Class War in the Newsroom

Lost in this clip from the 1958 movie "Teacher's Pet" is the class war embedded in the plot.

Clark Gable (right) plays a newspaper editor who considers journalism a trade, Doris Day a journalism professor who considers it a profession.

In the end Gable's boss is flattered and the two sides compromise. This is a shame because something like this class war is going on right now.

Today Reese Witherspoon would be playing a TV bureau chief with Jack Black as a blogger. She still thinks of the work as a profession, but he knows that if you don't serve the market you don't eat — and you don't deserve to.

The print industry has ignored the hard-won lessons of Gable's day and deserves to die. If you can't serve the market, if the market won't support your business model, you deserve nothing less, and I'm certain if he (or his character) were still around they would agree with me.

For the trade to go on strike or seek to extort money from unwilling consumers is to turn journalism into a welfare case, and thus destroy it. For journalism to be useful it must serve the marketplace. Don't give us what you think we need to know, give us what we want.

Many blog sites do that. Talkingpointsmemo and DailyKos have actually hired employees — Kos bragged that he even gave his health coverage. HuffingtonPost had one of its employees recognized at a White House press conference. ZDNet, where I work, seems to have a working business model. All this is more tenuous than I might like. We do it out of passion, not for the money.

Point is there's gold in them thar' bits and if newspapers can't find them, tough. Someone else will.

Now, go back to my updated cast list. I wouldn't make that movie the same way as in the 1950s, not at all.

Fact is TV talking heads make money. They make big money. They are assumed to be entertainers, all of them. They are compensated, hired and fired as entertainers.

These people have no relationship to the lives most Americans lead. Most would face a tax increase under the Obama budget. They are complaining about it, loud and long, acting as though all of us would face such an increase.

If you were to draw a chart showing the income of journalists 50 years ago, you would find Doris Day and Clark Gable making roughly the same amount of money. Do the same chart today, and you find Reese Witherspoon living in a Watergate apartment with assistants and her own driver, Jack Black sharing a cold water flat on the wrong side of town.

But here's the interesting part. It's Witherspoon's job that is under threat. Black isn't making much, but he's winning raises. Maybe she feels threatened when he finds something extra in his monthly check and offers to buy her dinner. Something like "Broadcast News" meets "A Star is Born," but Black is never going to be a real star — the best he knows he can hope for is to be on some Washington D-list.

Or we could have a scene where he "tweets" her during a State of the Union address and she dissolves in laughter. Yeah…that's the ticket.

If you'd like a treatment, call me.

The point is that the blogosphere is growing. Maybe we're not yet big enough to fill all the holes in current journalism coverage. Maybe our coverage is going to be quite different — we have to interact with and engage our audience directly, and grow our communities.

We're still feeling our way through this, but online journalism has real business models, and it's growing. If "newspapers" want to "go on strike" until they "force" us to buy their "balance" they can wait until hell freezes over.

Journalism is, was, and will remain, a business.