Cohen's article "From pink slips to pink slime:
Transforming media labour in a digital age" talks about the tragic decline
of digital journalism due to "unpaid labor, robot reporters, algorithms,
and outsourcing" (Cohen, 2015). This is a very serious issue affecting all
digital journalists today, whose jobs are being lost and pay cheques reduced due to things like outsourced writers manufacturing articles in the same manner that a
factory pumps out products, or robot reporters (programs) that can actually be
programmed to create headline articles which readers would still want to read
despite the significant drop in quality. This was a scary piece for me, as it
was something I myself was exposed to a few years back when looking for a
part-time writing job to supplement my income. As I looked around, the price
for articles went as low as one cent/word (???). It was also going to be too
hard to protest or argue with such a low pay rate considering most writers were already willing to go that low in order to be paid for their
writing. Doing a little research, I found overseas companies offering services
like copy-writing or various reviews for the same rate. Is the market even going
to allow for trained journalists in the future when outsourced individuals can write more pieces for less?
References
Cohen, Nicole S. (2015). From pink slips to pink slime: Transforming media labour in a digital age. The Communication Review 18(2): 98-122.
I'm with you on your concerns, Karl. I feel that whether we like it or not, we are becoming accustomed to consuming lower quality writing. Combining this with our tendency to skim different sources of text very quickly (as mentioned in an article in the Atlantic), we may feel like we are being more efficient, while we are actually hindering our ability to learn.
ReplyDeleteLink to article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
On a side note, sometimes I use the a text-to-voice feature on my PDF Reader to listen to articles. If the document were produced by robot reporters, and I had that article read to me in a robot voice, I would feel quite uncomfortable!!!