Newspapers around the country are in serious trouble. Among the emerging online outlets, which are at least partly responsible for the decline of newspapers, the reaction has largely ranged from "it's their own fault" to "meh--it was inevitable."
As someone who celebrates the vastly declining cost of, and barriers to, information of all sorts that has come with the rise of the Internet, the "meh--it was inevitable" perspective makes a lot of intuitive sense. The network neutral Internet is the greatest cultural achievement since the printing press, and quite possibly the greatest cultural achievement of all time. It is a broad, democratizing force that has made self-publication available to over one billion people, broken down barriers to information access more than any other invention in history, and even created vast new social meeting spaces and opportunities for interconnectedness. And even if you don't like the Internet (which isn't bloody likely if you are reading this), it is still impossible to deny that it is the way of future it can't really be stopped (although telecom companies still threaten to stunt it quite a bit).
However, the declining cost of information also means that the tens of thousands of middle-class jobs the newspaper industry has shed are being replaced by tens of thousands of low-wage jobs in a new digital sweatshop. Information production is becoming a less viable way of making a living, and the lowered cost of information on the Internet is directly responsible for this severe wage reduction. Apart from a few highly compensated positions at in the short head, even the progressive political blogosphere has created mainly a bunch of low-wage jobs with few benefits, and vastly increased work requirements. For example, in the abstract, you might think that being the lead, co-lead, writer for websites which, over five years, have generated 40,000,000 visits and 60,000,000 page views, would have resulted in a pretty high standard of living. However, I can tell you from personal experience, that such an impression would be completely wrong. A year ago, the International Herald Tribune had a good article about the new low-wage economy to which the Internet has given rise.
And this is where I have a lot of empathy for the decline of the newspaper industry. Even though it was pretty much inevitable that the rise of the Internet would put a severe dent in the newspaper industry, and despite the vast cultural outpouring the Internet has brought with it, making a living as an information producer is now more difficult than ever. Whether you work for a newspaper that is struggling financially, or whether you work for an emerging media outlet online, in both cases you are probably scrambling to find a way to make ends meet. Long-term, it seems unlikely that information production will be an industry that produces a lot of stable, middle-class jobs. With the lowered cost of information comes a lowered value in the production of information, and increased information consumption cannot make up the difference.
The future waits for no one, and it would be futile to try and devise some way to turn back the clock. However, if you are a young person considering a career as a writer, the prospects of becoming a stable member of the middle-class aren't very good either online or in the dead-tree world. Perhaps this will change as the Internet economy matures, but it is equally possible we have entered a new period where writing for a living results primarily in downward, long-term socioeconomic mobility. In the future, writing might simply become a working-class profession.
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