(Something Like a) Happy Journalist's Day (*)

Journalism. Journalism is rightfully judged as corrupt, rightfully criticized as cynical, and rightfully ridiculed as ignorant. Yes, it's sick with anachronism, backroom deals, and cowardly submission. And full of shitty management, clueless bosses, and ass-kissing colleagues. Happy day only to everyone else. Media companies pay miserably. At Página|12 there are freelance fees of 13,000 pesos, salaries of 500,000. There are anti-union overpayments, deductions for strike days, shortfalls in paychecks. One disaster after another. The basic processes of journalism are broken. What you're supposed to do to put together a proper story, almost nobody does it. Editors prioritize dumbass posts that bring in clicks. Nobody pays salaries so people can investigate, analyze, or do any real reporting. The editorial writers at outlets spend more time writing obituaries than actual editorials. There's never money to try new formats. They demand the views but won't give you the money. A third of what makes it to air is a piece published as a favor to someone. According to the annual survey conducted by SiPreBA, answered by more than a thousand press workers from private and cooperative media, 43% don't clear the poverty line even combining the salaries from all their jobs, and only 1 in 20 can make ends meet on the salary from their main gig. Outlets don't have active archives of all their journalism, or haven't digitized them, or lost them during office moves. Newspaper stands are turning into grab-and-go coffee shops. Nobody smokes weed in the newsrooms anymore. One tragedy after another. On Twitter everyone hates journalists but everyone wants to be a journalist. Every anti-journalist has a newsletter about anti-journalism journalism, sometimes post-Yarvinist, sometimes pre-Farrierist, always kind of ass-kissing with a side of panic-attack energy in face-to-face interviews. You want to lay out a newspaper page: you notify the closing editor about the topic, ask the design chief who's doing layout, request the photo from the photo desk, the layout from the designer, the ad from the sales department. By the end of the day you've written 60 lines of story and 80 lines of WhatsApp messages. They bust your balls with 85 emails and 45 WhatsApps so you'll cover an artist, you write the piece, neither the PR team nor the artist shares a damn thing, three people bail on the photo shoot, the singer can't string two words together, everyone dresses terribly. You want to report on something, they won't give you the story. You want to cover something, the company won't pay your ticket, the press office won't authorize your coverage, or okay fine, come tomorrow, but pay for this insurance policy covering the entire goddamn continent EXCEPT you yourself and your legal heirs, of course. Rockstar managers, rockstar journalists, rockstar media owners, rockstar PR people, rockstar producers, but for fuck's sake, where are the actual rockstar rockstars? AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON STREAMING. Meanwhile the presidential spokesperson jerks around the accredited press, the president asks people to hate us more and more, the minister sends people to beat up photojournalists, a gendarme blows half of one's head off, and since nobody says anything they now test how it polls when a cop executes a kid. On camera, the spectacle of misery goes viral; in print, the spectacle of the irrelevant. Every single incentive to do journalism is broken. Each and every one. It's not worth the money, nor the prestige, nor the knowledge, not even the power. It's useless for anything. And that's exactly why it matters so much. Radio is the same jerks at 55 telling the same stories they used to tell those of us who are now 40, except now they're telling them to 25-year-olds. You've had gray hair for 30 years, dude, I couldn't care less what you have to say about hooking up on dating apps, raise the damn bar. Most still don't know how to use Excel or set up an email filter; I predict most will keep using AI like crap too. If you're a writer, then write: don't take photos, don't shoot videos, unless you're getting paid for it and you've been disciplined enough to actually learn how to do it well. There is no way whatsoever that a journalist's greatest tool should be their email inbox. Nor is there any way whatsoever that a journalist's only tool should be the ability to report on what's happening in the news cycle. If you come up with the genius idea of covering the same thing everyone else is covering but "we'll put our own spin on it," think again, that's not how it works, the corporate machine will eat you alive. It's better to write really well about something of lateral interest than to be really lateral writing about something of interest. Most of these problems could start being fixed if journalism were a well-paid job, in proportion to the importance of work that, done right, is indispensable. What we see 95% of the time is dispensable, no question, which is why I'm talking about improving that ratio.

(*) On Saturday I logged onto X to wish some colleagues a happy Journalist's Day. I wrote a first tweet in passing, but my fingers got itchy and this rant wrote itself. I'm posting it on 421 because — as I said in the thread — nobody archives anything anymore. The photo? 2007, one of the last I uploaded to Fotolog; wrecked and totally trashed, at 21, reading my first Sunday story in a newspaper fresh off the press.