The problem with journalism these days is two-fold. First, those who want to work in the tradition of old-time muckrakers aren't going to find any jobs. The only places doing this type of reporting are the small independent opinion journals like "The Nation". They hardly pay a living wage and their staffs are tiny. This discourages this type of person from entering the field in the first place.

Monbiot.com » Choose Life

The first advice I would offer is this: be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you. In journalism school, for example, students are routinely instructed that, though they may wish to write about development issues in Latin America, in order to achieve the necessary qualifications and experience they must first spend at least three years working for a local newspaper, before seeking work for a national newspaper, before attempting to find a niche which brings them somewhere near the field they want to enter. You are told to travel, in other words, in precisely the opposite direction to the one you want to take. You want to go to Latin America? Then first you must go to Nuneaton. You want to write about the Zapatistas? Then first you must learn how to turn corporate press releases into "news". You want to be free? Then first you must learn to be captive.

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So my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable. The more loyal to an institution you are, the more exploitable, and ultimately expendable, you become.

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So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the "necrophiliac" world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she's twenty-six and she still doesn't own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones - their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world - upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.

This being said, there are avenues, mostly in print, for the potential for decent journalism in North America. New York Times, Globe and Mail, LA Times, Des Moines Register. Boston Globe used to be good, Wash Post back in the '70's et c. And, to "catch on" at one of these places, you will most definitely need to follow a route of unpaid internships passing into low-paid flunkey work (working unpaid overtime, perhaps, in order to actually do more than just researching for someone else's article or asnwering phones or doing photocopies) before actually moving into something you can make a living at.

I'm willing to bet the socio-economic stratum of origin of your average journalist at the NY Times is significantly higher than the mean, and higher than it was, say, fifty years ago, and this does inform the content.

Nil aon leigheas ar an ngra ach posadh

There was a period in US history where many major newspapers were owned by independent families with a sense of duty or moral outrage.

And - aside from the family angle - that's where the blogs are today.

But the problem with the blogs is they (we) are inward looking and don't do PR or outreach.

A few LTEs are not the equivalent of a major media presence. And where the trad media are background noise - even in the UK, there are rather too many public places which have TVs in place where you can see the latest 'news' - blogs have a self-selecting audience.

Which isn't to say blogs are bad or even that blogs are a failure, but to make the point that dismantling the noise machine is going to mean taking the battle onto the trad media's own turf.

all major media outlets are now owned by large industrial firms

Many U.S. newspapers used to be owned and run by families that felt an obligation to the community as well as to reporting the news, and they were satisfied with very modest profits (2-3%). In the last 20 years or so, as those old families have died off, the papers have been absorbed by conglomerates of various kinds, and there is now a requirement for ROI of perhaps 20%.

The only way you get a high return on investment in a labor-intensive business like reporting is to cut your labor costs. So these papers have reduced newsroom staffs and now fill their pages with recycled press releases.

But if you reduce the reporting staff, you also reduce the quality of the newspaper. Or, as the new financial mangagers like to call it, "the product." And then your subscription base declines, and you have to cut costs even more.

A lot of that, I think, has fed the explosive growth of blogs as news sources. There are a lot of good reporters out there, unhappy about what's happened to their profession, but feeling powerless to do anything immediate about it.

Look at this list again. Do you recognize one original thought on it? Any peculiar observation? Any evidence of extraordinary research into these vestiges of US society and militarism?

I don't. I was at Yale, when NW was there -- also Lyle and Pogue, for example. Both of them were at least Daily News reporters; both immediately graduated to NYT. Lyle earned the bonus of marrying, early in her career, into the Faber fortune; her "features," dispatched from London, may still be found occasionally in section A. NW? Not so much. NW and I lived in the same college, but were not in the same class. Nor were we friends. I will tell you, she was cultivating her "beauty" franchise even then from the purview of Feminist Studies or LitCrit vanity presses. I forget, because, frankly, she was not a recognized "leader" among the student arbiters and activists. (Understand: for these young women, Camile Paglia was a ineffectual political figure!) In any event, in the intervening 20 years, NW hasn't deviated from her brand of feminist mystique. Not once. No Naomi Klein is she. No Ray McGovern is she. No ...

Until this week. Perhaps you can imagine my dismay, when the PR for The End of America (thoughtfully linked to amazon and FDL), titled "Blackwater: Are You Scared Yet," shot to the top of the rec list without critique or even the author's participation. Following 140 comments without mention of Jeremy Scahill or even the faintest of ironic nods to any blogger who has been vilified for publishing "unsourced" pieces on US military fortification in the Indian Ocean, I quit the reception.

Why does one blog, when readers' tolerance for Manufacturing Consent is so high? When too few essayists and commenters can recognized the myriad instances in which one thought, "Indeed, we can't stop globalization or trade," is reproduced to suborn passivity in civil disobedience? So let's pass off advertising as news!

My only hope is that more ordinary readers will venture their experience as fact worth noting, as exemplary evidence of their political will to break professional courtesy extended to Writers of Interest and Journalists of Record.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.