The Multi-Hyphenate Journo in 2022
Also: some thoughts from indie podcasters and the NYT view on free speech
The question of who, and what, is a journalist, has been fraught for decades. Probably as long as the job has been around, in fact. What gave Ug the authority to scrawl updates about saber-toothed tiger proximity on the cave walls? How can we trust Spurius Voxpox’s musings about the approach of the Visigoths? The role of journalist has always been self-described but publicly examined.
Here in the UK there’s a, frankly very annoying, service called Muck Rack, which I think essentially collates journalists’ details for the help of PR firms. They’re a necessary part of the ecosystem, even if the bluntness of their tools means that I end up on press lists for dog food and cryptocurrency. But anyway, this is not about that. This is about their 2022 journalism trends report, which I saw yesterday thanks to the excellent Future News newsletter.
The 2022 Journalists, according to Muck Rack, are optimistic, Twitter-obsessives who publish, in the majority, 5 or more stories a week (terrifyingly). 41% work in online with a print edition, 33% in online without a print edition, and a mysterious 5% on print with no online (presumably obscure trade and B2B titles). Only 1%, according to Muck Rack, would be considered podcast journalists, and only another 1% would say they’re newsletter journalists. Which is all interesting enough – and corrects for my bias against trade and other niche publications – but the fact that caught my eye was their top line finding: ‘The average journalist covered 4 beats [in 2022] – last year, the average journalist covered 3 beats’.
This has been described as ‘beatflation’, the attempt to get journalists to cover things increasingly tangential to their home turf. On a very basic level, perhaps that’s environment or science reporters seconded over to the health beat for the covid-19 pandemic; on a more complex level, perhaps that’s the integration of lifestyle, health, beauty and entertainment, or climate, science, health and public policy.
To be honest, the notion of ‘beat journalism’ already feels quite antiquated. I’ve met very few journalists who wouldn’t be willing to spend an hour on Wikipedia in order to feel comfortable talking about a new subject. This is a tendency that has been facilitated and spurred on by the internet: it is both easier than ever to research, and more and more necessary. The volume game of internet media has ensured that the idea of being a cited expert in a specific field usually means you’re working too slowly. And I’m sympathetic to this trend, because the output of ‘beat reporters’ and experts is often not substantively different from the almost algorithmic quality of the Wikipedia digest. So why would you spend big on breaking up your team into very siloed remits?
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