Ezra Klein is a bright young journalist for The Washington Post who is, I suspect, destined for a long and distinguished career. I do not think he will have to approach the end of it to realize that one of the posts he wrote last week for his wonkblog that appears on the paper’s website will rank as one of dimmest things he will ever have written.
Klein stepped into the hubbub that Nate Thayer caused when he reported that an editor at theatlantic.com had asked him to create a 1200 word version of a piece he had written to be published on the site, for which he would be paid. . . nothing. His reward would be exposure. Thayer was naturally upset about it, as I have been when offered similarly impecunious deals. But these are the astonishing times we live in.
Klein decided use this incident to make an observation about journalism: “[B]ehind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free. Call it the revenge of our sources. For a very long time, we got them to work for nothing more than exposure — and sometimes, we didn’t even give them that. Now they’re getting more and more of us to do it.”
Klein differentiates between reporters, writers and journalists, with journalists atop the pyramid. “The difference between “writer” and “reporter” or “journalist” isn’t that the journalist reports — she develops sources, calls people, takes them out to lunch, and generally acts as an intermediary between her audience and the world of experts. The journalist also writes, of course, but anybody can write. Or, if not anybody, then certainly too many people for comfort. But few can get their calls returned by key congressmen, top academics, important CEOs or even, absent the legitimacy of a media organization people have heard of, a factory worker sitting at home on a Tuesday night. . . ”
This seems to me to a pathetically narrow view of journalism, a case of reductio ad absurdum, perhaps too much influenced by the daily enterprise Klein has spent his brief professional career within. Sources, broadly defined, are quite important at every level of journalism, and a journalist’s ability to cultivate them is a tremendous asset. But in most cases, it is not “Ezra Klein” who gets his call returned; it is The Washington Post‘s reporter who ges called back. It is the paper, or the magazine, and all that it stands for in terms of quality, reliability, seriousness and power, that gets the time and attention of the congressman and the CEO. On the face of it, Bob Woodward may have the best set of sources of any journalist in America, but if he took his act to even a serious smaller paper like The Chicago Tribune, his calls would start to go unanswered.
What the journalist brings, beyond sources, is his or her time-tested and experience-tested ability to reflect the values of the news organization–intelligence, intellectual integrity, an ability to put things in context and to understand wider implications, fearlessness, an ability to identify and tell a story and to spot an angle, a sensitive and accurate bullshit detector, and yes, an ability to write (Of all the things Klein is wrong about, his view that there is a superabundance of people who can write is the most ludicrous. Blogging and tweeting aren’t writing; Steve Brill publishing 20,000 words in Time is writing. Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, Norman Mailer in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes–that’s writing. Let’s not spend our time devaluing the art of our greatest practitioners.)
Certainly, there are many times when an editor values one of his journalists for the access he or she has to a particular source; getting a quote from the candidate or confirmation from the chief detective is what this business is often about. But what is more usually the case is that the editor values the journalist’s ability to understand the source’s agenda and preconceptions before presenting the source’s information. Some journalists are parrots, but not the best ones.
All of us who have written for any length of time have written for exposure; there is no offense in that. But what is upsetting is that in this time of turmoil in our profession, so many of the best publications, the ones we have long depended on to help define what is valuable in action and thought and policy, want good work, but aren’t willing to pay for it. It’s Gresham’s Law: the cheap writing is driving out the good.