selling special expertise and skills that can’t be underbid by freebie bloggers and social media dwellers.

Basically we’ve got to get out of the pulp business and start selling hand-crafted rocking chairs.

Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories.

That’s true. How many live blogs do we need out of the Oliphant inquiry?

This interchangeability is one reason why salaries for average journalists are relatively low and why columnists, cartoonists, and journalists with special expertise (such as finance reporters) get higher wages.

Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.

Picard offers an economic solution: each major newspaper should specialize in a few topics that have national interest and sell that expertise to other media organizations.

He suggests the Boston Globe could become the national leader in education and health (because of all the universities and research hospitals in Boston)

Dallas Morning News – oil and energy (actually, the Houston Chronicle is better suited for that role being home to Exxon and other oil companies)

Des Moines Register – agriculture

Chicago Tribune – airline and aircraft (and building on that theme political graft)

This is where Picard and I part company.

I agree that news organizations need to rid themselves of wire copy that can be read just about anywhere and become providers of quality and unique content.

However I don’t think we should leave expertise in any one topic to one organization. His economic model doesn’t calculate the influences of personal bias, whether it belongs to the journalist, the editor or the owner.

Trust me on this one. I live in New Brunswick. We live and breathe media concentration in this province and it ain’t always pretty.

But neither is the demise of journalism.