[A]s recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did. And I think we’re finding out now that the real, actual value of journalism in the current economy is not that high, and that what the dot-com bubble did and Tina Brown and others did to boost the value of journalism and writing to the point where some people were being paid $5 a word — well, I think there are a lot of people right now, really talented people, who are working for 50 cents or a dollar a word, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to make a living doing that.
via Dumenco’s Media People: New York Times Columnist David Carr – Advertising Age – The Media Guy.
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From jeffmacintyre.com: David Carr on Twilight in the Media Profession http://bit.ly/nntGX
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Depends on what you’re getting paid $1 a word for. For every bloated old-media corpse there are a half dozen carrion beetles like myself, ready to pick the meat off its bones.
Ah who am I kidding, media is going to suck for a while, no two ways about it. Stories are going to start being missed altogether, and we won’t hear about it until weeks or months after, if ever. We’ve built a great distribution network for information, but hardly any apparatus for information intake, except at a significant monetary loss. I do think this will change, but in the short term it’s not just journalists who will suffer – the American public is going to get dumber by extension.
This reminds me of what the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blogger had to say, in his 5-word acceptance speech at The Webby’s: “It not journalism that’s dying.”