The journalist as Beaux-Arts craftsman

“It is fear I am most afraid of,” Montaigne wrote. He concerned himself mostly with fear in battle. But he noted that “People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved also lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep…”

Journalists reek with fear right now. We fear the loss of our jobs, and with it our homes, our childrens’ future, our sense of self-worth. Most of all, we fear irrelevance, that metaphysical exile from society.

We can wring our hands until our skin falls off the bone. We’re being passed by. I remember reading about Beaux-Arts workers in the 1950s who shook their fists at the Museum of Modern Art, that icon of the International Style. “That goddam place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!” they said. [recounted in Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House”]

Our goddam place is the Internet, and the bastards killing us are ourselves. We thought advertising would shift nicely from old media to new. We thought free content meant we could assemble vast audiences online and strike back at the mass audiences of television. We were wrong. Writers and editors, are and almost always have been a cost center. We’re paying the price now.

Those Beaux-Arts masons were forced to do something else. If they stayed in building, their work felt less meaningful. We journalists may find we have to do the same. “It’s over,” says Lawrence Weschler in The New, New Journalism. He meant long-form, writerly journalism. Now it looks true for text-based journalism as a whole.

I think a model exists for selling news and features content, regardless of medium. Until I figure it out, or someone else does, I’ll take heart in something else Montaigne said: “those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else.”