You, too, can help the endangered print reporter
I’ve yet to see a silverback gorilla pitching his own wildlife preserve in the jungles of the Congo, but stranger things have happened.
It was made clear to me this week when CareerCast.com released its annual report on the most endangered jobs of 2014 that I have to do something to help my profession; I have to be that 800-pound gorilla if I’m to save print journalism.
In the top 10 worst jobs in America to have — from the bottom of a list of 200 career outlooks — being a newspaper reporter/print journalist ranks No. 4, or No. 197, depending on how you look at it.
With an annual median salary of $37,090 and a job market that is expected to diminish 13 percent by 2022, things are grim for our species, as many of us are being poached by public relations firms, the gradual rise (again) of Dot Coms, Starbucks and more than a few sources who would like to see our hands used as ash trays, our hides sold for rugs and our ivory tusks cut from our dead carcasses.
Print journalists are in need of some kind of captive breeding, maybe a preserve where we can be allowed to flourish in a controlled setting with plenty of tender-loving care and a round-the-clock staff of geneticists and wildlife biologists helping us to increase our numbers before releasing us back into the wild.
Help support this effort. I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a natural wildlife reserve for a breeding program and a psychological reintegration program, so we can live among you as equals and guardians of the Fourth Estate, rather than be seen as public nuisances gathered around the free buffet table and commemorative tote tent.
I do have a personal stake in this, as I would prefer to have my work, our work, be judged on the merits of its truth-telling and its effect on communities, not whether the client felt we gave pizzazz to his product or spun the message in the best possible direction.
And I like my hands; they’ve been described as feminine before, unsuitable for holding the cigar or e-cig of a mathematician like that of the Congolese lowland gorilla. Mathematicians by the way, have the top job of 2014, with a median salary of $101,360 and a 23 percent growth rate by 2022.
With a goal of $250 million in seed money, my Kickstarter funds could buy a nice big underutilized newsroom somewhere in Southern California — just about every newsroom — and keep the strongest of the species for sexual selection, feed them, make them comfortable, re-indoctrinate them in the core fundamentals and mission, and keep them far away from the finger sandwiches and annual chamber of commerce tri-tip plate dinners, and let them breed like rabbits.
Still, just to set the mood and make them feel at home, there will be controlled complaint sessions about useless sources and dumb editors, a bar with free drinks, random half-eaten pizzas to pilfer and coffee, lots of bad, dirty-office-pot coffee.
The California condor was saved from near extinction, and so can the newspaper reporter. It will take much money, and for every $100 you contribute to the campaign, we’ll send you a yearly subscription and grant online access to the automatic pay wall all U.S. papers have agreed to institute by February 2015.
For every $1,000, the reporters deemed the weaker of the species, the ones who didn’t make it and either keeled over at their keyboard or were ripped from the arms of their editors by an artisanal cheese maker in Portland, Ore., or a cold-press coffee brewer in Brooklyn, we’ll sever a hand for you. It will be a well-earned memento of your caring contribution and commitment to journalism.
Each hand, curled up in the shape of a cup and perfect for holding loose change and Mentos, will come complete with a class ring from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism on one finger, a symbol of that expensive education and mountain of student loan debt for an endangered career, like a Panda tooth or a polar bear claw. For an extra $100, that ring will be from Columbia in NYC.
I have high hopes for this project; just find us online and contribute today. On the upside, we’re not mail carriers (-28 percent outlook by 2022), meter readers (-19 percent) or farmers (-19 percent), all jobs that rated even lower than reporter. For them, we might just be looking at a tar pit somewhere with their names on it.
This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, July 18, 2014.