Fast food 3 times more important than journalists
Journalism is important. Journalists are the Fourth Estate, after all. It’s often said that journalism is a foul-smelling medicine we have to swallow so that our democracies can run smoothly. At least that’s how some people fight for the broken business model that came to define Modern Journalism.
If journalists really were that important, people would realize they can’t live without them. Otherwise all our institutions would crumble, right?
Nobody likes going to school, but we all know that if it weren’t for high school teachers we’d still be illiterate beggars. So we couldn’t live without them.
But journalists? It seems like 90% of Americans could do without them.
n=100. Data collected in a Facebook poll run in the Chicago, IL, network.
Overall, it’s statistically significant.
Female respondent were more positive about journalists: 13% of them said they couldn’t live without them, compared with 7% of males. Females were also more likely to prefer Football players over High School teachers, as opposed to males.
Journalism in its current format is just a dead weight. We have to find new ways to produce compelling content in ways radically different from those of Modern Journalism.
[...] (anyone wondering where the thought process behind this one came from. It was spurred in part by Asda’s demands to magazines and a post on Seamus McCauley’s site about how some people think fast food is more vital than journalism.) [...]
I’m kind of glad that 10 percent of people say they couldn’t live without journalists. That’s a hardcore tenth of the population – 30 million people.
Plus it’s a bit silly to compare ‘fast food joints’ to job occupations. I can think of a lot of mundane objects that people would say they couldn’t live without (mobile phones; water; television; chicken nuggets), none of which spells the death for any particular occupation by comparison.
On the other hand my old man was a car mechanic and I’m a journalist, so according to this the fam is moving up in the world. My sisters work in education so I guess the next generation will have to be football players, or fast-food joints.
Mike,
I agree that’s the experimental design of this post is silly
My point was just, as Seamus was saying over at Virtual Economics, that most people don’t really care whether journalism gets salvaged or not after newspapers are dead.
My hypothesis is that most Americans know that Modern Journalism isn’t key to the good working of a democracy (freedom of expression is, though). That’s why I included ‘teachers’ into the poll: people not everyone enjoys but who are doing a job without which we all know we’d go off-track.
We need to quit thinking in terms of ‘how to sell a product that has reached the end of its life-cycle’ (yes, that’s Modern Journalism) but rather go out and find what kind of content people want to consume.