Jeremy Adam Smith has a point.
“Very few of us become journalists so that we can write product reviews, celebrity gossip, or forty-seven tips for driving your man crazy in bed—even if that’s how we pay the bills.”
Smith is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and over at the institute’s blog, Knight Garage, he writes about a survey he conducted with 157 journalists exploring how they make ends meet in a stingy media landscape.
His inquiry: “In January, I launched an exploratory survey to discover how journalists and technical writers are getting their most important work done in an age of shrinking resources. I took this on because I felt it important to break away from the obsessive focus on shiny new technology and failing business models. Instead, I wanted to examine how rising numbers of independent, entrepreneurial journalists are reinventing themselves and their work, and in the process sustaining journalism as a whole.”
Smith’s study revealed that unconventional journalism payment models have largely been responsible for generating “meaningful” work. He found that “today’s meaningful journalism predominantly arises from a nexus of collaboration, grants and donations, and nonprofit initiative” and that “journalism is becoming is a form of social entrepreneurship—an endeavor.”
Read the rest of Smith’s fascinating piece here.
You can participate in a second survey by Smith here.
What do you think about this survey? Is Smith on point or off-target? Let us know in the comments.
