Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

How are intellectual pursuits different from sports pursuits, especially when it's one specific intellectual pursuit? And again, you make the jump from "white people are better at programming than black people" to "white people are more intelligent than black people".

> That is true, but it leads to statical variance across the board. If, for a large enough sample and controlled for mutable factors, white people are more successful at programming than black people, that is an essential trait. Given that we agree that race isn't an objective reality, race can't have essential traits, and thus statistically significant, categorical differences between outcomes must be caused by mutable characteristics like experience, education etc.

No, I think we disagree here. Race isn't an objective reality, but people still can have immutable differences between groups. For example, people with darker skin tend to lack vitamin D more easily in certain latitudes. This is an immutable difference with people with lighter skin. But that difference is a spectrum, and given a specific individual, you can't always put him in a "light skin" or "dark skin" group. What I reject with the idea of race is that everyone belongs to a specific race, and that you can draw clear lines between them. I don't reject the idea of immutable differences between people. I'm personally colorblind. I can't do anything about it. This makes my vision of color strictly worse than most people. But that's one characteristic. I also have brown eyes, which means I'm a bit less sensitive to the Sun than people with green and blue eyes. I belong to the "colorblind" and the "brown eyes" categories of human. But there's no "race" for that. White people have brown eyes and are colorblind. Black people too. But not all of them.

> How does a racial group be better at one field, categorically, unless either a) there are social differences like culture or access to education or b) there are essential, immutable differences between them? The important factor in racist reasoning is the idea that black people are less intelligent than white people. It's not true, but it's used to justify relegating them to a lower class.

Again, I don't understand why you're defending the idea that if there are immutable differences between people, one group must dominate the other. It's possible to accept that one group is better at something than the other without thinking that this group should dominate the other. And one field is not everything. I don't know many popular black programmers, and I don't know many popular white rappers. Who is the more intelligent here? Who should dominate who here? No one.

> We want this society now, except that differences in intelligence are not caused by race. So it's reasonable to investigate circumstances where outcomes are significantly different in order to understand what mutable systems and institutions could be changed to even the playing field so that capable black and white people can both succeed on merit.

I don't think we know for sure the origins of differences in intelligence between people. For example, IQ is highly inheritable, but malnutrition also reduces it a lot. That would mean that even if IQ was perfectly distributed in society between classes (which I don't think it is), the lower classes would slowly have a lower IQ because of malnutrition unless there's some sort of "safety net" against malnutrition. IQ isn't a perfect proxy for intelligence, far from it, but it's a start.

...I might outright have an alternate history of the entire '10s "Culture War". Or I might have gone paranoid. Of course I can't prove any of it. I'd love an answer to your first question myself.

As someone who has done both (and moved from journalism to engineering 4.5 years ago), I agree with the first half of your comment, but I disagree with this conclusion.

I do agree with you that we should encourage everyone to be a citizen journalist or copy editor, and to a certain extent, social media has done that -- much to the chagrin of many members of the public who then decry the state of the news media. There was a massive push by many of the leading journalism think tanks (Poynter, Niemen, CJR, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, etc.) more than a decade ago for citizen journalism and the rise of user-generated content directly led to news organizations like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which in turn informed news and news techniques from the likes of the Times, the Washington Post, etc. And despite media being an utter and complete shithole, more people than ever want to be journalists. But that's not the whole story.

The problem, and the reason this isn't a rejection of Jevon's paradox, is that even though the appetite and potential audience for news has increased, the business models around news have collapsed. Larger outlets have managed to sustain, and in some cases like the New York Times, pivot themselves into even larger and more powerful centers -- but thousands more have gone out of business. There have been so many layoffs in the last few years (and at digital outlets too - not just antiquated local papers), it's beyond depressing. There were 16,000 layoffs in newsrooms (print, digital, broadcast) in 2020 [1], and even with the gains in digital organizations, there are still 30,000 fewer working journalists in the US today than in 2008 [2]

I don't blame tech for the death of the newspaper, for what it's worth, (although Craigslist and the expectation of everything online being free didn't help), the print industry did a lot of it to themselves. But even digital-first publications suffer to make a profit and become a business, and because the returns on a media investment are not ever going to be the 20x or 30x you get from a tech startup, the appetite for investors has wained and even well-funded outlets can go under or get sold for next to nothing.

So you have a flooded labor market and not enough jobs. And those jobs? Don't pay well. Which means that like a lot of other humanities, those jobs are largely taken by the people that can afford to do it, and there goes your diversity numbers. And in New York, DC, or San Francisco/LA (where US news bureaus are largely located), cost of living is insanely high. So you have kids who paid $180,000 for a graduate degree in journalism making $45,000* a year to work in New York City, where they have to live in a shitty apartment in Brooklyn with three other roommates. Or, they come from money and have parents who bought them an apartment.

From a monetary perspective, I did very well in journalism, especially for someone who was mid-career and not an executive editor. I make more than double in tech. And in journalism, I was making more than double some of my coworkers (close to 3 times for some of them). To be fair, I work at a FAANG, so I'm an outlier -- and I have some friends/colleagues/mentors who made/make more in journalism than I do in tech -- so at the very top, journalism can be lucrative. But in mid-sized cities, it's abysmal.

Part of the reason people encourage "everyone to learn to code," is that for now, the labor demand is larger than the supply and so salaries are high. That probably won't last forever, but it has definitely been the trend for a long time. And another part of the reason is that in general, society dismisses humanities as being less important. And yes, to your point, there probably is also a part of gate-keeping by the elites in those fields to keep it rarified, but I don't think that's the whole story.

Joshua Benton wrote a great piece for Nieman Lab (part of Harvard's journalism institution) last month that really encapsulates a lot of the diversity challenge and what changes need to happen to make things better [3], but what he doesn't touch on as much is the fact that once people are skilled to be journalists, the jobs and the pay just aren't there for many people, especially compared to other professions.

* Thanks to labor unions, the floor for entry-level newsroom jobs at at least major digital outlets is getting closer to $55k on average, but I still know of big places that hire people in at $45k. And people take those jobs even when they cannot really afford to live on that salary.

[1]: https://www.thewrap.com/2020-newsroom-layoffs-data/

[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo...

[3] https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/its-time-to-create-an-alte...