The quandary of writing for free — or close to it

The brief, but polite reply to my query is quite familiar to freelancers scouring the Web for writing opportunities:

“The position has been awarded to another writer, but if you’re interested in writing on a volunteer basis . . . “

Um, when the “v” word comes up, that’s when I put my foot down. Very briefly, and equally politely, I explained that my freelancing policy is to pursue only paying work.

In my still-evolving policy I write without compensation only for my own sites. I’ve also offered to barter my writing services to a friend who allowed me to use his photos and videos on one of my blogs. He offered his work to me for nothing; the least I can do is return the favor.

But what if paid work turns out to more of raw deal than the volunteer kind?

Last week freelance writer extraordinaire Erik Sherman dug into the nitty gritty of some freelance aggregators, aptly dubbing them “writers mills” and “intellectual sweat shops” for their paltry terms. He got a response from one such place, but kept plowing on. Love his description of who’s got the upper hand here:

“They want experience, they want productivity, they want . . . trust fund babies.”

I’ve felt despondent myself looking through similar sites, signing up for a couple, and then reading the grim fine print. You’ll knock yourself out and get very little in return.

Earlier this spring the topic flared up on Word Count, an excellent digital age-oriented site for freelancers, when a veteran freelancer urged novices not to write for aggregators. He received a quick retort from a popular aggregator. Michelle Rafter, the Word Count proprietor, suggested new freelancers approach hyperlocal sites or consider starting their own.

I won’t suggest never write for a “mill,” even though it’s not my preference, because I do know some people who are going down this road. But if you’re trying to build a full-time freelance writing career there won’t be enough time to do all the work for aggregators that won’t pay you a living wage.

If you’re not, you might as well start your own blog and run with it, hard. Put all of yourself behind it, make it your own, and build it into something that might lead you to some substantial money — some good freelancing offers or contract work or even a job. Your time will be better spent.

The individual with whom I had been corresponding did reply to my request to keep me in mind should he have another paying slot in the future. I really did mean it when I said I enjoyed reading his sites, while directing him to some of my work. Perhaps something will materialize; regardless, I’m glad I didn’t give in to the temptation of a cheap byline. Or a free one, actually.

This week Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog replied in a comment to a post here about her hyperlocal site, which brings in enough advertising revenue to support her family. This is a terrific guideline for freelance journalists newly confronting the unforgiving world of writing for the Web:

“I’ve been trying to say this for a long time. . . These people who are slaving away for Examiner-dot-com or the zillion other ‘hey, we’ll pay you, really, at least, um, you’ll earn coffee money’ websites — or worse, ‘volunteer’ to write ‘blogs’ on newspaper websites — WHY oh WHY are you doing that? You don’t need tech expertise to set up your own site.

“God knows, we’re proof. We’re still running on the same out-of-box WordPress theme I chose 3-1/2 years ago when I thought this was going to be  ‘just a blog.’ We’ve gotten some help, pro bono and paid, to make some tweaks, and we can’t keep this theme forever, BUT if you’re just starting — go to WordPress or Blogger or wherever and GET GOING!

“Make your OWN name. Own your OWN page views. Rock your OWN world . . . if you do good work, Google will index you on your own site just the same way it would do so if you were buried in somebody’s bigger site. Don’t let somebody else earn money off your work. Aggregators aren’t the problem in that regard — writing for free or cheap for some big company IS.”

Lessons learned along the blogging trail

Some links I’ve been referring to as I sort out my own ideas about what I want to achieve through blogging (here and elsewhere) and as I try to de-stigmatize (with a little bit of success) the form for skeptical old-school journalists:

• Getting started remains one of the biggest obstacles for many print types I know. But then what? Gina Chen, as usual, has a great starter’s guide which extends to the realm of getting all over social media. Above all:

“Have fun. . . . Don’t worry about traffic at first. . . . But the real value of blogging, at least to me, is connecting with other people and getting to ‘talk’ with them about a topic I love.”

It seems so simple and quite obvious, but it’s something I find far too easy to forget. Why waste time blogging on a subject you can’t get excited about, or at least just a little bit interested in, exploring?

• How often should you post? This is something I agonize about all the time. This week, for example, I’m posting every weekday (I’ve given myself tight deadlines, although I’m about to miss this one by a few minutes.) Lately it’s gone down to once or twice a week. So much of it depends on inspiration, marshaling material (links) and wondering whether you believe you have anything interesting to say. Pat Thornton believes that “quantity matters:”

“Someone who blogs a few times a month will get a lot less traffic than someone who blogs a few times a week. Both of them will get less traffic than someone who blogs daily. All of them will get less traffic than someone who blogs multiple times a day.”

I get too carried away on this blog with long winding narrative, which isn’t a bad way to blog on occasion. But I have found that shorter posts (many of them curated or aggregated, in fact) not only have spiked up traffic, but tend to get retweeted on Twitter and distributed across the Web in other ways.

Readers do appreciate a concise roundup of links on a particular topic (as I served up yesterday). Time and brevity mean everything on the Web, and I’m learning quite profoundly that providing a service instead of just bloviating endlessly is of far greater value.

• Some journalists commonly accuse bloggers of “stealing” their material via the apparently subversive act of linking. (Some people, in fact, want to make it a crime.) Nicholas Carr, a noted skeptic of techno-Utopianism, has a brief response: So what? Not only is the “parasitic” nature of blogging fine by him, you can go ahead and label his blog as such. He doesn’t mind. In fact, he believes the parasitic nature of blogging is an inherently good thing:

“Bloggers blog for a host of reasons, but what sets blogging apart as a literary form is that it offers a writer an easy way to document his or her responses to their day-to-day reading. The constant flow of text through the eye and mind is a characteristic of many people’s lives, but it has never been possible before to capture the experience so thoroughly and with such immediacy as it can be through blogging. Diaries come closest, but they’re private, and I’d argue that they place more distance between the act of reading and the act of writing about reading.

“The least interesting blogs are the ones that simply replicate existing journalistic forms such as news articles, company profiles or product reviews. They can be very useful, and they can certainly be very popular, but they’re blogs in a technical sense only.”

What drives me insane is to see longtime print journalists treating a blog as an idyllic venue for cranking out the kinds of material they’ve always longed to do for their papers, but for a lack of space. No linking. More personal rumination than reporting. And endlessly, endlessly long. Yes, we want to know what you think, on a certain level, but please try to be true to the form at a bare minimum. Is that so hard? Give your readers context, the ability to fact-check what you’ve written and other resources for their further exploration, and you will be doing them a great service.

• And most recently, Scott Rosenberg, author of a new book assessing the history, impact and importance of the blogging revolution, posted yesterday that journalists just “don’t get” why most people blog:

“For the great majority of participants, blogging is a social activity, not an aspiration to mass-media stardom. It is very hard for journalists to understand this because the opportunity to express themselves in public has always been a part of their professional birthright.”

In the comments below, Ryan Sholin, one of the bright lights of journalism’s future and who’s recently fled the newspaper industry, writes that journalists need to understand that blogging, rather than their print bylines, is the coin of the realm:

“Three jobs in a row now, the existence of my blog has been a crucial deciding factor — it’s how people know me, know my ideas, know where I think information and communication are headed.

“Oh, and the newspaper articles I wrote at the largest paper I ever worked for? They’re in an archive behind a paywall. So, journalists, good luck with those clips. I’ll keep pointing people to my blog.”

Here’s where Ryan does his primary blogging.

Some old-school ideas for renewing journalism

Dusting off some links I’ve been collecting of interests to journalists in transition, those in recovery or those trying to get a better handle on the Web’s effects on — and possibilities for — the profession:

• Multimedia journalism ace Mark Luckie writes that adapting to doing the news on the Web means much more than mastering technical skills. It’s a rather old fashioned formula:

“Success in journalism requires a strong grounding in the fundamentals: knowing how to write (well), how to interview, how to speak to others and how to quickly establish trust and relationships. Without these skills, there is no reason to even learn the technologies that are transforming the industry.”

• If you’ve started or are thinking about starting a “hyperlocal” Web site, the married couple that runs the West Seattle Blog offers a good example of what can be done in the genre, if you will. They support themselves and their teenagers on advertising revenue, but make it clear this is a fully consuming way of life:

“It’s the same challenge that I’m sure our parents faced in running their small businesses. We’re at that point where you know you are going to have to broaden the fold, to bring in someone, whether its on the business side or a Saturday editor, and that person is going to have some thoughts and some ideas. You know it’s not going to be just your little thing anymore.”

• Via Paul Gillin, the creator of an early Internet news site goes several steps further in suggesting that the best solution to fading journalism models is for individual journalists to take control of their own careers:

“Journalists need to own their own news publications, not simply toil for the people who own them. I’m no socialist, so don’t get me wrong, but there’s really no point in supporting other people with our work when we can support ourselves with it. We don’t care how long it takes; we always knew they would be slow to get off the corporate teat and start walking on their own. When that happens, and great news organizations owned and operated solely by journalists who are their own bosses exist all around the world — that’s when a newspaper war will erupt, and the world will find journalism anew. It won’t be so boring then.”

• Business innovation expert and former Microsoft manager Scott Berkun takes aim at the gospel of social media, especially the “change the world” hosannas that frequently erupt from uncritical worshipers:

“The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. . . . Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.”

I’m really missing David Halberstam right now

You probably already know what I think about this. So I’ll try to be brief here, knowing I’ll surely fail: I’ll be heading offline, and probably totally unplugged, for those interminable hours this afternoon.

You know which interminable hours I’m talking about.

The interminable hours that follow the interminable days of “coverage” from the nation’s news media about the final farewell to a celebrity.

And how the media is covering the memorial service, and to what extent.

Yes, there is coverage about the coverage. As it careens “toward bizarre excess.” Newsflash: We passed “toward” before the coroner arrived.

This is an all-out invasion force blitz, my friends. Operation Media Moonwalk.

L.A. is in “lockdown” mode. It’s going to be live-blogged! Follow this cash-strapped newspaper’s special Twitter stream! Oh Lord, can the Web handle it? And for God’s sake, what about the children?

I know, I know. It’s all about great ratings and page views and whatever. Gotta give the people what they want. But what if it’s not? Seriously?

And when it’s as self-justifying as this, comparing the Present Palooza to the Princess Diana Death Jam, it’s enough to want to seek refuge in Dick Cheney’s bunker:

“Michael Jackson has sparked the same response – not because the media wants to rummage through the shadowy parts of his life, though that’s been done, but because tens of millions of people loved his singing, dancing and music”

Of course the media wants to “rummage through the shadowy parts of his life!” If he were just a wildly popular entertainer who seems to be a regular chap — we’ll call him Tom Hanks — there would have been little rummaging.

But with the recently departed, there’s so much to rummage, forever. Michael Jackson may be gone — let the man rest in peace! — but the tawdriness and strangeness will never go away. Especially with a fresh batch of it on the horizon. And with unceasing loudmouth mouthpieces like this one who are like moths to camera lights.

At the risk of sounding like an elitist (and how’s this talking head for chutzpah?) I’m distraught that many mainstream news outlets could scarcely be bothered to devote much time to the passing of a man who has been blamed for the deaths of millions, including hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, during the most wrenching cultural and political upheaval of our time.

Maybe I’m just missing David Halberstam, who wrote the definitive book on Robert McNamara and the other architects of the Vietnam disaster. Then again, appreciating that he excoriated the celebrity media swamp infestation as eloquently as he did the quagmire in Indochina, I’m glad Halberstam isn’t here to witness this.

Shortly after Halberstam’s tragic death two years ago, veteran television news producer and Web video impresario Michael Rosenblum wrote a fabulous post contrasting the starkly different media cultures that produced Halberstam and a famous present-day television journalist:

“I am forced to wonder why the world of print journalism is capable of generating such excellence from just one man, while television ‘journalism’, with its thousands and thousands of employees, and hundreds of millions of dollars and endless hours of air time is not capable of delivering anything remotely similar.”

Except that it’s not just television journalism anymore. The subject of Rosenblum’s blistering ire was Katie Couric, the same Katie Couric who is anchoring the CBS Evening News from — wait for it now — the Staples Center. Even Jeff Greenfield, a fairly serious journalist and perceptive student of politics and history, is chiming in on the current spectacle.

Et tu, Obama? NPR?

OK, that’s enough. At least I’m not upset like this guy is.

But I do have this final question, and I don’t mean it to be merely rhetorical: How is a crazy rant by a Congressman any more surreal than what’s unfolding across the pages and airwaves of our legacy media?

In this video with the Newseum, Halberstam unfortunately sounds rather quaint when he says:

“One of the best things about being a journalist is that it allows you to be player in great events without needing to be popular.”

A newsroom’s loss is journalism’s gain

After 20 years in newspapers, the Syracuse Post-Standard’s “blogging mom,” Gina Chen is packing it in.

But unlike so many journalists who’ve left their newsrooms, she’s got what I believe will be a rather bright future in the profession.

She’s left to work on a doctorate in journalism, with plans to teach and train the next generation of journalists who will face a very different professional environment than most of us.

Not that her move doesn’t come with some uncertainty:

“I realize I’m committing to journalism at a time when the field is in flux. By the time I’m finished with my program (three years), j-schools may have dried up and blown away like so much newsprint, and I’ll end up a highly educated fry girl at the local fast-food joint.”

I seriously doubt that will be her fate. Mine, on the other hand . . . .

If you’ve read Gina’s stellar blog, Save the Media, you know that she’s already been an invaluable educator for many of us, in mid-career, who are trying to grapple with the wrenching changes, from skill sets to mindsets, in our work.

The good news is she’s going to continue to blog about these subjects during graduate studies. Being allergic to a formal classroom setting myself, I am thrilled I’ll be able to keep learning from her. What she writes about, in clear, helpful and easy-to-understand prose, is well-suited for being an educator.

Best wishes, Gina. And don’t worry. You’ll be better off than most of us can imagine.

• Another journalist is bidding farewell this week to a wildly popular media blog that has been an information lifeline for beleaguered Gannett Co. employees, current and former, and who are bracing for another big round of layoffs starting today.

Jim Hopkins began Gannett Blog early last year after taking a buyout and the site quickly became a water cooler for Gannetteers. His approach comes from his background as a business journalist, as he has examined public filings and other corporate documents revealing the fiduciary activities of Gannett honchos, among other things, in the wake of monumental employee cuts across the chain. He’s been a controversial figure, to say the least. But what he’s dug up has been some pretty good journalism about a powerful media empire that very rarely has been scrutinized like this.

Hopkins explains his reasons for discontinuing the blog and talks about his next venture. Another site, Gannettoid, will pick up the baton.

Celebrating my independence as a journalist

On Independence Day I usually dispense with the overwrought, warmed-over patriotic platitudes that come with the quintessential American holiday.

The American Revolutionary figure who in my mind best lives up to the ideals of what transpired on July 4, 1776 was Thomas Paine, a quintessential outsider.

Since I’m a fierce independent in so many ways, especially now as a post-newsroom journalist, I thought I’d shamelessly pile on the Paine bandwagon. (But not as shamelessly and absurdly, I hope, as Glenn Beck.)

Paine didn’t just talk a good game about freedom and liberty and egalitarianism; he truly lived it, nearly died because of it and was vilified on both sides of the Atlantic for doing so.

I write this because one of the primary ideals that pulled me into the profession, the need to question and scrutinize authority, is in desperate need of renewal. More worryingly, the powerful media institutions charged to watchdog have been squandering that duty in astonishing fashion.

The journalistic aristocracy is crumbling, and not just because of its refusal to prepare for the future. As it dumps more journalists out on to the streets, it obliviously tries to sell itself for a wad of cash.

The same paper whose journalism fearlessly revealed a White House that had defiled the Constitution was caught trying to auction off access to those same corridors of power, as well as to its own journalists. The targeted buyers: Corporate and agenda-driven lobbyists.

And still, even after this ploy was first reported (by new media!) and eventually aborted, newsroom staffers spoke largely off-the-record, for fear of being openly critical of a practice that would subvert the very independence they are expected to demonstrate in their jobs.

The economy is brutal and the job market is practically barren and I may be overly zealous like Paine but also foolishly quixotic in thinking I can practice journalism on my own terms. I know some people who have, but the odds are long and the time in which they accomplished this feat was not short.

But at least for one Fourth of July, I’m able to celebrate my independence as a journalist. As an individual, I’m relieved to have freed myself from the old, decrepit ways of thinking/acting/existing, and the fear that bolsters them.

Forever.

The dog days of journalism’s civil war

Perhaps it was fitting that as soon as I began reading Antony Beevor’s splendid history of the Spanish Civil War did journalism’s internecine conflict flare up again.

I don’t get the impression that Malcolm Gladwell is a print-über-alles partisan, but his skewering of the thesis of Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free,” has engendered a vigorous response from the author as well as Web marketing major domo Seth Godin. In turn, Godin’s response has been called into question by a young Web marketing ace.

The problem I have is that I like all of these individuals and their arguments, to a degree. I’ve generally refrained from the free vs. paid content wars because frankly so much of all this goes way over my head. I’m not business-savvy (yet!) but I am trying to figure out how to make a living as a newbie entrepreneurial journalist and that’s enough of a challenge. I follow this issue to help my understanding of the emerging media environment I inhabit, but I’ve really tried hard not to take sides in all this.

Yet that’s what I’ve inadvertently done after seeing that a former colleague is head-over-heels in favor of threats from newspapers to sue Web sites for copyright infringement for the brazen act of linking. My former colleague (neither does he work at my former newspaper) sounded gleeful in his admonition to “Take Back the Streets!”

Now I have a lot of respect for this individual; he is a fine journalist and author and a very decent guy who is genuinely concerned about the fate of his profession. (And an admission from Anderson that he lifted material for his book from Wikipedia — a scourge among print partisans — surely has them emboldened in their assertions about the general thievery that takes place on the Web.)

But a “man the barricades” mindset not only is counterproductive to the profession; it denies the inevitable march of technology’s effect on journalism, all the media fields and many other industries as well. I’m beyond being weary of this line of thinking; it’s really pissing me off.

How much more hollowing out of newsrooms do we have to witness to understand that the business model of print is unsustainable? How many more talented people like my former colleague (thankfully he’s still employed at a newspaper) will be shown the door for them to understand that desperate maneuvers, ostensibly to “protect” their work, are designed to save antiquated corporate structures and revenue streams, not the jobs of workaday journalists?

I’ve been occasionally sentimental at times about wanting to hold on to what I’ve known as a journalist. I still love print and at least try to pick up the Sunday paper along with subscriptions to several magazines. I cannot read with deep immersion online and probably never will. Like Nick Carr, I worry about the cognitive effects of lengthy periods of time spent online. And the obnoxious rantings of certain techno-utopians border on the asinine when they don’t cross it.

But clinging to the past and resisting the future are deadly notions for journalists. Seeing others in my line of work just give up has helped me to shed some layers of fear — and self-doubt — I didn’t know were there. I’m driven by the fear of being stagnant.

Someone who’s sharpened my understanding of what it means to be a journalist in the 21st century nailed it in a blog post today explaining how “technology is always the great cultural motivator.” These are the people that all of us in journalism need to read, listen to and learn from, instead of being consumed by what he aptly calls “the inertia of lamentations.”

More than anything else, I really wish all of these people who claim they want to save journalism could find a way to just get along.

What I should have told a recent journalism grad

I felt rather buoyed this morning after e-mailing a reply to a thoughtful young professional journalist seeking my impressions of her news start-up. Wrote I:

“I do see that there is, and will continue to be, a vital role for journalists to use their news judgment and training to filter through information on the Web and present it with intelligence and insight for readers/viewers, just as old-school editors have done for many years.”

Oh, so earnest is all that! A short while later I came across a despondent print journalism grad who wrote into Salon’s Cary Tennis for career advice. How about this for an old-school response that has made me insanely envious:

“If you are a true journalist, the world is going to kick your ass. If you are a true journalist, you are supposed to be having a hard time. This is how the world makes writers. It kicks their ass long enough that they start finally telling the truth. They just finally give up and start bleating out little truthlets.”

That’s just the first graf. Kid, you still there? Well, listen up. The rest is a classic stream-of-conscious ramble, including this riff from an amazingly long gonzo-ish graf that must have been banged out on mescaline:

“We think of Sartre. We read Boswell. We picture the harsh levity of a drunken Samuel Johnson and think to ourselves, well, things could be worse. We think of Samuel Pepys on London Bridge getting blown by whores. We think of him singing with his wife and friends in the parlor. We think of him being treated, again, for another venereal disease. We think of Neanderthals scratching on the walls of caves. We think of their flutes 18,000 years old, the music they must have played, the fears they must have had; we wonder if they thought about us, their descendants, trying to figure out our VCRs.”

Kid, don’t leave now. We’re just about to reach the crescendo, where we confront the current state of the profession and figure out what the hell to do about it:

“We stand paralyzed before the fire, like animals watching their habitats burn. I can see what’s happening but am also somewhat paralyzed, doing an essentially 19th-century thing in this 21st century medium. . . .

“It’s a weird world but it’s interesting and fun. Fuck the little stuff. Don’t worry about your career. Find a story and write about it, and stay off the streets if you’re drunk.”

My media affliction, identified; seeking a cure

Just as I unwound from Friday’s rant about media coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, Doc Searls applies a salve to what’s been ailing me:

“Most of us can’t help falling into conversational black holes. But we can help getting sucked into celebrity obsession.”

As I’ve been thinking about what I wrote yesterday — and posted on some other blogs — I realize I got sucked down the even more tempting rabbit hole of obsessing about celebrity obsession. My enmity for pop culture is at the heart of this.

My reaction also was triggered by a fear that my profession was headed down the Pigalle path of OJPalooza. And with the cause of Jackson’s death to be speculated upon for weeks, and his personal physician gone missing,  I’m sure cable news, Huffington Post and other outlets suffering from post-election reader/viewer drops will get a big boost. How nice for them, how dreadful for those of us who at least occasionally try to glean some news and intelligent insight from them.

And then the New York Times explicates how “TMZ was far ahead in its reporting depth.” Stop the inanity!

Help me! I’m getting obsessed again! Searls’ main point about the Jackson attention is that it is one great big time and energy suck:

“I submit that obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. (I originally wrote “chewing gum” there, but I think smoking is the better analogy.) It is an unhealthy waste of time. And time is a measure of life. We are born with an unknown sum of time, and have to spend all of it. ‘Saving’ time is a rhetorical trick. So is ‘losing’ it. Our lives are spent, one end to the other. What matters most is how we choose to spend it.

“The Net maximizes the endlessness of choice about how we spend our time. It also maximizes many kinds of productiveness. Nearly all the code we are using, right now, to do stuff on the Net, was written by many collaborators across many distances. Some were obsessing about what they were producing. Others were just working away. Either way, they chose to be productive. To contribute. To work on what works.”

Thanks for the prognosis, Doc.

No old/new media divide for junk journalism

As millions wondered Thursday about the fate of Michael Jackson, a leading Web entrepreneur groused on Twitter about that darn mainstream media:

• “@latimescitydesk confirms TMZ report that Michael Jackson is dead. 30 minutes later CNN will not give TMZ credit. very odd.”

• “Why wouldn’t @CNN reference the reports from LATimes and TMZ that Jackson is dead? They could say ‘unconfirmed by CNN…’ “

To which another self-styled “technology evangelist” replied:

• “Old media arrogance. Simple as that. If they don’t report it, it’s not worth citing.”

And back to our entrepreneur, with his nose still out of joint:

• “finally, almost an hour later, CNN reports on CBS and LA Times reporting michael jackson dead–but no credit to TMZ.”

As it turns out, TMZ, a celebrity news site, did get this right. And first. But that’s beside the point.

TMZ's MJ coverage, with all the multimedia bells and whistles.

Consider what’s being discussed and argued about here. Giving credit where credit is due — about the death of a celebrity. No small celebrity, to be sure, but a celebrity whose tabloid life has long been the subject of morbid media fascination. From the celebrity as well as the mainstream press.

We have individuals on the new media vanguard, frequent commentators about the future of journalism, who in this instance (and many others) would rather kick old media in the pants for its supposed “arrogance” in not giving TMZ credit for a “scoop.”

The “old media” may not have gotten this story first, but who really cares? Is this the sort of story we want serious news organizations to hotly pursue in these times of newsroom layoffs, slimmed down news holes and shrinking aspirations for what they cover? I certainly hope not.

Neither do I think are there any “lessons” for breaking news to be drawn. And is “traditional media showbiz coverage” endangered? Yawn.

Fans and news cameras outside Michael Jackson's home, a common assembly after a celebrity death. (The Guardian)

My indifference isn’t because because I loathe pop culture. But Michael Jackson hasn’t even undergone an autopsy and media wags are obliviously performing an inquest on a genre of journalism that has seriously devalued the profession for most of my time in it.

The same newspapers that in recent months and years have been gutting local arts, books and cultural coverage also have been wasting resources chasing down stupid celebrity and “fark” news for decades. CNN, chided a week ago for allegedly being slow to cover the Iranian protests, is now getting lectured for not giving props to a gossip blog with a reputation even in Hollywood for shaky factual accuracy.

Long before the primacy of the Web, there was the death of Elvis Presley in 1977, when I was in high school. Local television news outlets rushed to record stores (yes, we had vinyl back then, digikids!) to find an ample supply of blubbering middle-aged women clutching albums featuring the King. The weeping was ceaseless — this was the heart of the Deep South, too — and so the cameras rolled, and we were treated to this outpouring of grief for days, weeks and months. We were led to believe this was really important news. It crowded out everything else.

A Graceland candelight vigil 30 years after the death of Elvis. (BBC)

As the Web was hitting its early stride in the mid 1990s, we were subjected to the O.J. Simpson soap opera that in my estimation is when mainstream media credibility took its fateful post-modern nosedive. That was followed by the global sobfest over the tragic death of Princess Diana, who a decade later is still not allowed to rest in peace.

And now we have Michael Jackson, whose lifespan neatly coincides with the approximate time that the mainstream media has thrown itself on the altar of popular culture.

His death is noteworthy, and I’m not arguing against covering it. Pete Hamill has stated that he’s not against celebrity journalism but “it must be journalism.”

But what we’ve gotten instead, far more than any serious reporting that explains our obsession with celebrity worship, is the conscious pandering to empty souls who wait outside a hospital and speak of a departed pop star as if he were family.

With all due respect to the Tweeting individuals cited at the top, “old media” is far more out front in this regard than the digital savants imagine.

In other news, the entire staff of journalists at a newspaper owned by Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi has been arrested. Where is the perspective when it’s truly needed?

“We’re already saying, Neda who? Stick a fork in this protest movement. It’s feeling done. Sad how the trivial can change history.”