If you’re a journalist in 2020, you could fill several thick notebooks with the reasons you have to be scared, demoralised, beaten-down, disillusioned… really, insert any negative emotion you can imagine. These are terrible times for this line of work, especially in the United States.
The field is being hit with wave after wave of contraction, and local and regional newspapers are dying to the point where all that’s left, with the exception of a handful of the biggest cities, is a giant news desert dotted with tiny puddles. Countless layoffs have ravaged the industry, leading to many heartbreaking cases of journalists being marooned, midlife, in an unforgiving labour landscape.
My theory is that “Learn to code,” a meme often hurled at laid-off journalists by Twitter trolls, cuts particularly deep because of how neatly it capture the sheer desolation that engulfs journalism’s professionally dispossessed. I’m sorry to be a professional chauvinist, but there is something unique about what we do: it requires such a specific skillset, and, when done right, it feels so meaningful and serves an indispensable societal role.
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