Fire the Journalists

I have an idea: let's fire all journalists. No one likes them. They are irritating. Their content is worthless.

With that one statement, we have just created a lot of new openings, so who should fill those chairs?

I propose people with degrees in advertising or marketing from business schools or experienced sales people. They know how to tell pithy stories. They understand that telling a good story is imperative to making a profit when the subject matter turns difficult. They know how to make you feel good about the most depressing or mundane subjects. They know how to turn grammatical variations into phrases repeated around the world by teenagers and young adults.

Journalists go to school to learn to tell stories, but advertisers tell better stories with pictures or shorter scripts. Why waste time reading 500 words of journo-babble when we can get the idea in 30 seconds or just a neat picture?

Journalists go to school to learn how to get two sources for every article, then they turn to old school chum or neighbor to be their representative of the general public (less effort you know). Advertisers and marketers are far more skilled at finding out what the general public wants and thinks and giving it to them.

Journalists go to school to learn how to take polling data and make it a tear-jerking human-interest story about one person that illustrates the point that the journalist wants to make without any regard to what the polling data shows. Marketers have experience in digging into polling data and giving any one segment of the population exactly the product they want. Marketers don't care if one segment of the population agrees with Henry Ford and only wants black cars while another segment wants bright yellow ones. Marketers will use the polling data to order enough black cars and bright yellow cars to make everyone happy. Just imagine if the newspapers were run by marketers that told the same story for two different market segments: one liberal and the other conservative. Imagine that the number of column-inches given to each version of the story could be based on the percentage of that paper's readership who share that political persuasion.

Journalists play at marketing by constantly making the papers look more and more like Romper Room but still giving us the same Henry Ford black Model T for liberal, empty content.