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On Monday, New York Magazine published its 2024 “Power Issue.” The lead article is a gossipy collection of fifty-seven Big Media Names talking on and off the record about various currents in contemporary media, from the role of Apple News and tech billionaire owners to how AI’s actually going to affect the business. If you like media gossip, this is absolutely for you, and I devoured it as soon as I saw the link.
But the part I keep coming back to has a lot less to do with Big Media Thoughts and more to do with the workplace, just generally. The subtitle: The Kids Are Too Soft.
Entry-level journalists “are not nearly as talented as the people ten and 15 and 20 years ago,” insists one newspaper vet. There are lots of reasons that may be the case. “It used to be that you would give someone the advice, ‘Go work for a small-town paper and then come to me,’” says Bari Weiss. “Well, they’re all gone.”
Combine that with the pandemic and the rise of WFH and you get young staffers who never had a chance to be mentored. “They’re probably maybe a little less qualified because they’re less trained; the whole attitude is less servile than it used to be,” notes an editor. “You have people who are — I don’t want to say working fewer hours, but the mode of dues paying has changed a lot.”
One executive expressed frustration with Gen Z this way: “They want everything right away. They want everything fast. They’re super-ambitious in the wrong ways. The people that seem to me to succeed are the ones that just do good work, really push themselves, and assume the right people are going to notice. And guess what? The right people always notice. The stuff you never want to deal with is somebody who’s been there for nine months already asking what your long-term, seven-year plan is. It’s like, ‘You just got here. I don’t have a plan for you yet.’” Another editor-in-chief carps, “My biggest pet peeve is when it feels like I’m the teacher and they’re in sixth grade doing a homework assignment.”
Choire Sicha writes a New York Mag afternoon newsletter called Dinner Party, and for Monday’s edition, he asked a bunch of Gen Z staffers for their responses. Some of my favs:
➽ “I think most young journalists would love the time to cook in a warm nourishing broth of mentorship, hard work, and experience. If media companies would like to pay for that kind of long career, they have our direct deposit information.” — Bridget Read, features writer
➽ “What the rest of this package makes clear is that we’re dealing with a totally different media landscape, one that’s (A) a lot more precarious and (B) inundated with content. To the A point, I think what some of these execs are calling ‘super-ambitious’ and ‘less servile’ is maybe a manifestation of a deep-seated (and, for them, probably completely alien) fear that we’ll never make enough money to retire. To the B point, just doing ‘good work’ isn’t enough to stand out anymore. You have to be loud and impressive and, yes, occasionally super-annoying. “ — Paula Aceves, associate editor
➽ “It’s a tradition as old as time for the older guard to complain about the young hires, so I can’t in good faith get offended by most of this. I look forward to complaining about my future Generation Alpha co-workers in exactly the same way as the boomers here are complaining about my generation. What put a bee in my bonnet was the quote about ambition. I hated that. The “executive” there should know that the way the media is now set up (and if I were feeling less charitable, I’d note that this is the media system that *they* set up) requires exactly the kind of ambition that they’re annoyed about. ‘Paying your dues’ is less worthwhile for the young journalists of the moment because there’s no way to know if the place where you’re paying your dues will even exist in five years. You’ve got to get a certain level of work out the door and an accompanying notability almost immediately if you want to have the tools to make the kind of flexible career that “modern media” requires. You worked for six months doing blog posts at a publication that promptly laid off its entire staff? Great, well you’re now competing with all those former co-workers of yours for jobs (and freelance gigs). It is an impossible business to break into for most people my age, and if some publication gives you an opportunity, the young journalist has to break down the door, not just get their foot in it. That means pushing harder for bigger work faster….” — Jason Frank, writer
I love it. I also love that all of these journalists were willing to put their remarks on-the-record — unlike most of their elders. And the first thing to note, as Jason Frank does, is the most important: complaining about the work ethic of the next generation of employees is a time-worn tradition. Some of my favorite research for Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation featured the Greatest Generation talking absolute shit about boomers: they were directionless, hapless, over-educated, too idealistic, too political, too interested in finding a vocation and generally allergic to hard work. Boomer readers of this newsletter will recall the refrain, maybe from their parents but certainly from the media: their generation had lost their way.
Many of those boomers grew up and got old and became homeowners and middle managers and began complaining about Gen-X, who were also aimless and idealistic and unambitious, in part because they’d seen what all that boomer ambition had borne (in short: Reagan). When millennials entered the workforce in the early 2000s, the refrain got louder — even if it was mostly still coming from boomers, whose numbers drowned out the Gen-Xers (whose main complaint about millennials was that we were too much like boomers, touché).
Millennials were coddled, soft, impolite, ill-prepared, and entitled. They wanted work that felt meaningful, not soul-sucking. Their egos were too fragile. They were allergic to the phone. And, as the 2000s progressed, and the crater of the 2008 financial crisis continued to expand, they wouldn’t leave their parents’ basement.
The question I kept returning to when writing Can’t Even felt so simple: if millennials were, in fact, “coddled”…..who coddled us? Who instilled these principles about the sort of work we should be doing? If we were ill-prepared, who did the preparation? Our educators, elders, parents, and mentors, of course — most of whom were, well, boomers.
I’ve long argued that the critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable. But that sort of introspection requires, well, work. The easy workaround is to expand the critique to an entire generation and put it in the passive voice. Hence: The kids want participation trophies instead of we gave the kids participation trophies.
I’ve watched with bemusement and annoyance as millennials have also grown up and grown old and started leveling the same fucking complaints leveled at us against Gen Z. Gen Z doesn’t know how to pick up the phone….because previous generations haven’t prioritized it. They want to work less….because we bitched about the wages of making work the center of our lives so voraciously. They don’t want to work for free….because we fought hard to denormalize it. They don’t want to get yelled at, or sexually harassed, or tokenized, because those who came through those workplaces fought for better conditions. We made it (marginally) better, and now the complaint is that they’re not as hardened as we were.
The recurring hypocrisy makes me wonder: Do we *actually* not want people to go through what we went through….or do we secretly think what we went through is foundational to good work?
This is an incredibly tricky question, partly because it’s difficult to separate the perception of “good work” from the conditions that produce it. The “good work” of magazine writing in the 1970s is difficult to judge alongside the “good work” of the 1990s or 2010s. Is that Newsweek profile good because the author had a whole team of researchers back at the office? Is that ‘90s Entertainment Weekly profile good because Time Inc. had gobs of money? Is that essay in The Awl good because everyone got laid off from everything and no one was paying anyone anything, so why not write the weird shit you want to write?
It’s appropriate that Choire Sicha — one of the founders of The Awl, a site that did as much to influence the tone and style and understanding of “good” internet writing as Gawker — is the one asking Gen Z journalists for their insight. It’s also appropriate that the archives of The Awl (and its sibling site, The Hairpin) have been lost and/or transformed into AI clickbait — and recovered as part of massive Kickstarter campaign to fund Flaming Hydra, a collective of writers (many of whom were longtime contributors to The Awl) trying to make a sustainable enterprise on the internet. And that one of the Kickstarter-exclusive gifts is a bound collection of greatest hits from The Awl.
I appreciated this remembrance from Mary H.K. Choi, situating The Awl’s rise in a particular moment in media history:
Put differently: there were no media jobs then, and there are no media jobs (at least full-time ones) now. That’s an overstatement, but it’s widely true: there are still some high-level jobs, but they're largely occupied by people who’ve been in the business for five years if not twenty. There’s an ever-narrowing path to “break in” to media, whether via television news or beat reporting. Back in 2009, people went on unemployment, took jobs unrelated to media, and blogged (for free) in their spare time. That’s how you likely found so many of your favorite internet writers today: reading what they wrote for free (obsessively, delightfully, with little editing) on sites you access for free. When someone started paying them (but we, as readers, still believed we should have access to their work for free) they had to produce a lot (and quickly) to make ends meet, and they rarely if ever had the protection of a union. Their “work ethic” was the result of market dynamics: work like this or don’t work at all.
That was true in journalism in the post-recession area, but it was equally true in academia. I wrote for nothing in academia because I knew I needed to publish if I wanted a future in the industry, and I wrote for nothing (or maybe $100 a piece, even when that piece was a 7000-word researched feature) in media, too. When I got a job at BuzzFeed News, that work ethic, borne of abject fear of fulfilling the boomer stereotype and living in my mom’s basement while defaulting on my student loans, served me incredibly well.
Even when I burnt out, I turned that burnout into an article and spent the following year expanding it into a book, which I knew I needed to write in order to further chip away at my student loans. Fucking classic millennial work ethic! I have such a vivid memory of a few of my Gen X editors telling me to write less: I should put more space between my pieces, make them more of an event. I also remember being quietly furious. They don’t get it, I muttered to myself, if you’re not putting something new on the internet in this climate you don’t exist.
Of course, they did get it. They’d been through more layoffs, more site reinventions, and more fear about their redundancy than I could fathom. I mean, one of them was a MUSIC JOURNALIST! No journalistic niche has suffered more! But because of the way they came up through the industry, they also understood “good” writing as rare writing, writing that didn’t need you to tweet about it, writing that just stood for itself. Listen, I’m technically an Xennial, I know where that attitude comes from. But I also understand that if a 23-year-old showed up to a media organization with that attitude the first thing they’d be called — and are called — is entitled. Maybe even soft.
Elsewhere in the Power Issue feature, various media execs describe the broad effects of unionization with annoyance and hyperbole. “You see what happened at the Washington Post; essentially, it’s anarchy,” says an anonymous executive. “The staff took over the publication and started dictating moves.”
Some execs were slightly more balanced — but still think that union-reinforced boundaries backfire:
Outside the activist front, some felt unions hadn’t delivered to their members. Nearly everyone recognized that management’s relationship to staff has probably changed permanently, at least compared with when interns were forced to work for free and assistants were expected to dog-sit for their bosses on weekends and worse. “You could just make people do whatever, whenever,” says Janice Min of the go-get-me-a-salad days of magazine editors pushing around their underlings. “Now, there’s just a much greater sense of boundary.” Still, there was some nostalgia for a time when a boss could push their charges to the limit. “I’m not saying you have to come to the office, but the people who do the best work — all of them — work really hard all the time. And you can’t say that anymore,” says an executive.
There’s also a sense that unions garnered some power, drove publications out of business, and now the proper balance has been re-installed. “Between the years, like, 2016 and 2021, the relationship between employers and employees shifted, and it’s shifted back, basically,” says one editor-in-chief. “That was a temporary phenomenon that really strikes me as over.”
But did the unionization efforts kill these publications — or did their business models depend on paying staff members very little, burning them out, and then hiring new hungry journalists who’d also work for very little? I refuse to blame “advocating for severance and decent insurance” for the demise of publications who’d failed to see how, oh, Facebook might fuck them over. These media executives understand unions as a coddling mechanism, when what they’re really trying to do is make the field sustainable. For the current generation of journalists, sure, but also for the journalists to come.
For these execs who’ve clawed their way to the top of a dying industry, sustainability is an alien concept. You get to the top by climbing on other people or, if there is a rope, by pulling it up before anyone else can get there — or feigning ignorance when it grows so tattered and broken that people keep falling off before they reach your standing. (Cue the handwringing: WHERE ARE ALL THE MEDIA MOGULS?!?)
There is so much survivor’s bias in every industry — and so little consideration of who gets expelled from systems that understand “excellence” in unyielding ways. In finance or non-profits, you’ll recognize the same standards: you should be willing to work for an extended time for free or below a living wage; you should be able to ignore or excuse others’ bad or abusive behavior; you must be open and eager to working at all times, without the encumbrance of caregiving or personal needs, for the rest of your life.
The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares not pursue it. Because this much I know is true: it’s not because they’re soft.
So how do we break this cycle? If, upon encountering or even considering the attitude, ambition, or “work ethic” of a younger generation, your impulse begins to drift towards they don’t work like we do, my hope is we consider the following:
How have we, as a society — and how have I, as a leader — helped foster the conditions that encourage someone to work a certain way, with certain habits, or attitudes, or ambitions?
How much of my reaction is to the fact that someone is not working exactly the way I did at that point in my life — even though my circumstances were almost certainly wildly different?
How has our society — or our industry — tacitly agreed on an understanding of excellence that has little room for different ways of navigating the world, of making space to care for others, or collectivism just generally?
What if working differently is also an attempt to keep people in the industry for longer — and make the industry as a whole more sustainable?
What can *I* learn from the way they’re approaching work?
Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own. ●
I’d love to hear from all generations about the ways in which you were shamed, at various points, for your generation’s work ethic…..but I’d especially love to think about how you’re thinking about approaches to work, how your own standards have changed, and what’s lost when we default to the “kids are soft” mentality. .