By way of Billy Beck [1], I note Tom Bartlett [2]has decided not to do his column anymore.
In the not-too-distant past, this was impossible. If you didn’t write for a newspaper, it was very hard to get out commentary on topical subjects in a timely manner. But if you were any good, it wasn’t too difficult to make a pretty nice living as a columnist because there were many newspapers and competition raised the value of those columnists that readers would follow from one paper to another.
…
As a result, the demand for traditional column writing has pretty much dried up, just as the demand for buggy whips collapsed when the automobile came along. I don’t mourn the old system. I am a great fan of bloggers and learn far more from them than I do from the Broders and Friedmans of the world, who have largely become irrelevant to serious political discussion.
Obviously, Bartlett takes a little longer to get to the second quoted paragraph than my edit would seem to suggest, The way he did all of this though, made me think of the reasons that I decided to leave broadcasting as a profession some years ago. Indeed Bartlett mentions broadcasters in his piece… though I think he’s looking more at news and comment types, which I was only briefly during the early 80’s when ABC Talkradio came to town.
(Sigh) When I was coming up in the early and middle seventies, one could make a fairly decent living at it. And you can have a helluva lot of fun while you were at it. For my money, there is nothing like the connection you make with listeners who have come to know you, who share your love for music, and are willing to give you feedback on the work you do. There is nothing in my experience that comes close. Add to that, that I was lucky enough to work with people that I’ve grown up listening to and whose abilities I admired. I found myself amazed when they held me and my abilities to be equal to their own. I’ll always cherish that. Despite how a topsy turvy the radio world could be, I was never out of work for longer than I wanted to be. I’d take a short vacation, make a couple of phone calls, and I’d be back on the air, somewhere, by the next evening. That’s the way it used to be… and the way it had been for a long time. I had thought to make radio my life’s work.
But, by the time I decided to pull the plug in 1988 the signals that already been there for a long time. There will always be radio people around, but you’re never going to be able to make the same kind of money, and there won’t be nearly the positions open. Automation, satellite delivery for tourist rail stations , changing programming requirements, direct satellite radio, the CD player, etc… All of these led to putting my chosen field in pretty much the same situation as Bartlett describes, here. Radioed jobs were already approximately as stable as a fart in a windstorm, and all of those points just made it worse. And I knew it was time for me to move. I’d always been a computer hobby type, even from the earliest days of personal computing. I built not one, but two Sinclair ZX 81’s, for example. And so the career and the hobby switched their primary roles. And with Plan B successfully implemented, I’ve done all right for myself. I’ve actually had two careers in my lifetime, thus far, both involving things I absolutely love doing. In that respect, I suppose I’m very lucky.
As for this… I’ve wondered for a long time, about the specific effects that the blogging world was going to have on people such as Bartlett. I’ve always known that would be at least in some cases similar to the situation he describes. graoth and change, you know.
I guess what forces me to comment, here , however, is a bit of respect, and for lack of a better word, sympathy. I’ve lived the situation he describes. And I know how hard that choice he’s made, is to make. It’s a choice that’s not made an easier when you know you’re good at the job you’re leaving. And, he is.