Why I left news

There are hundreds upon hundreds of think tanks, bloggers, academics and NGOs who all do deep policy work, lengthy investigations into issues and opinion-making. The problem is they just aren't all in the one place. You can't simply try to put them in one place under a for-profit model because sooner or later an editor is going to look at the accounts and say 'hyperbole pulls in 100x the clicks compared to the NGO report .pdf'. There is simply no way to avoid that in the end, even with a slight detachment from the ads and cross subsidisation inside a corporation like Google. Google had to shut down Reader for exactly this reason, it wasn't good for ads.

Basically my argument is we need to replace greedy and/or partisan editors with content aware programs, and redefine what we think of as a journalist to include people from think tanks, NGOs, academics and bloggers. I've made a start with a prototype at jkl.io, but I have the same problem as Ms. Bird in that there is no interest/money in it so I might well be forced to do other things.

I loved journalism, and I continue to love journalism, so it was really difficult to leave it as a _vocation_. But it was not very difficult to leave it as a _business_.

Now that I'm doing full-time software development, it's easy to see that it was the right choice for me and my family. The salary and benefits are significantly better, as you might expect, and so is the morale and the job security.

I might have stuck it out longer if I had any confidence that the people who handle the business end of the journalism world had a decent plan to become profitable again as print dies out (or at least becomes permanently crippled). But I never heard or saw anything, internally or externally, to give me that confidence that there was a workable plan.

(As it turns out, I have been able to continue writing, not only for my employer but outside of work -- I have a book coming out in the fall and another in the works. That's helped to satisfy my writing itch, and my full-time job has helped to satisfy my "pay the bills" itch.)

The news is an important establishment and seeing it reduced to what it is is very disheartening. The fact that twitter is mentioned so often and seen as a fairly credible source to me just epitomizes just how far it has slid away from what it was.

I have a suspicion that what newspaper companies want is not what is taught in journalism school.