Journalism
I have always suspected that the key to happiness is self-knowledge. I am hopelessly gauche, awkward with people, interested in things and emotionally illiterate. These days people these kind of characteristics are much better understood, but in mine there was no labelling. Maybe thinks haven't only got better.
As a callow youth I wanted to be a journalist. It's hard when one is young to have an ambition to do a job that one doesn't even know exists. I knew about the educational establishment because I was immersed in it. I knew about journalism because I read it. Not only newspapers, but magazines like New Statesman and Nation, The Spectator and Encounter. How little I understood that these were hopelessly uneconomic undertakings.
Nowadays I realise how lucky I was. People won't pay to read the work of journalists. Especially the sort of self-indulgent stuff that I imagined that I would be able to write. Thank goodness for this blog, which allows me to play at journalism without putting my income in danger.
This page on journalist remuneration from Prospects, a website devoted to providing information about graduate careers is fairly shocking. Even the highest salary band mentioned is barely at the level at which an intern to an investment bank is paid. How could anyone armed with this knowledge choose to go into journalism as a career? How could anyone hope to own a modest house on such a salary.
As I have said before, the press is in a spiral of decline because of the migration of job and classified advertising to the web. Once a tipping point is reached nobody will ever go to a newspaper to find a job and the papers will simply close down. Twenty years ago there were half a dozen specialist publications which were supported by advertising for software developers. I am out of that industry, but I'd be surprised if any of them survive in anything like their previous form. Computer programmers may have been the first to see the advantages of finding their perfect job online, but it can't be long before the rest of the world follow.
As a callow youth I wanted to be a journalist. It's hard when one is young to have an ambition to do a job that one doesn't even know exists. I knew about the educational establishment because I was immersed in it. I knew about journalism because I read it. Not only newspapers, but magazines like New Statesman and Nation, The Spectator and Encounter. How little I understood that these were hopelessly uneconomic undertakings.
Nowadays I realise how lucky I was. People won't pay to read the work of journalists. Especially the sort of self-indulgent stuff that I imagined that I would be able to write. Thank goodness for this blog, which allows me to play at journalism without putting my income in danger.
This page on journalist remuneration from Prospects, a website devoted to providing information about graduate careers is fairly shocking. Even the highest salary band mentioned is barely at the level at which an intern to an investment bank is paid. How could anyone armed with this knowledge choose to go into journalism as a career? How could anyone hope to own a modest house on such a salary.
As I have said before, the press is in a spiral of decline because of the migration of job and classified advertising to the web. Once a tipping point is reached nobody will ever go to a newspaper to find a job and the papers will simply close down. Twenty years ago there were half a dozen specialist publications which were supported by advertising for software developers. I am out of that industry, but I'd be surprised if any of them survive in anything like their previous form. Computer programmers may have been the first to see the advantages of finding their perfect job online, but it can't be long before the rest of the world follow.