My New Year advice to aspiring journalists: become accountants instead
Like many people in the media, I’m bracing myself for an annus horribilis. I have multiple income streams — film, television, radio, books and journalism — and all have been decimated by the Credit Crunch. I’m not exaggerating when I say my earnings will fall by at least 50 per cent in 2009.
I got an inkling of just how bad things are when I was offered a column recently by a major Fleet Street newspaper. They wanted me to write 500 words a week on the OpEd page — prime real estate by any measure.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred and fifty a week.’
I almost dropped the phone. To give you an idea of how bad this is, it is less than I received for a piece of similar length for the same paper over 20 years ago. Indeed, it is less than you would get for a column in the Independent on Sunday which, until recently, was the worst-paying paper on Fleet Street. The executive who made the offer explained that rates had been ‘slashed’ and that several of the paper’s weekly columnists are paid less than this — and for all I know that is true.
Presumably, the reason I was offered the column is because the paper in question has just fired an existing columnist — one of hundreds to be put out to grass in 2008. When one of Fleet Street’s best columnists was given his marching orders recently, he took it in good part. ‘Keith Waterhouse once said that, as a freelance, you are like a busker outside cinemas — if one commissionaire moves you on, you just go and play outside another,’ he said. ‘I think this is a good rule to work by.’
Unfortunately, when he gets to the next cinema he will discover half a dozen other buskers jostling for the space. The bloodletting on Fleet Street was terrible in 2008 and promises to get worse in 2009. Circulations are in free fall, advertising revenue has fallen off a cliff and paper costs are sky-rocketing, thanks to a booming newspaper business in China. This means there will be more and more freelancers competing for work — bad news for the busker, and even worse news for me, since I am not in his class.
If you are used to plying your trade as a critic, things look particularly bleak. Last April, an American film critic called Sean Means published a list of all his colleagues who had been put out to grass since 2006. They numbered 28 in all — and since then the list has grown. So far in the UK, it is television critics who have suffered most, with several Fleet Street newspapers dispensing with daily television reviews. It can only be a matter of time before the rest of them are given their marching orders — followed by theatre critics, film critics and music critics.
As a case in point, I recently asked a Fleet Street arts editor if he would be interested in a piece called ‘The End of Criticism’. ‘It sounds like a good idea, Toby,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, we’re about to make all of our critics redundant. It might not sit too well with them.’ One of the reason critics are in the firing line is that newspaper executives can point to the internet and claim, with some justification, that bloggers are now doing the job of professional critics. Moviegoers, for instance, are just as likely to turn to an online critic as they are to a newspaper reviewer. They may not have the breadth of experience as professional critics or the ability to express themselves so eloquently, but people no longer value these attributes as highly as they once did.
It is not just critics that are being killed off by the internet. Last year, the Christian Science Monitor ceased publication in newspaper form and moved all its operations online. That is surely a harbinger of things to come. I sat next to the editor of a Fleet Street newspaper at a dinner party a few weeks ago and asked him if there was any possibility of his publication becoming an online-only affair. ‘I wish,’ he said. ‘Problem is, we’ve just signed a ten-year contract with a printer and if we renege on that we’ll be sued for more than we’d save by going online.’ If there are any students out there thinking of careers in journalism, think again. My advice is to go into accounting and specialise in the administration of companies that have gone bust.
Comments