The news media has been on a disruptive curve from the moment news consumers realized that the internet provides instant information. Many news outlets have either evolved, gone out of business or are trying to survive. Pleas for money has become the norm in the news media industry. The internet has disrupted many business models. For example, taxi drivers saw their industry drastically change with the advent of Uber. Economic models are not stagnant as they evolve as new business models are invented.
I am not surprised that the news media industry continues to plea for money because they have been slow to adopt to the new reality. It is part their fault and partly the fault of consumers who do not value creative workers as much as they should.
The internet has created a race to the bottom for creatives in that everyone is looking for market share by giving away their work. It not only affects the news media providers but the artists, photographers and all sorts of creative workers like architects and others who no longer hold the monopoly in their communities.
But something caught my attention on Twitter on Tuesday that bothered me.
It was reporter Alfredo Corchado who reports for The Dallas Morning News. Corchado posted on his Twitter feed an announcement that he and his colleagues were informed about getting pay cuts. Normally I do not write about posts like this because a plea for money from a reporter is common now. But Corchardo’s plea for money bothered me because of the reality we live in today.
Alfredo Corchado posted on his Twitter feed that the pay cuts “hurts…a lot”. He added, “Please, if u can, support local journalism.”
It bothered me because Alfredo Corchado seems to have forgotten that many workers are not working today. Just yesterday Logan’s Roadhouse fired all 18,000 of its employees. Those are fired workers that have been added to the others that have risen the unemployment rate to its highest level since the Great Depression.
All those workers are not only without a paycheck, even a diminished one, but are also wondering when they will be able to work again.
In that reality, Corchado, who admits still receiving a paycheck, however much it was cut, is asking people to “support local journalism.”
I get it, people need to make enough to survive.
But to ask for sympathy for a pay cut considering how many workers are not being paid ignores the reality that is the economic crisis everyone, including journalists, are living under today.
Alfredo Corchado closes his Twitter plea with “truth matters.”
The truth is that Corchado’s plea for helping him resolve his pay cut ignores the anxiety and fear hundreds of thousands and likely soon to be millions of American workers are dealing with today because of the pandemic crisis.
It is a shame that he did not think through his plea for money before posting it.
