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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

What is the source for the claim that so many American journalists under 40 live in the area encircled in the map in the tweet? The source for wages in journalism having gone to hell? The source for unions restricting the supply of labor? If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages?

I also think the author's characterization job status is wrong. Journalists mostly hang out with journalists so whether journalist is a high-status job or not is irrelevant since they are all journalists. Working for Google has high status in some circles but probably not among Google's own employees. Furthermore, only a tiny fraction of all journalists write for the Washington Post or other recognizable papers. Not a lot of status in writing for marketing agencies or obscure trade press magazines.

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> If so, why hasn't all the journalist unions he see forming already restricted the number of journalists and increased their wages?

They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy.

Unions work best when (among other factors) everyone has a feeling that they are not better than the others and can substitute for each others. Writing fails this in general because writers want to have their own voice. You want everyone to know it was you writing, and a guest writer will have a different voice and different ideas. Note that in corporate writing the above doesn't apply and so unions are more likely to have a place (but corporate writing is mostly by marketing and probably better paid and so the union doesn't really have as much to do and so there is less reason to pay those dues)

>They tried. Unions have a hard time stopping the supply of free labor. We have a first amendment which limits their legal means to passing laws that other unions have. We also don't have the safety dangers of plumbing or electric that give laws restricting supply some legitimacy.

I think the bigger hurdle is that the people they'd need to convince, politicians, are by nature of their profession, very well versed in public messaging and "journalist adjacent" skills and deal with journalists on the regular and therefore very likely to say "lolno" to any request for a moat of regulatory capture.

Plumbers and electricians would never have been able to get the regulatory capture they have if the people they needed sign off from had been equally well versed in their skills and exposed to dealing with them.

Did you know the sector with the sharpest rise in union membership last year was media?

"Among the industries with a growing share of union membership is journalism, where 33 workplaces voted last year to organize with labor unions, according to Poynter, the media industry news outlet. In 2021, employees at Politico, Forbes, The Atlantic and Insider all joined NewsGuild, while journalists at MSNBC voted to organize with the Writers Guild of America East."

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-member...

When your skills are replaceable you have very little leverage. Journalist are certainly a field where these days you can be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern. Only if you have build a name and grinded it out you have some leverage. Thus union is little help if you could just fire your entire staff and pay a few editors to hire new people.

I understand the sentiment of your post.

Zero trolling: For a very high quality pool of journalists and writers at The New Yorker, do you think that also applies?

I hold the opinion that certain media outlets have out-sized caché (attraction) in their country's culture and are able to "punch about their weight" and draw incredible talent for the wages. It is almost like an inverted veblen good! Examples that come to mind: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Nikkei Shimbun, Der Speigel, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Re-reading that list before clicking 'reply', I wonder if all of them have strong employee unions. It seems possible.

EDIT: What about public radio and television in highly advanced democracies? It is a pretty similar situation. High quality staff, peanuts for wages, but they don't have commercial pressures. US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all have outstanding, neutral public broadcasters. (Queue the 1000x naysayers that will say "Oh, it's never been worse -- see recent scandal XYZ".) Is the answer: Gov't funded (taxes) public broadcasters that cover news that struggles to make money in the private sector? Maybe.

ITYM "cachet" not "caché".

> Journalist are certainly a field where these days you can be easily replaced even by possibly unpaid intern

Only if you're a median journalist. If you're a top 1% caliber journalist you're not replaceable. It's much like software engineering, social media influencers, and Hollywood in that regard. 10x skill gap between median and top and heavily bimodal comp model as a result.

A few items that popped up from quick searching:

* On journalist wages - https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-pay-falls-u-s-average-wa... - wages are not growing and the employment pool is shrinking. A comparison with BLS data shows a similarly slow wage growth pattern.

* Unions, in some circumstances, can restrict labor supply. This is called exclusive unionism and historically it's been used for everything from keeping racial minorities out to keeping the secrets of bagel-making under wraps. Here's the latter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338

The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available.

For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are working for them in the last few years). They also are employing more people as journalists than they have historically.

It appears that we're going through two trends in news.

One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e. newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find themselves outside.

The other trend is decentralization at the news production level (individual journalists), which benefits the small number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on companies for news aggregation.

There are a lot of people in this second category who would not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as journalists.

Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree with reality for a while.

I can believe journalist wages are not growing though your source in eight years old.

The thing about bagel recipes seem to be about trade secrets not labor supply restrictions. How to make bagels is not a secret. I checked the sources the Wikipedia article cites and none of them mentions anything about secret recipes.

At the time, how to make bagels was not widely available information. The union tightly controlled their trade secrets and shut down any shop that didn't work with them. Membership was limited to family members of early members. Sounds like controlling the labor supply to me, though I understand that this is an opinion and others may disagree. All of this is material you can find fairly readily documented.

Should that prove insufficient, I refer you to a 1913 essay by Booker T Washington: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-neg...

Choice quotes include:

> One does not have to go far to discover the reason for this. In several instances Negroes are expressly excluded from membership in the unions. In other cases individual Negroes have been refused admittance to unions where no such restrictions existed, and have been in consequence shut out from employment at their trades.

The essay details several specific instances.

My point is not that unions are inherently exclusionary. My point is that they can be and occasionally have been put to that use, effectively limiting labor supply. Much like pre-unionism guilds often were.

I don't know the history of bagel baking. Though it seems odd to me that bagel bakers would be allowed to keep bagel recipes away from bakeries they work at. My suspicion is that the group we're discussing did not act as a labor union at all, but rather as a trade association trying to control the bagel market on behalf of bakery owners.

As a general rule, if someone is complaining about "the left", they aren't a person who actually cares about accurate statistics. In the dopamine economy, it's all about coming up with seemingly witty hot takes that reaffirm the world view of a group of people who take pride in their lack of critical thinking.

The right as well.

My observation is that generally only people who complain about neither or both tend to care about statistics.

You are correct that rage addicts exist all across the political spectrum, though I don't think "the right" is nearly as much of a trigger phrase as "the left". There are plenty of other phrases used by left leaning rage mongers, but "the left" has for years been curated to trigger strong negative emotions towards half of the US population. People who use that phrase know exactly what they're doing, or are at least parroting someone who does. People who intentionally use negative trigger phrases to gain traction are not typically people whose opinions are worth spending much energy on.

>I don't think "the right" is nearly as much of a trigger phrase as "the left".

I dunno, "the left" has their own terms to incite rage: far-right, white supremest (rarely any evidence), racist (same), right-winger, evangelicals, Nazi, deplorable, redneck, etc.

"The right" uses terms: liberal, socialist, communist, SJW, etc.

If you are strictly speaking in terms of which is more insightful and limit it to "the left" or "the right," I guess it depends on which circle you are closer to. I can see the argument for "the left" as being more insightful, but that might just be because of the circle I'm currently closer to.

I try to use terms such as those as a red flag. Anyone who tries to make a generalization for a spectrum as broad as "the left," or "the right," is trying to sell me something. I try to stick to policy, everything else is usually just theatre to distract from policy.

Somewhat related, Hillary Clinton was talking with BLM members about how to change things in 2015. She caught a lot of flack about it, but she was absolutely right when she said, "I don't believe you change hearts. You change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate." That's why I tend to stick to policy. Full disclosure, I don't particularly care for the Clintons.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/19/9174077/hillary-clinton-black-...

Are you saying that nobody on the left (okay, sorry, the "not-right") ever uses negative trigger words in reference to their political rivals?

Are you aware that from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the word "liberal" was worthy of enough derision that people would openly cringe at the term? Republicans were fantastically successful at two things politically: tying the support of social programs to the Red Scare and gathering support of trickle down economics by opposing desegregation efforts.

The irony is that going corporate and writing marketing copy will earn you way more money than journalism ever will.

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