Dear Michael Schudson, You Are Delusional

“You talk to people, these small online startups, as Len Downie and I did, the optimism is absolutely infectious. Even journalists who have left or been fired from or been let go from traditional mainstream organizations now are working at lower wages for some of these organizations and they are grinning ear to ear. They have never had such a good time.” –Michael Schudson, academic sociologist and faculty member of the Journalism School at Columbia University, in an interview conducted at Yale, as quoted on media’s unhappy pallbearer Jim Romenesko.

Well!

DO YOU SEE ME GRINNING FROM EAR TO EAR, YOU DOCTORATE-HAVING, TENURE-LOVING, SUIT-WEARING, PONZI-SCHEME-ENDORSING, CHEERLEADER FOR THE DEATH OF THE UNION AND THE PENSION? YOU AND YOUR PAL LEN DOWNIE ARE LIVING IN A HILARIOUS FANTASY-LAND OF FANTASIES AND MAGIC.

To wit:

1. “Serious news organizations sometimes with five, sometimes with 10, sometimes with 20 journalists, mostly young, but not all, who are doing serious reporting in their locales, sometimes that the mainstream media never did or hasn’t been doing for a long time.”

Goodbye, old people who have been employed! (Old, by the way, is “over 40.”) There is no place for you.

2. In case we’ve forgotten: this year, a largely-unscientific, self-selecting poll found that 6% of jobless journalists found new jobs in their field.

3. How will there be journalism jobs, professor? “But you still need some money to pay these people and they are finding it primarily through philanthropy at this point. We are hoping that government will take an interest in funding such projects, as well as mainstream projects.”

Oh! Yes! The journalists will work for the government. What a great idea!

4. “We need a mixed model of funding streams and we need society to take a kind of common responsibility for providing news to the democratic public.”

Have you been outside the J-School, where you and your pals are taking tens of thousands of dollars from young people to give them a ticket to nothing? Do you know what the “democratic public” thinks of news-suppliers? Here, go read the comments on this blog, which include:

* “They could always go to work for the Obama adminstration…oh wait…they were already doing that.”

And:

* “’Journalists’ should be registered like sex offenders.”

And go on and on. Good luck with your fantasies!