Wolff: In digital media's youth crusade, career paths are fuzzy

An extraordinary aspect of digital journalism is the age of the people who work in it. This is perhaps so self-evident that there appears to be little research on the subject. But certainly a trip from an old-media organization to a new one is something of a sight gag. It's as though the world begins after 1980.

The news media, like most businesses built on craft and culture, have largely worked as an apprentice system. Younger people learned skills and language from older people. A good media job would have been judged on the basis of the caliber of the more senior people you could learn from.

Within the last 10 years, with much of the focus on new start-up Web- and mobile-focused media companies, and massive staff cuts (longest in, first out) in the traditional business, that older side of media has been depleted if not decapitated.

There is, too, the view that an older generation has nothing to teach anyway, possessing neither the new skills nor new language. It is not part of the native digital world. Hence, it's been a natural kind of generational cleansing.

Obviously, too, the young are cheaper than the old — much cheaper. Digital media not only self-selects from its natives, but from practitioners who are able to work for peanuts. As the journalism world has been gutted on its middle-class side, large numbers of fundamentally non-economic players have been added on the digital side — young people not supporting families, or often even themselves.

This is, in one sense, counterintuitive because the traditional side still produces vastly more revenue and profit than the evolving new side — in many instance the old support the new (and the young). True, the traditional side is shrinking, while the digital side is growing — though far from fast enough to support a next-gen journalism middle class.

Still, if there is a promising shore to reach, low salaries are part of what is necessary to get there.

But I wonder whether the speculative nature of this career is clear to those who are trying to join it. Not only is middle-class security far from guaranteed in most of these digital journalism businesses — really polymorphous content businesses — but there is hardly a proven market for many of the novel skills that are being learned in this new content marketplace and high-risk apprenticeship.

Among these are techniques of traffic building, video processing and information aggregation. The most sought after category in "content employment" is in social marketing — that is, as someone who can work the underlying system of social media, most specifically Facebook, to attract traffic. There are more than 50,000 such jobs listed on LinkedIn.

These new journalism and content jobs may one day produce real profits, but their value is now equivocal. In fact, judging by the ever-declining price of advertising, and the per head worth of a user in most digital media, the value of those techniques and of the digital journalism craft as a whole rather appears to be in free fall.

The New York Timeshas just announced a reorganization of its digital video assets, a side of its business that had in fact been reorganized before as an area of promising growth. That growth, or value, did not materialize — at least not enough — in part because no clear success model exists. Low-production-quality video may one day work in the modern newsroom, or it may not. That prompts the question: if you are a low-paid cog learning a speculative craft, what do you have in the end if these skills you've acquired turn out to be worth little or nothing?

What exactly is the career that is being built?

An answer to that question seems to have been sufficiently delayed by a sense of rising numbers. BuzzFeed and Vice have become leading symbols of a great, in-the-billions, speculative market. On the other hand, a job at these companies is also something of a what-me-worry punch line. If not quite a sense of victimhood, there is a sense, at least among many of those without an ownership stake, of being a cultural cliché, or perhaps a benighted dupe. That is, someone may come out of this with riches and a promising future, but it probably won't be you.

The Gawker Media staff, on its part, has voted to unionize, a kind of explicit acknowledgement on the limits of upward mobility in this new world.

Curiously, though, this generational divide, however economically fraught, may have already had a big social and journalism impact. It's a new bias. Not so much regional, socioeconomic and ideological, but related to age. The media reflect the social esprit de corps of the young.

Arguably, the almost universal media celebration, at least in digital venues, of the gay marriage decision was part of this. I wonder whether you can extend this and say that age bias itself, this sense of generational social triumph, is now one of the attractions to digital journalism. It can't pay you or sustain you, but it can elevate you. There does rather seem to be an inverse growth in the discussion about the virtues and importance and reverence for journalism at the same time it loses more and more resources and experienced practitioners.

Bubbles are about fooling people. The young would seem to be an obvious and excellent target.