Journalists should be paid for their work. iStockPhoto

Talk about missing the point.

In the Philly Post, Victor Fiorillo reacted to a federal judge’s decision that Fox Searchlight Pictures had violated the law by not paying production interns.

The headline on his article said:

Unpaid Interns Need to Shut the Hell Up
The system’s not unfair. Maybe you just suck.

Fiorillo knows the system is fair because he was an unpaid intern himself, explaining that his arduous journey into journalism began when he “happened upon some Philadelphia-related news in Haiti, of all places, where I was vacationing.”

His column includes the admonition, “Some unpaid interns have been complaining about unpaid internships for as long as unpaid internships have existed. And as a former unpaid intern, I am here to tell you that they need to shut up.”

So, there. And what does he say to people who can’t afford unpaid internships? Nothing.

Fiorillo is missing a critical point. Not everyone can afford to vacation in Haiti and then work for free. CNNMoney reported in May on a Fidelity report that said a survey of 750 college graduates showed that they have an average college-related debt of $35,200.

That’s the average. To work for free, students and their families have to pile more debt onto that load. Some just can’t borrow any more money and must work outside their career field to pay for college or support themselves. Unpaid internships discriminate against people of low and modest incomes. The lucky kill themselves by working two jobs at once.

Journalists should support interns who work for free, as well as their efforts to get paid for working. We shouldn’t write headlines telling them they “suck.”

Only by having paid internships will we be able to open newsrooms and other workplaces to talented people of limited means who are being excluded for no reason other than being too broke to donate their labor.

New York Times: “Condé Nast Faces Suit From Interns Over Wages”

© Alex Elman iStockphoto

Joe Hughes, editor-in-chief at ComicsAlliance.com wrote in a column that there is not a single black writer working on a monthly series for the two major comics publishers in the country. Hughes asked why not and, as importantly, why doesn’t anyone seem to care anymore?

Good questions.

In the late 1980s, I was reader representative at the Detroit Free Press and editors got so agitated about diversity newspaper comics that it changed things. It might have started with a content audit I did.

After hearing an approximately equal number of black and white callers tell me there were too many people of the other color in the Free Press, I decided to run a one-month audit on the images. When I got to the comic pages in the back of the newspaper, I just kept on counting.

There were lessons to be learned from what we were doing on the sports pages and with crime stories and in features, but the finding that editors seized on was that the images of people in the comics pages were about 99 percent white.

There were lots of reasons for the disparity.

One of the cartoonists, pretty much all of whom were white, told me that the people he drew were factitious and could be whatever race the reader imagined, even though they were all white, even on Sunday. One cartoonist had tried to draw black characters but was so roundly criticized for how he made people look that he gave up. At least he tried.

A syndicate told us that southern markets wouldn’t buy strips with black characters or by artists, so they couldn’t carry any in their portfolios.

Other media, including The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Reporter, picked up on that comics audit and started asking the same questions.

None of the objections turned out to be insurmountable. We asked for more diversity in the talent pool and in the strips. We started seeing it and bought the strips to try them out.

And enough readers liked them so much that we kept them.

One of my sons, just learning to read, was sitting on the floor of our home, reading the funnies, and started cracking up.

He showed me what made him laugh. It was “Curtis,” a strip by Ray Billingsley, one of those new black cartoonists. “Curtis” started in 1988. Billingsley counts many white cartoonists as his mentors and supporters, but he needed a chance. “Curtis” was it.

And here’s the lesson in a young boy’s laughter: We don’t diversify the media just because it’s right, although that’s a pretty good reason. And there’s more to it than including as many perspectives as possible, which is also essential to doing this work correctly. We also diversify the media because no demographic has a lock on talent and skill. In fact, that is less and less the case. So, if we don’t let the Ray Billingsleys do comics and, thank you Joe Hughes, write comic books, then we lose the people who have just the right touch to tickle certain funny bones or make people think.

Photo © Rambleon, iStockphoto

A report that the average starting salary for journalism majors has risen to around $40,000 is generating some conversation this week.

The report comes from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The gist of the conversation is that $40,000 seems to be too high. I agree. But averages rarely tell the story. Something to consider:

These are journalism majors in all jobs, not just in journalism jobs. The University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication has a long history of studying communications employment and wages. Grady professor Tudor Vlad has said that flexibility in career choice goes a long way in helping wages. Grads might find that journalism degrees prepare them for higher paying jobs outside of journalism.

There are also several factors that make managers in newsrooms and other operations dig deeper:

* Northern states typically pay better than southern ones. One reason is living costs.

* Pay is higher in the city than in the country. Ditto the living costs.

* Beginners at newspapers are typically paid better than beginners at broadcast stations in the same town.

* Employers pay more for scarce talent. Today, that means web and mobile producers, designers and social media specialists. Good videographers can make more than photographers.

* Content area matters, too. Business reporters can command better pay than news reporters.

* Negotiating draws out higher offers. Bargain.

* Part of the salary calculus is how much the candidate made in a prior position. Negotiating at every step has a multiplier effect.

* Experience brings out higher offers, too. The person with three internships and campus media leadership can command a higher salary than the person with none. Get lots of experience.

* The sources of that experience matter. An academic and employment pedigree implies quality.

* The employer’s perception of the candidate’s potential can mean more money. Paint a career arc.

So, there we have it. An average rate for new journalism grads, or 10 strategies for beating the average.

Who wants to be average anyway?

Photo © shironosov, iStockphoto

Four powerful forces are making staffs younger:

* Thousands of buyouts have culled older, higher-paid employees. This has damaged institutional knowledge.

* To cut payrolls and protect staffing levels, managers are hiring younger and cheaper people.

* Young people more often possess today’s sought-after skills such as editing video, creating for mobile platforms and social media.

* The housing crash means people with homes are not as mobile as people who do not own homes, who can more easily move into jobs, but who have fewer roots.

What this all means is that the average age in newsrooms is declining, that there is a lack of mentoring (or time for it) and that younger people will be asked much earlier in their careers to step into leadership roles.

This could be said about many industries. As the profile of newsroom staffers is changing, so are the newsrooms themselves. Legacy buildings are being sold (watch Gannett, Newhouse and Tribune Co.) and smaller staffs are being moved into smaller, rented quarters with fewer walls and permanent work stations. The staff is becoming more fluid.

This rapid change means newsrooms and other industries will have to work like crazy to hold onto the people they recruit or surrender to revolving-door hiring that will spin faster and faster as the economy perks up. The quality of hires will decline and the highest attrition will be among the people with the greatest talent. Newsrooms that fail to invest in personnel will find themselves in a vicious talent drain.

Strategies:

* Train for quality.
* Train to retain.
* Rebuild talent pipelines, but not in the old ways.
* Develop and support great managers.
* Take advantage of the value in employees at every experience level.

Running hard but going nowhere? You might be on a churnalism treadmill. Photo © Ronald Hudson, iStockphoto

Twice recently, I have heard people mention churnalism.

Both were talking about online media, but now that all media have online, every journalist is in danger of becoming a churnalist.

Churnalism is the new name for what we used to call feeding the beast.

Churnalism is fast, thin and needs constant updates even when there is nothing much new.

Churnalists work for clicks.

They live-blog events and then Storify what they just live-blogged.

They aggregate what other folks do – for as long as someone is still producing fresh content – mixing a little opinion or insight with a lot of borrowed stuff.

To meet output demands the interview fewer people but interview more of them by email.

They take fewer risks. They know less about what they’re writing.

Churnalists produce five, six, seven, eight items a day, but they can’t tell stories. They might shoot fewer pictures per assignment as the race around to do more, or they’ll be less selective on an assignment, posting 60 pictures in a gallery, but shooting nothing memorable. Their photos are called pringled because people will flip right through them as they do through a can of uniform potato crisps.

Churnalism produces more items than journalism does. But they are shorter, they have fewer sources, the interviews are shallower and there is less editing.

Churnalism is less rewarding for the people who do and it less satisfying for the people who consume it.

Readers who are tired of churnalism can walk away from it. That’s not easy when churnalism pays your bills.

Journalists can decline offers to work in churnalism factories, but that is not easy if you really need a job. And sometimes churnalism overtakes the newsroom you are already in.

These are some strategies for avoiding churnalism:

* Churnalism lives on item count. Rather than create a lot of wafer-thin stories on a bunch of subjects, go deeper on fewer subjects but do it in little stories.

* Learn photography. In newsrooms that count both photos and articles as items, you will be able to spend more time reporting if you submit in multiple media.

* Be selective I. Spend even less time on the simplest items so you can spend more time on some selected ones.

* Be selective II. Mix up your coverage diet by using incredible simple briefs to open the door for complex stories. Don’t make everything you cover be of equal weight.

* Follow continuing stories. Frequent updates on stories that develop slowly saves you from reporting everything fresh and lets you build depth over time.

* Write in takes. The age-old work style of typing stories out in chunks that could be run to the typesetter as each part of a story was written can work online, too.