Today, two of my friends asked me to defend my suggestion on Twitter that the San Francisco Chronicle is understaffed. So I went back to look at the numbers, and gave a quick call to Media Workers Guild spokesman Carl Hall.

In the past few years, the Chron has gone from a 400-person newsroom to a 120- person newsroom. Apologies for my limited graphic design skills:

UPDATE:  They’re not alone. In comparison, the local (and now independent) alt weekly East Bay Express had 13 full time editorial staffers in 2005, and now has 4.5, a loss of about 65 percent. So yes, also pretty drastic. The chart:

Here’s a partial timeline of the cuts to the Chron’s newsroom in recent years (thrown together very quickly, so corrections or additions are welcome):

May 2007:  The paper announces they will be cutting back their 400-person newsroom by 25 percent, eliminating  80 unionized jobs and 20 managerial positions. “This is one of the biggest one-time hits we’ve heard about anywhere in the country,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says.

August 2008: The Chron announces they’ll be cutting another 125 positions, although not all from the newsroom. “They’re cutting deep into muscle, sinew and bone now,” Media Guild representative Carl Hall said. “It seems like the entire industry is in a death spiral.”

February 2009: With losses of $50 million the previous year, Hearst threatens to sell or shutter the paper. The paper reportedly has a news staff of 275.

March 2009: The paper threatens to lay off 225 more people, most from the newsroom. In negotiations with the Media Workers’ Guild, they offer to reduce the cuts to merely 150 total people  in exchange for concesssions from the guild. (That’s a 30 % cutback.)  The guild accepts the conditions, which include an extra two hours of work a week for employees who manage to keep their jobs.

April 2009: The Columbia Journalism Review reports that 120 staffers had accepted buyouts.

January 2011:  Carl Hall of the Media Workers Guild told me today that  the newsroom now has about 120 employees, and that the newsroom has been relatively stable for past year. The Wall Street Journal notes that the newsroom is only 40 percent the size it was in January 2009.

If anyone else has stats for me and would like to add a chart to this gallery, just let me know: beckett.lois[at]gmail.

Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan, 2009

REPORTER: Attention. Attention please. Richard Holbrooke is dead.

(silence)

REPORTER (Washington Post): As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

REPORTER 2 (NY Daily News):  Richard Holbrooke spent his last breaths pleading for an end to the U.S’s nine year campaign in Afghanistan–

REPORTER 3 (Foreign Policy):  Did he oppose the war? Was he–Holbrooke the dove?

REPORTER 4 (New York Post): HOLBROOKE: DEATHBED PEACE PLEA!

SPOKESMAN, STATE DEPARTMENT:  Oh, fuck.

REPORTER 5 (The Spectator): The “you” refers to Pakistan! The New York surgeon operating on his heart was born in Pakistan! And everyone agrees that Afghanistan can’t be “solved” without Pakistan!

SPOKESMAN, STATE DEPARTMENT: Excuse me, gentlemen? It was a joke. Ha-ha.

REPORTERS: A joke?

ANONYMOUS AIDE: Mr. Holbrooke was not a starry-eyed peacenik.

SPOKESMAN (P.J. CROWLEY): It was humorous repartee. I think the context was, you know, finishing the job. 

WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN: And as for Mr. Holbrooke’s final words, I think his comment simply demonstrates his committment to his work.

REPORTER (Washington Post):  Mr. Holbrooke was speaking not to his surgeon, but to an Egyptian-American internist, Dr. Jehan El-Bayoumi.

REPORTER: Another Arab?

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: I went to the University of Michigan.

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN (QUARI YOUSAF AHAMADI): According to credible news agencies, Richard Holbrooke is dead. He had been suffering from a heart’s disease. 

Emergence of this untoward phenomenon as an off-shoot of the Afghan issue is not a strange thing.  Former Soviet leaders Brezhnev, Konstantin Cherninkove and Vladimir Andropov  all had  heart  attacks in a short time distance.  They relieved themselves  of the Afghan mission by retreating into the lap of death.

REPORTERS (to DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI): You were there. What did he say?

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: I don’t remember. I was thinking about his heart.

REPORTER: You remember.

REPORTER 2: Don’t Arabs have long memories?

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: I can open him up. I can look at his body. The aorta. The myocardium. Don’t ask me what he said.

REPORTER: You heard it. You were there.

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: I haven’t been confident about a diagnosis since my third year of residency. That was when I conducted an autopsy on a man who died of congestive heart failure. That’s what all the tests said.  And then I looked, and what actually killed him was  lung cancer with lymphangitic spread. It can mimic heart failure on  the most sophisticated tests. It has nothing to do with the heart.

REPORTER 2: Did his family sue the hospital?

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI:  He would have died no matter what the treatment was.  I believe in autopsies. Bodies, once you open them, they don’t lie.

Journalists, I find, also enjoy autopsies. They open invisible bodies. They saw the air.

REPORTER 1: You’ve been in the news before, haven’t you?

REPORTER 2: She’s Hillary Clinton’s physician.

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: Secretary Clinton and I have a lot in common. We both like pantsuits.

REPORTER 1:  That’s not what I was talking about. Remember back in 2004, when we found out that Dick Cheney’s doctor was addicted to pain meds?  Xanax, codeine, Ambien, Stanol, this nasal spray. He had paid $46,000  in two years for the stuff. A GWU doctor. You turned him in.

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: He used my name to write the prescriptions.

REPORTER 2: This was the doctor who told America that, after three heart attacks, Dick Cheney was still “up to the task of the most sensitive public office.”

REPORTER 1: And then Cheney has his fourth heart attack–

REPORTER 2: –and nasal-spray junkie reassures America that Cheney’s ready to go back to work.

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN (QUARI YOUSAF AHAMADI): Brezhnev. Cherninkove. Andropov. A few months ago, an American four stars general, David Peteraeus,  fainted during a Senate hearing–

Holbrooke in Afghanistan

REPORTER: Do all politicians have fragile hearts?

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: Smokers have fragile hearts.

SPOKESMAN (P.J. CROWLEY): The medical team said: ‘You’ve got to relax.’ And Richard said: ‘I can’t. I’m worried about Afghanistan and Pakistan.’ And they finally said: ‘Well, tell you what. We’ll try to fix this challenge while you’re undergoing surgery.’ And he said: ‘Yeah, see if you can take care of that.’ .

SPOKESMAN (P.J. CROWLEY): Holbrooke always wanted to make sure he got the last word.

REPORTER 2: He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize seven times.

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN: He never won it.

JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: When I talk to the family, I never say “autopsy.” It’s a harsh word. I say “aftercare.”

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN:  The protracted Afghan war  had a lethal dent on Holbrook’s health. His life of toils and fatigues ended after admission into a hospital. We believe Holbrooke’s timely death could have a didactic effect on the American strategists.

REPORTER 3: What can Richard Holbrooke’s death teach us about life? NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on the role of stress prevention and getting enough sleep. Could  the 69-year-old Holbrooke have used these simple tactics to prolong his life?

TALIBAN SPOKESMAN: It was a heart’s disease.

REPORTER 2: Were Richard Holbrooke’s final words a joke? We report, you decide!

REPORTER 1: And what about Holbrooke’s surgeon?

DR. FARZAD NAJAM: My name is Farzad Najam.  I was featured in the 2003-04 edition of the National Register’s Who’s Who in Executives and Professionals–

REPORTER 2: And before that?

DR. FARZAD NAJAM: I received bachelor’s degrees in medicine and surgery from King Edward Medical College.

REPORTER 2: In Lahore, Pakistan–

DR. FARZAD NAJAM: A school founded in 1860.

REPORTER 1: After the death of  King Edward VII in 1910, the college was renamed in his honor. He died just soon enough to avoid World War I. They had called Edward “the Peacemaker.”

REPORTER 2: On a typical day, he smoked 20 cigarettes and 12 cigars.

REPORTER 1: The day he died, the King suffered several heart attacks, but refused to go to bed saying, “No, I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end.”

King Edward's mistress, Alice Keppel

REPORTER 2: Nice.

REPORTER 3: I like it.

REPORTER  1: Then he called in his 42-year-old mistress.

REPORTER 2: We report, you decide.

REPORTER 3: “No, I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end.”

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: We told him he needed to calm down.

LES GELB, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS:  Afghanistan is no longer a vital interest of the United States.  Of course, I feel for the  Afghans; but I feel far, far more for Americans….

DR. JEHAN EL-BAYOUMI: That’s all we were saying: calm down.

A note on the text: this post is an experiment in found theater. You could also call it a reporting-based fantasia–not fact, exactly, though mostly built of  facts.  The majority of the text is drawn directly from last week’s news articles and opinion posts.  Any line that follows a hyperlink is either a direct quote or a pretty faithful paraphrase of what an actual person actually said, or, in a few cases,  facts about them from a credible online source. The King Edward anecdotes are history that actually happened, at least according to Wikipedia. Lines without any hyperlinks are my interpolations–unsourced and totally made up.  (For instance, I have no idea if Dr. El-Bayoumi likes pantsuits, or what she has said or would say to journalists.)  This is obviously an odd fusion, but I hope it’s also a transparent way to play around with the real language of news.

One of the obvious inspirations for a news/theater fusion on this topic were the verbatim sections of The Great Game: Afghanistan, which I saw when it came through Berkeley on its American tour.

All thoughts (on form or content) welcome.

Imagine you just became the the editor of a weekly magazine.  You produce a  16ish-page tab  once a week,  plus whatever you want on the web.  You have no advertisers, no responsibility to earn money, and a bunch of smart, ambitious college students willing to work for free.  Your weekly has a tradition of printing old-school longform narrative cover stories, plus embarrassing party photos and snarky columns. But you’re having a bit of an identity crisis.  Blogging has taken off, which means many of the stories you used to cover are now blogged first, and in a conversational tone that used to be your distinctive voice.

What do you do?

I had this conversation yesterday with one of the new editors of The Harvard Crimson’s weekly magazine, Fifteen Minutes. Their first reaction to the growth of The Crimson’s news blog is  to focus on more and better narrative journalism.  Awesome, right? Remember: They don’t have to abase themselves for page views!

My advice for them: 1) Jump into Twitter.  Find ideas and readers there 2) Do fewer stories but make them awesome 3) Let your writers find weird, idosyncratic stories they’re passionate about, rather than dutiful “issue” reporting 4) Become a platform for the campus’ smartest student bloggers. They have ideas. You have eyeballs.  Make like The Atlantic, and put them together.  5) Take a look at Longshot Magazine, and invent some experiments of your own. 6) Think of yourself as a magazine based at a university, not just a magazine of undergraduate life  7) Try  anything.  You will never get an opportunity like this again.

What advice would you give them? What would you do if you got to run a magazine for a year–without worrying about profit?

In the cities and towns of Mexico, the main plaza is usually called the
zocalo. It is a marvelous social institution. Along the sides of most such
public squares are the city hall, the central police station, and the
church. There is a often a band shell in the center, surrounded by a park,
with benches under the trees and shoeshine boys and newsdealers.

Most buildings have arcades fronting the square, and beneath the arcades there
are cafes with tables. In the evening, men and women of all classes arrive
from all districts of the town. Boys and girls walk in groups, flirting,
whispering. At the cafe tables, there is much talkAt one table, the
subject might be football. At another, the cost of living. At a third, the
perils of love. Every sort of imagination is exchanged: news of politics,
corruption, the cost of living. Each night, there are thousands of small
encounters, collisions, illuminations. More important, there is a sense of
belonging in the rude democracy of the zocalo. The daily visitors belong
to that town. They are its citizens. They come to know its great men and
strong women, its frauds and informers, its liars and its truth tellers,
its solid citizens and its criminals. In the zocalo, they come to
understand how the town works and who has real power. They understand
clearly what factors — weather, devaluations, the larger economy — will
affect their ability to put food on their tables. They go to the zocalo to
learn.

The institution of the central plaza has never existed in the same way
north of the Rio Grande. There is no unifying, centralizing place in New
York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Our scale is too large, the cities too
immense. Even our small-town equivalents — the town square or Main Street
– have been abandoned for the glossier attractions of shopping malls. But
I like to think of newspapers as psychological zocalos. A newspaper is a
specific product; but it is also a common destination for citizens from
all walks of life, a thing that is also a shared location. Those citizens
might spend only a short time in the printed zocalo, but they can feel a
small amount of comfort in the big, anonymous, alienating city in knowing
that such a brief experience is common to hundreds of thousands of others.

The newspaper as plaza must be open to all those who want to learn more
about the place in which they live and the world in which that place
exists. If it is too narrow, too insistently rooted in the parish, it
becomes by definition parochial. If its concerns are too ethereal, too
remote from the lives of ordinary citizens, it will become a closed space,
a kind of private club, a force for exclusion instead of inclusion. A
newspaper must be open. It must communicate a sense of welcome. There is
room in the zocalo for people who are interested only in sports or
politics, crime or education. Some might want to know about changing
fashions, the latest plays, movies, or music, the best restaurants. Some
might want a laugh; they can turn to the comic strips. Some might want to
hear the latest gossip.

“What is your audience?” is the question often asked of newspaper
executives.

The answer should be a variation of: “Everyone in the zocalo.”

© Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

A VOICE OR VOICES

First, make a room like your eye. Completely dark.

Seal up the cracks. A curtain over the door.

It doesn’t have to be a room

A shoebox. Some spare cardboard

It could be a room. It could

The important thing

You don’t realize until you try, how difficult

the way light, no matter how late

there’s so much of it

you start to feel

as if someone had spilled it

just a box

and an accurate, sharp

a pin

something like a pin

a hole

right in the middle of the wall

the smaller you make it, the sharper

and an image

because the hole is so small

It’s like discipline. It’s like disciplining the light.

the smaller you make the hole, the sharper

but upside down.

The whole world

not the whole

outside that box. Every piece of light

and you’ll see this little image

It’s because the hole is so small

of course it has to be a room

It’s like your eye. It’s the same thing.

you can’t fit inside a box

It’s like your eye.

because the hole is so small

you can’t see the image on your eye

you never see it

the brain—

if you saw it, you wouldn’t recognize it

like this

A pin pricks through. Then an image, on the far wall of the stage, of a woman’s body. It is hard to see. Upside down and too small.

ACTAEON

You can’t ell me what this is. Can you? This is the light that touched my eye.

The image shifts a little.

That is what I saw.

A sudden flurry of drumbeats. The drums mimic the clopping of hooves; the horses break into a gallop. Voices like the baying of hounds. Suddenly, Actaeon is standing in bright light, drawing back his enormous bow. He aims, straining the bow and himself to the breaking point. He throws back his head and howls like a dog. He releases the arrow.

Silence. A faraway howl. A HUNTER trudges in from the direction of the arrow.

HUNTER

You missed.

ACTAEON wipes the sweat off his face. The horses’ hooves start back up again, at a walking pace.

ACTAEON

Let’s go back. It’s past noon.

The lights are bright. It’s a very hot day. ACTAEON drains his flask. He is out of water.

ACTAEON

I’ll just—

The light changes

THE HUNTER (as if later)

He said, don’t wait for him. He said

The howl of a single dog.

THE HUNTER

He said

A VOICE OR VOICES

He said he was thirsty

You know what that means

THE HUNTER

He said

A VOICE OR VOICES

He should have known better.

It was hot.

Gone home. There was plenty of

There was water at home

The sound of water. ACTAEON kneels to drink. He splashes his face. He looks up.

The sound of chimes: a goddess moving in air.

A VOICE OR VOICES

What did you see?

ACTAEON

Lines. Planes. Smooth places. Soft ones.

A VOICE OR VOICES

Smooth—

She—

But what did you see?

ACTAEON

There was no touching.

A VOICE OR VOICES

What did you touch?

ACTAEON

Only the light touched her—

The light that touched her touched—

A VOICE OR VOICES

You will have to be more specific.

ACTAEON

—my eye.

A VOICE OR VOICES

There was a her.

You saw her.

ACTAEON

I saw nothing! Only the light—

A VOICE OR VOICES

You saw

ACTAEON

A little image upside down!

A VOICE OR VOICES

And she was wearing?

ACTAEON

An image no bigger than—

No bigger—

Like a diagram in a book, upside down—

A book across the room—

A VOICE OR VOICES

But it didn’t stop there.

It didn’t. Because the brain

ACTAEON

I asked her to let me

I asked

A VOICE OR VOICES

Did you say please?

ACTAEON

I said let me.

Let me tear out my eyes.

I said please.

The sound of a goddess in air.

ACTAEON

I would have torn out my eyes.

A lone woman’s voice, singing. ACTAEON trembles.

A VOICE OR VOICES (very soft)

But what did she look like?

What did she look like in your mind?

Did she—touch—

Was she—

The water—

The tiny projection reappears, and trembles.

ACTAEON

In a dark room. A pinprick. And the image. Of everything outside—

The projection changes. A new slide moves into place: a stag. The howl of a single dog. ACTAEON staring forward, mesmerized. The projection refocuses, the light no longer hitting the scene, but projected on ACTAEON’s body.

ACTAEON

This is how the light reaches you.

A VOICE OR VOICES

The eye opens.

The light enters.

ACTAEON

There was light—

And her, turning—

And the trees closing in—

A VOICE OR VOICES

Close your eyes.

Close them.

The baying of the dogs gets closer.

ACTAEON

I am warning you—

A VOICE OR VOICES

At night, she rises from bed.  The floor cold

But her feet—

Her little feet, fall on the soft pelt—

the skin warm against her skin—

HUNTER

Close your eyes.

The baying of the dogs becomes unbearable.

End of play.

Matt, I think you make a great point that Ambinder’s characterization of blogging is in many ways particular to the crowded, ego-heavy DC blog world that he inhabited. But I also think that his criticisms of the demands of an online persona apply more broadly to the different kinds of blogging than you give him credit for.

For the past three years, I’ve heard over and over that journalists must develop a “personal brand” in order to survive in the new world of web journalism. Get a blog, get on Twitter—get an audience, or you’re toast. This idea surfaces regularly in lists of advice for journalism students. I’ve even heard a proposal or two that he journalism of the future will be supported not by advertising or by subscription costs, but by fan club sales: buy a t-shirt from your favorite narrative journalist! Look—a coffee mug with a picture of Susan Orlean’s chicken! I think Ambinder’s essay is important because it’s the first time I’ve heard pushback on this idea from a journalist who was very successful in making himself a personal brand. I read Ambinder’s farewell to blogging as his desire to de-brandify himself, to retreat from the persona he had created.

Obviously, as you point out, there are many ways of blogging, and many kinds of blog personas. I assume many bloggers—maybe yourself included—wouldn’t even say they have a “blog persona,” but simply that their ordinary, multi-sided, thinking selves blog.

But I think many bloggers—not just the ones in the DC fishbowl— face the pressure to build and maintain a consistent identity. And Ambinder is right in saying that this is something that print journalists don’t have to deal with in anything like the same way.

“Really good print journalism is ego-free,” Ambinder writes. “What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.”

I wouldn’t gloss this as just talking about narrative journalism, but about the kind of journalism where a reporter gets to start with a clean slate and a single question—where agendas and interest groups and the probable reaction of this group or that one recede, and all that’s pulling you forward is your sense of the still-veiled contours of the story. It’s no accident that Ambinder talks about the story and the reporting process “unfolding.” What makes (at least a lot of) really good journalism is that readers get to discover something that seems new and exciting because the journalist has just discovered it, too.

What’s particularly exciting for journalists about narrative journalism is that part of what it means to discover a story is to discover the voice you’ll use to tell the story. Will you be naïve or knowing, smug or elegiac, angry or extravagant? Will you exaggerate your narrator’s persona to prove a point, or will you let the facts “speak for themselves?” I think distinguishing between different types of narrative journalism as “ego-free” or “ego-driven” based on whether an article “foregrounds the author’s curiosities, concerns and assumptions” is a mistake. Atul Gawande isn’t a more “ego-driven” journalist than David Grann because Gawande writes himself into an article as a character and Grann doesn’t. The two writers are simply making a stylistic choice based on how they think a story can be best communicated to an audience. For any article, a third-person, “just the facts, ma’am” account is every bit as artificial as Joan Didion’s fits of the vapors.

I think this may have been what Tim Carmody was talking about when he wrote of Ambinder, “It’s very hard to blog as a reporter. You have to be a writer, which is different.” Just-the-facts-ma’am reporters may forget that they are enacting a persona, because their voice is given and generic. But part of the essence of being a writer is the creation of an on-page persona—the creation of a voice.

But the great thing about old-school narrative journalism, or straight-up writing, was that you didn’t have to stick to one voice. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you could create a new voice, and a new persona, for every story. A lot of writers don’t—if you find a good persona, why not stick to it?—but the option is always there. And your persona was also limited to a certain article or a certain book. It was confined. You created it and let it go. You didn’t have to wake up to it every morning. If Tom Wolfe didn’t want to feel like a Martian, he could leave his white suit in the closet.

But blogging (and other persona engines, like Twitter) function in a very different way. That’s because what is central to blogging is not just “a series of posts displayed on the Web in reverse-chronological order,” but a very different, interactive and intensive relationship with an audience. I’ve learned a lot from what you’ve said and written about the way blogs can be used to build communities around certain questions or topic-areas, and a lot from Jay Rosen’s insistence that those words “the readers” or “the audience” be replaced with “users” who are part of a community. There are plenty of unfolding benefits to working with, and being accountable, to a whole community, rather than just to your editor.
But I think there is a difficult, sticky area for web journalists in this transitional period, when we have lots of exposure to a vocal audience that hasn’t quite become a community, when we are suddenly required to have a persona (within certain strict guidelines) but haven’t been told when—or if—that persona can ever be shut off.

The structures of the media web reward people who can consistently and volubly fill a certain niche. To succeed as a journalist on the web, by the metrics we use today (Twitter followers, Facebook likes, pageviews) you not only need to specialize in a certain subject, you also need to produce content regularly and rapidly—ideally, you need to produce content in small tweets and snippets all the time. Your personal brand must always be on the march, your narrative advancing. Even the journalists most shielded from the pressures of daily production—say, investigative journalists—are still being asked to present themselves to readers, at least at forward-thinking web news organizations. (CaliforniaWatch, which just won an ONA award, is currently going through their newsroom for a “meet our reporters” series.) In the blog world, you can’t really experiment with one voice today and a different one tomorrow. Well, that’s not quite right: you could, of course, but wouldn’t that undermine your brand?

Historically, one of the joys of being a journalist was getting to be—just slightly—a different person every day. You got to have different obsessions, different companions: today a bank robber, tomorrow a Mennonite. Maybe your copy would be dropped neatly into labeled sections, but nobody could pigeonhole you; your job was to explore the miraculous variability of the world.

I think some people do this very beautifully on the web, but the incentives of the link economy make it much more difficult to succeed at this. Success is easier-if you consolidate and amplify your online persona and keep it consistent. This, we’re told, is the way to stand out of the crowd—even if it means that you end up like Ambinder, tired of the sound of your own voice.

I think Smith’s argument has a lot in common with an essay published earlier today by The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder about why he has decided to leave blogging behind. As media professor Jay Rosen put it, Ambinder concluded that it was “exhausting to articulate and defend an online persona.”

“Blogging is an ego-intensive process,” Ambinder wrote. “Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative… What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called “Marc Ambinder” that people read because it’s “Marc Ambinder,” rather than because it’s good or interesting.”

It seems to me that there’s a lot of overlap in the ways that Ambinder and Zadie Smith are reacting to the social web. As a Facebook user, as a blogger, you are asked to perform a fixed identity. Both the journalist and the novelist balk at this. They do not want to be made coherent. In literature, people with coherent personalities are frowned upon. Social media encourages them. It asks us to make ourselves into flat characters.

As Alexis points out very beautifully, people adapt technology for their own purposes. They work with, around, and against given structures. They use new channels in old ways. You can’t “Dislike” anything on Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped the haters hatin’.

But I think Ambinder and Smith are raising an important criticism. The social media world isn’t an identity-flattening place by default, but because of specific choices—most importantly, Mark Zuckerberg’s drive to civilize the web by making users have a unified, verified identity wherever they go on the Internet. To me, this is the most convincing aspect of Smith’s argument. She writes:

“What’s striking about Zuckerberg’s vision of an open Internet is the very blandness it requires to function, as Facebook members discovered when the site changed their privacy settings, allowing more things to become more public, with the (unintended?) consequence that your Aunt Dora could suddenly find out you joined the group Queer Nation last Tuesday. Gay kids became un-gay, partiers took down their party photos, political firebrands put out their fires. In real life we can be all these people on our own terms, in our own way, with whom we choose. “

I’m just old enough to remember when the Internet was still a new frontier. It was 1999. Anyone could stake a claim on their little plot of Geocities and plant it with hideous animated GIFs. And out there, in the Wild West, identity was fluid. Suddenly, there was a space for experimentation, for creation and transgression. I could use a fictitious AOL Instant Messanger screen name to chat with a boy who would never talk to me in real life. The New Yorker cartoon said it all: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

There’s plenty of positive results that might come from a web where identity is authenticated, centralized, and perpetually displayed. There are benefits to civilization. But there are also costs to making the Internet a network of small, claustrophobic towns, where everyone knows what everyone says about everyone else, where nothing you’ve done can ever be erased, and you have one identity on the whole Internet forever.

I don’t think that Smith was advocating for us all to run off into the woods. Instead, she was arguing that to the extent that the Internet is a world, it should be one that allows contradiction, compartmentalization, and fluidity. On the Internet, like the physical world, we should be able to perform our identities in very different ways in very different places. And to the extent that the Facebookiation of the web makes that more difficult—to the extent that, like Ambinder, we find ourselves amplifying our identities into an artificial coherence—Smith is right: we have a problem

The likely result of these moves? By 2015, news companies will pay top dollar, and pound, euro and yen, for top-end talent, and they’ll pay as little as possible for good-enough newsy content that fills many topical and local niches. Over the next several years, the most successful media brands will have mastered better the economics of pro-am journalism.

As a young journalist, my first thought, of course, is: how are would-be journalists going to get the experience to make it into the ” star” league?

In the old days, pursuing a career as a journalist meant climbing up a very clearly defined ladder. Jay Rosen describes it nicely in a reminiscence he posted earlier this week:

In those days the way you got to be a correspondent for the New York Times or the Washington Post was by 1.) rising in the hierarchy at your college newspaper, or going to a decent J-school; 2.) grabbing an internship at the biggest metro daily you could talk your way onto; 3.) doing well enough in the assignments you were given to get hired at that newspaper or a comparable one in your region; 4.) generating the “clips” (copies of your by-lined articles) that would allow you to jump in a year or two from Buffalo, Columbus, Birmingham or Norfolk to, say, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta or Baltimore; 5.) repeating step 4.) until you had the clips to get hired by the Post or the Times, which could take many years; and 6.) starting on the metro desk in New York or Washington until you got the call to report on the statehouse or the national scene.

It wasn’t an easy ladder to climb, but it made sense. You proved yourself at each level before you moved on to a bigger and more competitive news market. You spent time sitting in court rooms and listening to the police scanner and writing the 10,000-th article about the annual county fair.  There were–and still are–problems with the system, especially since the first rung of the ladder was often an unpaid or poorly-paid internship  made the profession more viable for rich kids. But the focus on clips made journalism more meritocratic than a lot of industries.

The best part of the system was that there were editors at the regional papers who took mentorship very seriously and devoted a lot of  time to training young reporters.  For me, that editor was the Reading Eagle‘s John Forester, who supervised my very first newspaper internship. John gave his interns tough love. He had us over for dinner at his house, told us frankly about our  weakenesses, and was fiercely protective of our copy.  Five years later, he still keeps tabs on how I’m doing.

In the world of web journalism, the ladder and its fixed rungs are dissolving. Newcomers like Politico or ProPublica have become aspirational ending points (and fixtures of college journalism fairs), and you don’t need to work for a news organization anymore to build up experience and reputation as a writer–all you need is WordPress and Twitter and some free time.

But there’s the rub: free time. Once you got on the ladder, journalism paid, and the basic reporting you did as a young reporter directly paved the road to the more sophisticated reporting you would do later on. There was a viable economic model that allowed you to train yourself to do great reporting–train intensely, which means full time–while still having money for rent and food.  What happens when that model goes away?

That’s why I came down so hard earlier this year on the San Diego Union-Tribune’s job posting for “Jr. Staff writers” who would be producing content with “no analysis or narrative required.” Economically, it seemed to make sense for them to hire people to churn out low-complexity content about community events. But where was the hope for advancement in that “Jr. Staff writer” job–the hope that motivates smart, curious people to come into journalism in the first place?

The Union-Tribune’s “Jr. Staff writer” position seems to fit right into Doctor’s vision of journalism in 2015, in which big news sites employ many people get paid a pittance to produce simple, locally-focused filler, as well as a few expensive, brand-name reporters.

What’s missing from this vision is any path from A to B.  In the old days, young reporters who were covering the county fair also had a chance to cover breaking news. They were expected and encouraged to build up their expertise and their talent. That’s how the industry’s model worked.  But that’s not going to happen with Demand Media or a Jr. Staff writer.  So where are the rising stars going to come from?  Where will they find their mentors, and how will they support themselves? Journalism school?  Hyperlocal blogs? Will they be expected to push themselves up out of the seething mass of  Internet writing without any assistance at all?

We don’t live in this world quite yet.  But I think this is an important question that we need to be thinking about–not just as insiders, wondering, “how will I (or people like me) have a shot at making it,” but as readers, appreciating the work of experienced, well-trained writers who, after all, do have to come from somewhere.

I don’t want to  romanticize the old system for its own sake: we don’t need “journalists” covering the county fair. People can just tag their own fair pictures on Facebook and read each other’s blog posts if they want some local color. And if AOL wants to pay five people $10 each to do this, in between their corn dogs, that’s not an abomination.

But there are some kinds of information–some ways of knowing a city–that require intense committment and years of practice.  Maybe the journalists of the future will accquire that experience the way novelists get theirs: writing on the sly while waiting tables or teaching SAT prep.  That might work for slow news.  But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in a deadline-driven industry. Is Patch going to be the major training ground for the national correspondents of the 2030s?

Storify bills itself as a way to turn the overwhelming torrent of social media data into compact, lasting stories…More than any program I’ve used, Storify feels like it was built by people who know how journalists work—and, in particular,how web journalists are being taught to work right now. One of Storify’s founders, Burt Herman, spent a decade as an AP reporter, and his insider’s perspective really shows in the final product.

I expect to be using it on this blog in the future–for Tweet conversation roundups, to begin with, and hopefully for text-heavier posts as they refine the program’s text tools.