A Survivor’s Guide for Canadian Journalists
A survey of the challenges—and opportunities—facing a new generation of writers, editors, and broadcasters
Jonathan Kay
The other casualty of the hit-counter phenomenon is a decreased emphasis on investigative reporting, which is fantastically expensive and time consuming, but doesn’t always generate huge hits—although when it does, as the Rob Ford and Jian Ghomeshi case studies show, the results can be spectacular. Several media outlets have maintained a steady commitment to investigative reporting (I will single out the Toronto Star for excellence here, despite its embarrassing misfire on the recent Gardisil story) but the general trend has been a decline. If you can get 100,000 hits with an edgy opinion piece written by a twenty-five-year-old in an afternoon from her cubicle, why spend tens of thousands of dollars (much of it going to lawyers) on a second-tier, in-depth story that will get the same 100,000 hits? It’s not that Canadian editors don’t want to do the important, investigative stories; it’s that the economics don’t encourage them to do so.
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Journalists are are going to have to turn themselves into digital entrepreneurs, because, as my conversations at Western University show, you can’t just sit around waiting for someone to offer you a dream job anymore: the only way to carve out a living in this industry is to hustle on multiple fronts. Many of the young journalists I know combine freelance website work with spot radio and TV hosting, public speaking, and private communications consultancies.
There is money to be made in journalism these days, but more and more it comes in bits and pieces. For those with true talent, there still are just enough of them to build up something that, at the end of the month, looks something like a decent paycheque.