Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this - one wonders why anyone would rationally become a journalist. The pay is crap, the verbal attacks are constant ("fake news", etc), the competition is immense (publish NOW because it's already on Twitter, yet it needs to be 100% factually accurate, so don't forget to triple-check your sources), and oh by the way, if you report on anything of societal value (rooting out corruption, printing stories about drug cartels), you may get yourself killed.

Or I could sit quietly, write some code to enable more ad views on tech platform du jour, get paid bank, and complain about journalism on Hacker News with my free time between deploys. Guess which one I would choose?

View on HN

> and oh by the way, if you report on anything of societal value (rooting out corruption, printing stories about drug cartels), you may get yourself killed.

Don't forget sued, which prevents many independent journalists from being as aggressive as they should be with the plutocratic class and large corporations in countries where murdering journalists is still verboten. If you don't have the legal resources (and insurance) of a major news organization behind you, good luck writing the type of stories that cause discomfort to the powerful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

https://www.propublica.org/article/terror-in-little-saigon-v...

If you confront the powerful, it often ends up being too little, too late, in terms of government protections.

Having worked closely with and been friends with journalists:

It's because they believe in the work, find it interesting compared to other lines of work, or were inspired by other writers. They don't get into it for the money. They leave the profession or advance in position for the money.

but maybe in ten years, you'll regret your choice

or maybe you won't because you won't even know what you are missing out

not judging you, I program and sit in an office, but I can understand the magic of being in the middle of the pulse of the world. It is a world that I only look at as a bystander.

perhaps being a journalist is paid little because it is you are more alive, instead of programming the next punch-the-monkey, you are tracking the money that rich people hide, investigate the dark side, with that you basically "live longer"

Even in a hundred years he wouldn’t regret the choice. Nothing you described sounds appealing. Journalists see most technology like a black box that does mysterious things and produces an output, just like a bystander. If you don’t want to be a bystander to those processes, you become a programmer.

Why are you so sure you can't be both ?

Because there are only 24 hours in a day and roughly a third of those are already spent sleeping and eating.

Edit: I see down vote bots are in full effect.

you are conflating the job of journalist with a journalist's relationship with technology - even at that, you are both generalizing and oversimplifying.

What I specifically referred to is that programming a computer as a day job (for example as the poster said their job is optimizing ads for a website) is probably far less fulfilling than following and analyzing world events and doing journalism. That's all.

Why do you think world events are inherently more fulfilling?

A long time ago I realized there’s nothing interesting about world events. Most will have little to no effect on me and most of it is just like one big reality show. I now actively avoid learning about world events and am much happier. I’d rather learn about events local to me or stories about people I may be able to relate to, and none of those really require journalists.

The things you can do with software and computers are far more interesting than reading about how corrupt some rich guy is. I don’t give a shit about him or his corruption.

I don't follow why you equate journalism with covering corruption - that's just a small fraction of all news.

Overall I am not sure what point are you trying to make. That today you feel happier as a programmer? Sure, good for you.

I am only calling out the naive and frankly childishly simplistic arguments made in this thread that state things along the line: "It must suck to be a journalist, thank god I program ads for a website"

I have come believe that jobs that are hard to do but don't pay well are such because are more fulfilling and people are willing to trade monetary remuneration for a more interesting line of work. Many people (and it seems that you feel that way too) take this as a critique of their choices: "No way that a job that pays less than what I do is more interesting! Especially not a journalist/teacher/policeman etc."

One may wonder the same about many professions like primary/secondary teaching.

The answer is that lots of humans like that sort of work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com