Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity.
I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity.
This is one of my concerns about the recent antipathy toward standardized testing. My family came over from Bangladesh, at a time when there were less than 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. Didn't have much cultural knowledge, didn't know anybody important, and it didn't matter. Did well on the SATs, did well on the LSATs--in either engineering or law, being a foreigner didn't hold me back. Not sure what would've happened if those objective measures hadn't existed. (I mean I guess I do know what happened--family connections mattered a lot more in e.g. the legal field back in the day.)
When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests. That’s why it is the privileged elite who decry tests and call for “diversity.” Under the guise and mask of diversity they try to maintain and entrench their privilege while giving the occasional breadcrumbs to the truly historically disadvantaged.
I can’t for the life of me understand how the daughter of Bill Gates is the same as a poor African American from the ghetto.
Diversity initiatives are almost always a subterfuge or false flag operation.
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Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.
What do you think about the system on the subcontinent? I'm not sure how it's done in Bangladesh, but in India your higher education is basically decided by your score on a few objective measures which are orders of magnitude more difficult than the SAT.
It's actually mind-boggling how much harder IIT JEE math is compared to SAT math.
People hate on tech interviews, but it's honestly a lot more fair than traditional interviewing if done properly. You only gauge the candidate on their ability to solve and think through a problem. I also follow a trainer's pattern who doesn't read the candidate's resume before a technical screen to further reduce bias.
I kinda agree. When I started in the early 2000s, the norm was a 1-2 hour battery of psychological tests that somehow tried to assess my intelligence before someone technical even spoke to me.
1-2 hours of leetcode, or a 5-6 hours take-home project is a godsend. Programming is my passion anyways.
>I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist"
A few years ago when some journos got laid off, people on twitter meme-ed that they should learn to code. Not only did the journos make it extremely apparent just how far beneath them they think software development is, they also went out of their way to attack the people ribbing them. (With their standard tools: guilt by association to 4chan who got in on the ribbing, and getting twitter to categorize criticism in the wrong direction as abuse.) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
It's not the reason, but analyzing this sort of thing is a start.
This hits the nail on the head. All of my friends who are in the process of becoming journalists have to spend tons of time working unpaid shitty internships just to get a low paying bottom rung job.
The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often both.
This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large - most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have rich parents.
The cause is pretty obvious: journalists and other humanities do not pay well. People are not willing to pay for the garbage modern journalists put out, so there is not much money in the field. The only people going into the field, therefore, are those who are independently rich (rich parents) and ideologically motivated (which further reduces the quality of modern journalism).
> I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".
It's easy: they want to protect their field. This is basically a "not in my backyard" movement. "X industry should be more diverse. Not mine, because that would means more competition for me."
> I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".
Software pays significantly more. Why push people into lower paying jobs?
> I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".
Because it's a shrinking industry with excess supply where the compensation and working conditions are terrible? It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
> I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
The answer lies in where those "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives come from.
Software/Tech workers, unlike many other fields, don't have any prominant organizations that advocate for their rights, set working standards, conduct examinations for certificates, or even just speak for them in public. The void is currently filled by others, such as Tech CEOs and organization in other fields, who have other agendas. One of the agenda is to get more people into the field, reducing barrier of entry so that Tech companies have an easier time hiring.
Essentially, software/tech workers don't have a say in our field like the accountants/doctors/pharmacists/lawyers/trades.
Coding is an accessible path to wealth which conceivably could support more. Nursing receives that in pulses and there are tons of organizations and outright unions for them. Nursing has boom and bust cycle
Those which fail at scalability and wealth would fall flat before it gets off the drawing board. An initiative to promte being a X would be utterly panned for these for instance.
1. janitor
2. social worker
3. hollywood actor
4. major league athlete
5. CEO
> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network.
Is tech really that different?
* When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previous companies, which usually hire from prestigious universities.
* Much of what we look at is how many talks a senior candidate has done, their name recognition (aka brand), etc... all indicators of prestige, but not necessarily talent.
* When evaluating junior candidates with a lack of job experience the candidate pool is often selected on collegiate prestige.
* Hiring is often done by algorithm interviews which, if you went to a prestigious school, are what they spend more time teaching.
I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships had I not spent years putting out other peoples software fires first.
Every profession has problems around social social proof. There are limited resources for recruiting and so heuristics that work get used. But I really can't think of any field that does better than tech in terms of keeping those barriers low relative to possible income and prestige.
I know people who dropped out of high school making >300k/yr as software engineers, and god only knows how many college drop outs (myself included) who are also making that kind of money.
Conversely, people I know who went to law schools that are not one of the top 10 in the country are never even considered for high paying jobs in their industry. If a path to those jobs is available, it does not appear to be widely known, unlike the path to big tech.
Yes, without social proof getting your start is harder, and all else being equal ivy league grads will always have a leg up on you, but these are some truly phenomenal opportunities for people to climb the ladder.
I agree with you that it's definitely about who you know - if you go to Stanford, you can get better jobs out of college compared to someone with similar skills who didn't. But I worked at a FAANG (or whatever it's called now) company and many of the senior engineers we hired were from small/less prestigious companies. These were people with ~10 years of experience who had become great software engineers but had never considered themselves in a class to work in big tech. Then, when given a chance, they got an offer and often accepted it because it paid so much better than their old job. If there weren't such high demand for software engineers, the company would just have hired from other big tech companies since it's safer, but they were forced to try to find people in unexpected places.
On the other hand, these people were still negatively impacted by their backgrounds: they hadn't had the chance to join fancy tech companies out of college, which meant they missed out on several years of career opportunities. They were more likely to be hired at a Senior Software Engineer level, for example, when someone similar from a big tech company might be hired at Staff+.
> I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships had I not spent years putting out other peoples software fires first.
If you tried to get into journalism instead chances are you would be flipping burgers at McDonalds right now. Sure tech isn't perfect, but it is much better than almost any other field. The fact that you could work your way up that quickly is just proof how well we have it in this field.
People say "everyone should learn to code" because that's where the money is. It's well understood that becoming a journalist is a cause of, not a solution to, financial woes.
> "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor".
In theory, everyone already is a citizen journalist, and everyone should've learned to be a copy editor in the public school system. Much of the impetus for the "everyone should learn to code" effort is by analogy with English class, which is required every year in the public school system, but programming class is usually an exotic elective reserved for upper-middle-class districts. Illiteracy is not socially acceptable in America, but lots of people will say "Oh, I'm just not a math person", and programming is considered a profession rather than a requisite skill.
The woes of professional journalists are somewhat related to this. We're surrounded by a glut of potential writers. Because of that, we need heuristics for who we should actually pay attention to. One easy heuristic for that is pedigree: who do you know, what family were you born into, which college did you go to?
Also, for many of the prestigious publications, the way into the door is often via unpaid internships, and interns who do really well eventually get paying jobs. Only those whose families can support them well into their 20s can afford to do that.
> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network.
>My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
As someone who has done both (and moved from journalism to engineering 4.5 years ago), I agree with the first half of your comment, but I disagree with this conclusion.
I do agree with you that we should encourage everyone to be a citizen journalist or copy editor, and to a certain extent, social media has done that -- much to the chagrin of many members of the public who then decry the state of the news media. There was a massive push by many of the leading journalism think tanks (Poynter, Niemen, CJR, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, etc.) more than a decade ago for citizen journalism and the rise of user-generated content directly led to news organizations like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which in turn informed news and news techniques from the likes of the Times, the Washington Post, etc. And despite media being an utter and complete shithole, more people than ever want to be journalists. But that's not the whole story.
The problem, and the reason this isn't a rejection of Jevon's paradox, is that even though the appetite and potential audience for news has increased, the business models around news have collapsed. Larger outlets have managed to sustain, and in some cases like the New York Times, pivot themselves into even larger and more powerful centers -- but thousands more have gone out of business. There have been so many layoffs in the last few years (and at digital outlets too - not just antiquated local papers), it's beyond depressing. There were 16,000 layoffs in newsrooms (print, digital, broadcast) in 2020 [1], and even with the gains in digital organizations, there are still 30,000 fewer working journalists in the US today than in 2008 [2]
I don't blame tech for the death of the newspaper, for what it's worth, (although Craigslist and the expectation of everything online being free didn't help), the print industry did a lot of it to themselves. But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
So you have a flooded labor market and not enough jobs. And those jobs? Don't pay well. Which means that like a lot of other humanities, those jobs are largely taken by the people that can afford to do it, and there goes your diversity numbers. And in New York, DC, or San Francisco/LA (where US news bureaus are largely located), cost of living is insanely high. So you have kids who paid $180,000 for a graduate degree in journalism making $45,000* a year to work in New York City, where they have to live in a shitty apartment in Brooklyn with three other roommates. Or, they come from money and have parents who bought them an apartment.
From a monetary perspective, I did very well in journalism, especially for someone who was mid-career and not an executive editor. I make more than double in tech. And in journalism, I was making more than double some of my coworkers (close to 3 times for some of them). To be fair, I work at a FAANG, so I'm an outlier -- and I have some friends/colleagues/mentors who made/make more in journalism than I do in tech -- so at the very top, journalism can be lucrative. But in mid-sized cities, it's abysmal.
Part of the reason people encourage "everyone to learn to code," is that for now, the labor demand is larger than the supply and so salaries are high. That probably won't last forever, but it has definitely been the trend for a long time. And another part of the reason is that in general, society dismisses humanities as being less important. And yes, to your point, there probably is also a part of gate-keeping by the elites in those fields to keep it rarified, but I don't think that's the whole story.
Joshua Benton wrote a great piece for Nieman Lab (part of Harvard's journalism institution) last month that really encapsulates a lot of the diversity challenge and what changes need to happen to make things better [3], but what he doesn't touch on as much is the fact that once people are skilled to be journalists, the jobs and the pay just aren't there for many people, especially compared to other professions.
* Thanks to labor unions, the floor for entry-level newsroom jobs at at least major digital outlets is getting closer to $55k on average, but I still know of big places that hire people in at $45k. And people take those jobs even when they cannot really afford to live on that salary.
Thank you for the detailed response with your real-life experience and links; material like this is why I come here! Link 3 in particular sounds like a tailor-made companion piece to this article.
> But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
This is exactly what I don't get. You'd think at least one large regional newspaper would have the gumption to try and pivot completely into an app-only, region-wide live version of Twitter or something like that. Currently, small swathes of this are being captured by (terrible) startups like Citizen [1].
Basically, what you're saying is the standard narrative, that free content on the web has destroyed the traditional media model. What I'm saying is the traditional large media houses have totally failed at embracing this model, and converting themselves into efficient producers of it. If they had shown more imagination, maybe we'd be reading information-packed Live Wires on NYTimesWire interspersed with ads, instead of Tweets interspersed with ads.
Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth).
You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don’t anymore. We don’t need them.
If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at the NYT is night and day.
"Don't talk to cops" is a popular idea, but nobody thinks the same of journalists even though most are effectively undercover idea-police for the establishment. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you by a journalist at no potential benefit to you. At best, they won't fuck up your public image.
Haha, you're all so fucking angry you don't have breathless useful idiots like Wu, Scoble, Kelly, Swisher, or Shirky dominating the tech press anymore. It's precious!
Posting like this breaks the site guidelines badly. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and drop the name-calling, flamebait, fulmination, and snark.
I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition now with people that can own their own distribution and aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece.
The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
Focusing on such statistics usually encourages equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity.
A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but can’t, along with the various factors that are preventing them from getting into their desired profession.
If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc., you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at institutional bias, but there’s still no way to prove causation with just that data.
You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are that’re faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do something about those specific obstacles.
Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true.
It seems to me as though people who make a big deal out of "lack of diversity" in any field are saying that it's because of some form of discrimination or bias in hiring. This is the primary hypothesis they're putting forward, often as fact, as opposed to the reality that it's a hypothesis until it's adequately substantiated with unbiased data collected from multiple sources.
The hypothesis may be true, but it's hard to tell objectively (e.g. I don't know many managers who would even be capable of seeing that they're biased, let alone acknowledging their biases). Accusing people of being biased without evidence isn't constructive for anyone involved either.
So we need to come at the problem a little differently, and accept the fact that we're never going to get a 100% clear-cut answer, but we can get much closer to the truth than we are right now. We also need to accept the fact that the reality will change over time, and so regular interrogation of the hypothesis is necessary.
We can look at a variety of metrics to try to tease out whether there are biases in specific companies (this list is by no means complete, these are just two studies that I can think of conducting off the top of my head):
1. Compare the candidates who actively apply for jobs to those who actually get the jobs. This comparison must not only include candidates' group affiliations (ethnicity, gender, age, etc.), but reliable measures of competency for the particular role for which they applied.
2. Find out from a larger pool of people outside of (1) whether they would have applied for a particular job but did not or could not because of particular barriers.
If you find that the data from (1) shows that there are candidates who have particular group affiliations and meet the competency criteria for the roles, and they are less preferred by a particular company than people of other group affiliations of similar or lower competency, then you can say with a reasonable degree of likelihood that whoever made the hiring decisions at those specific companies is/are probably biased. Not the company as a whole - just the people who made the hiring decisions (there won't be data on the other people in the company, so you can't make judgements of them from such a study). Do that for enough companies in different geographies and you'll get a sense of the different biases in different cities/states/countries (e.g. some places may be biased against competent women, others may be biased against competent older people).
Then, (2) should help us to find out qualitatively what factors are actively contributing to people not even applying for particular jobs in the first place. These may be structural problems in countries'/states'/cities' education systems, lack of access to food or housing, poverty, etc. (the possibilities are almost endless). This will form the basis for more study to figure out how to best address particular structural problems/impediments.
So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general??
Because if you look at the actual data from the big tech companies there is literally 1 very obvious reason that all groups are under-represented. Because the "Asian" group in most big tech companies is about as big as the "White" group despite being a faaar smaller part of the population.
And don't forget that the data group everyone with ancestors from Asia, a rather large and diverse place, as being from a single demographic. That is, if they don't group people from an Asian background in the broad "not historically underrepresented" category. As if Uighers and Cambodians (for instance) have massive institutional advantages.
From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications."
It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.
I think it is more that industries that rely heavily on actual productivity/measurable competency are going to lean more heavily on the immigrant population because domestic STEM education largely seems to suck.
It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
I'd be curious how they define race. Do they have a rule book with color pigment density, size of external attributes and maybe even a grading scale of good to bad "diversity factor"?
I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity. What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be more worried if all journalists are students of the same school of thought than if they were all blue-skinned.
And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D
And when the government in China asked me my "self reported racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...
There's obviously not a perfect definition of race, but it's also obvious that many news orgs are, by basically any definition, very disproportionally white compared to the racial markup (however you decide to define that) of their candidate pool.
I think of race as an ideology- different groups seem to have roughly similar views about it when they have shared history- it's a social construct, so it's difficult/impossible to really convey to other people what it means to someone. For example, the concepts of white/black races seem to have originated in the US somewhere around 1700 [1], and are noticeably absent from older writings.
For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent. The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to interpret literally.
Yes, a common conception of race is nation/region/tribe- eg. Trojan, Roman, Mongol, or the various SA tribes. So, a modern US-centric version could be the state you are from, or rural/urban, etc. It's meaningless, though, unless society adopts the concept, and given the worldview nowadays it's hard to imagine anything more granular than continental origin gaining traction (at least in US).
You see this phenomenon in policy development too.
My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though).
Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.
So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications.
This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors.
The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there.
Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades.
Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3).
After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to.
Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors.
At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.
> The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.
I hadn't thought of that but, yeah. While I know people who jumped straight to name publications based on some combination of connections and college newspaper experience, it was also pretty common to "pay your dues" at small town papers before (again, often through connections) landing at some big-time pub.
And, as you say, those small-town newspapers are pretty hurting these days where they still exist at all.
Isn't it a luxury to be able to put down money for a journalism degree tuition in the US? I think this may already be explained quite well for the US higher education system, how do these ratios compare to journalism degrees'?
A journalism degree is by no means a pre-requisite to working as a journalist. In fact, a fair number of people would argue it's a negative relative to real-world experience. I'm not sure any of the working tech journalists I know have a J-school degree.
How do they become journalists? Straight out of high school? Or there are non-university shorter courses they need to take?
I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite scary to me.
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I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible.
My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
This is one of my concerns about the recent antipathy toward standardized testing. My family came over from Bangladesh, at a time when there were less than 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. Didn't have much cultural knowledge, didn't know anybody important, and it didn't matter. Did well on the SATs, did well on the LSATs--in either engineering or law, being a foreigner didn't hold me back. Not sure what would've happened if those objective measures hadn't existed. (I mean I guess I do know what happened--family connections mattered a lot more in e.g. the legal field back in the day.)
I can’t for the life of me understand how the daughter of Bill Gates is the same as a poor African American from the ghetto.
Diversity initiatives are almost always a subterfuge or false flag operation.
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Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.
It's actually mind-boggling how much harder IIT JEE math is compared to SAT math.
As an awkward autistic guy who often gets mistaken for hispanic, the tech interviews are a god-send.
1-2 hours of leetcode, or a 5-6 hours take-home project is a godsend. Programming is my passion anyways.
A few years ago when some journos got laid off, people on twitter meme-ed that they should learn to code. Not only did the journos make it extremely apparent just how far beneath them they think software development is, they also went out of their way to attack the people ribbing them. (With their standard tools: guilt by association to 4chan who got in on the ribbing, and getting twitter to categorize criticism in the wrong direction as abuse.) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code
It's not the reason, but analyzing this sort of thing is a start.
The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often both.
This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large - most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have rich parents.
It's easy: they want to protect their field. This is basically a "not in my backyard" movement. "X industry should be more diverse. Not mine, because that would means more competition for me."
Naval hit the nail on the head here: `The whole Social Justice Warrior-ing trend seems like a case of white-on-white violence.`
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1132170896817266688
Software pays significantly more. Why push people into lower paying jobs?
Because it's a shrinking industry with excess supply where the compensation and working conditions are terrible? It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
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The answer lies in where those "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives come from.
Software/Tech workers, unlike many other fields, don't have any prominant organizations that advocate for their rights, set working standards, conduct examinations for certificates, or even just speak for them in public. The void is currently filled by others, such as Tech CEOs and organization in other fields, who have other agendas. One of the agenda is to get more people into the field, reducing barrier of entry so that Tech companies have an easier time hiring.
Essentially, software/tech workers don't have a say in our field like the accountants/doctors/pharmacists/lawyers/trades.
Those which fail at scalability and wealth would fall flat before it gets off the drawing board. An initiative to promte being a X would be utterly panned for these for instance.
1. janitor 2. social worker 3. hollywood actor 4. major league athlete 5. CEO
> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network.
Is tech really that different?
* When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previous companies, which usually hire from prestigious universities.
* Much of what we look at is how many talks a senior candidate has done, their name recognition (aka brand), etc... all indicators of prestige, but not necessarily talent.
* When evaluating junior candidates with a lack of job experience the candidate pool is often selected on collegiate prestige.
* Hiring is often done by algorithm interviews which, if you went to a prestigious school, are what they spend more time teaching.
I've been programming my whole life, but I'm a drop out and spent a chunk of my formative years in the military. The only way I got into being a full time SWE was working as a SRE-SE first. I would've never gotten one of these kush internships had I not spent years putting out other peoples software fires first.
Every profession has problems around social social proof. There are limited resources for recruiting and so heuristics that work get used. But I really can't think of any field that does better than tech in terms of keeping those barriers low relative to possible income and prestige.
I know people who dropped out of high school making >300k/yr as software engineers, and god only knows how many college drop outs (myself included) who are also making that kind of money.
Conversely, people I know who went to law schools that are not one of the top 10 in the country are never even considered for high paying jobs in their industry. If a path to those jobs is available, it does not appear to be widely known, unlike the path to big tech.
Yes, without social proof getting your start is harder, and all else being equal ivy league grads will always have a leg up on you, but these are some truly phenomenal opportunities for people to climb the ladder.
On the other hand, these people were still negatively impacted by their backgrounds: they hadn't had the chance to join fancy tech companies out of college, which meant they missed out on several years of career opportunities. They were more likely to be hired at a Senior Software Engineer level, for example, when someone similar from a big tech company might be hired at Staff+.
If you tried to get into journalism instead chances are you would be flipping burgers at McDonalds right now. Sure tech isn't perfect, but it is much better than almost any other field. The fact that you could work your way up that quickly is just proof how well we have it in this field.
In theory, everyone already is a citizen journalist, and everyone should've learned to be a copy editor in the public school system. Much of the impetus for the "everyone should learn to code" effort is by analogy with English class, which is required every year in the public school system, but programming class is usually an exotic elective reserved for upper-middle-class districts. Illiteracy is not socially acceptable in America, but lots of people will say "Oh, I'm just not a math person", and programming is considered a profession rather than a requisite skill.
The woes of professional journalists are somewhat related to this. We're surrounded by a glut of potential writers. Because of that, we need heuristics for who we should actually pay attention to. One easy heuristic for that is pedigree: who do you know, what family were you born into, which college did you go to?
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The term for this is "classism".
As someone who has done both (and moved from journalism to engineering 4.5 years ago), I agree with the first half of your comment, but I disagree with this conclusion.
I do agree with you that we should encourage everyone to be a citizen journalist or copy editor, and to a certain extent, social media has done that -- much to the chagrin of many members of the public who then decry the state of the news media. There was a massive push by many of the leading journalism think tanks (Poynter, Niemen, CJR, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, etc.) more than a decade ago for citizen journalism and the rise of user-generated content directly led to news organizations like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which in turn informed news and news techniques from the likes of the Times, the Washington Post, etc. And despite media being an utter and complete shithole, more people than ever want to be journalists. But that's not the whole story.
The problem, and the reason this isn't a rejection of Jevon's paradox, is that even though the appetite and potential audience for news has increased, the business models around news have collapsed. Larger outlets have managed to sustain, and in some cases like the New York Times, pivot themselves into even larger and more powerful centers -- but thousands more have gone out of business. There have been so many layoffs in the last few years (and at digital outlets too - not just antiquated local papers), it's beyond depressing. There were 16,000 layoffs in newsrooms (print, digital, broadcast) in 2020 [1], and even with the gains in digital organizations, there are still 30,000 fewer working journalists in the US today than in 2008 [2]
I don't blame tech for the death of the newspaper, for what it's worth, (although Craigslist and the expectation of everything online being free didn't help), the print industry did a lot of it to themselves. But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
So you have a flooded labor market and not enough jobs. And those jobs? Don't pay well. Which means that like a lot of other humanities, those jobs are largely taken by the people that can afford to do it, and there goes your diversity numbers. And in New York, DC, or San Francisco/LA (where US news bureaus are largely located), cost of living is insanely high. So you have kids who paid $180,000 for a graduate degree in journalism making $45,000* a year to work in New York City, where they have to live in a shitty apartment in Brooklyn with three other roommates. Or, they come from money and have parents who bought them an apartment.
From a monetary perspective, I did very well in journalism, especially for someone who was mid-career and not an executive editor. I make more than double in tech. And in journalism, I was making more than double some of my coworkers (close to 3 times for some of them). To be fair, I work at a FAANG, so I'm an outlier -- and I have some friends/colleagues/mentors who made/make more in journalism than I do in tech -- so at the very top, journalism can be lucrative. But in mid-sized cities, it's abysmal.
Part of the reason people encourage "everyone to learn to code," is that for now, the labor demand is larger than the supply and so salaries are high. That probably won't last forever, but it has definitely been the trend for a long time. And another part of the reason is that in general, society dismisses humanities as being less important. And yes, to your point, there probably is also a part of gate-keeping by the elites in those fields to keep it rarified, but I don't think that's the whole story.
Joshua Benton wrote a great piece for Nieman Lab (part of Harvard's journalism institution) last month that really encapsulates a lot of the diversity challenge and what changes need to happen to make things better [3], but what he doesn't touch on as much is the fact that once people are skilled to be journalists, the jobs and the pay just aren't there for many people, especially compared to other professions.
* Thanks to labor unions, the floor for entry-level newsroom jobs at at least major digital outlets is getting closer to $55k on average, but I still know of big places that hire people in at $45k. And people take those jobs even when they cannot really afford to live on that salary.
[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/2020-newsroom-layoffs-data/
[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo...
[3] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/its-time-to-create-an-alte...
> But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.
This is exactly what I don't get. You'd think at least one large regional newspaper would have the gumption to try and pivot completely into an app-only, region-wide live version of Twitter or something like that. Currently, small swathes of this are being captured by (terrible) startups like Citizen [1].
Basically, what you're saying is the standard narrative, that free content on the web has destroyed the traditional media model. What I'm saying is the traditional large media houses have totally failed at embracing this model, and converting themselves into efficient producers of it. If they had shown more imagination, maybe we'd be reading information-packed Live Wires on NYTimesWire interspersed with ads, instead of Tweets interspersed with ads.
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[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/27/22595648/citizen-app-crim...
Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth).
You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don’t anymore. We don’t need them.
If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at the NYT is night and day.
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We've had to ask you this more than once before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition now with people that can own their own distribution and aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece.
The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but can’t, along with the various factors that are preventing them from getting into their desired profession.
If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc., you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at institutional bias, but there’s still no way to prove causation with just that data.
You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are that’re faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do something about those specific obstacles.
Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The point is that you can’t see equality of opportunity by looking at the output.
The hypothesis may be true, but it's hard to tell objectively (e.g. I don't know many managers who would even be capable of seeing that they're biased, let alone acknowledging their biases). Accusing people of being biased without evidence isn't constructive for anyone involved either.
So we need to come at the problem a little differently, and accept the fact that we're never going to get a 100% clear-cut answer, but we can get much closer to the truth than we are right now. We also need to accept the fact that the reality will change over time, and so regular interrogation of the hypothesis is necessary.
We can look at a variety of metrics to try to tease out whether there are biases in specific companies (this list is by no means complete, these are just two studies that I can think of conducting off the top of my head):
1. Compare the candidates who actively apply for jobs to those who actually get the jobs. This comparison must not only include candidates' group affiliations (ethnicity, gender, age, etc.), but reliable measures of competency for the particular role for which they applied.
2. Find out from a larger pool of people outside of (1) whether they would have applied for a particular job but did not or could not because of particular barriers.
If you find that the data from (1) shows that there are candidates who have particular group affiliations and meet the competency criteria for the roles, and they are less preferred by a particular company than people of other group affiliations of similar or lower competency, then you can say with a reasonable degree of likelihood that whoever made the hiring decisions at those specific companies is/are probably biased. Not the company as a whole - just the people who made the hiring decisions (there won't be data on the other people in the company, so you can't make judgements of them from such a study). Do that for enough companies in different geographies and you'll get a sense of the different biases in different cities/states/countries (e.g. some places may be biased against competent women, others may be biased against competent older people).
Then, (2) should help us to find out qualitatively what factors are actively contributing to people not even applying for particular jobs in the first place. These may be structural problems in countries'/states'/cities' education systems, lack of access to food or housing, poverty, etc. (the possibilities are almost endless). This will form the basis for more study to figure out how to best address particular structural problems/impediments.
So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general??
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...
From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications."
It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.
It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
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I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity. What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be more worried if all journalists are students of the same school of thought than if they were all blue-skinned.
And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D
And when the government in China asked me my "self reported racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...
For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent. The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to interpret literally.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevanc...
If the answer is yes, then there should be some specific unspoken criteria that exists, so what are they?
If no, then how do people tell whether a panel is diverse, or a class or company is diverse, when it's not self-reported?
My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though).
Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.
This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors.
The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph?
That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there.
Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades.
Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3).
After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to.
Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors.
At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.
Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.
And, as you say, those small-town newspapers are pretty hurting these days where they still exist at all.
I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite scary to me.