OPINION:MY FIRST PAY packet as a professional teacher in Britain in 1992 was £690 (€876) for a full month's work. It took five years before I reached the giddy heights of a four-figure monthly income.
Each day I’d walk up the stairs to the staff room, to drink coffee and hide from the kids. On the noticeboard was an A4 piece of paper showing the teaching pay scale.
As a newly qualified teacher, naturally my annual salary was at the bottom. Each academic year, the salary rose a few hundred pounds until it stopped at the top of the scale, which was about £28,000 per year at that time. We referred to this chart as the stairway to heaven, partly because the length of time it took to get to the top meant you would probably die shortly afterwards.
To get more money, young teachers like me were encouraged to take on extra responsibility. I was given £500 a year to take charge of the college minibus, a role that came with the bonus of a subscription to Minibus News. The only way to escape this low pay trap was to be promoted to head of department level, or God forbid, director of faculty.
This is what good teachers did, with the effect that they taught fewer hours in the classroom. The whole system incentivised teachers to aspire to teach less.
This is a common complaint made by people from across the public sector, where money flows to responsibility and management rather than improving core competency. The better you are at nursing, the more likely it is you will be promoted off the ward. The best policemen are pushing paper back at the station rather than on the street.
Something similar happens in journalism. And while nobody, least of all me, is claiming that working for a newspaper is up there with teaching or nursing, the effects of this rush to expertise may be in part affecting how stories are told.
Like a newly qualified teacher, a reporter is an entry-level position on a newspaper, with a pay packet to match, while the really big cheques go to editors, commentators and columnists.
This is perfectly rational. As news becomes commoditised, one future for newspapers is to become platforms for named writers. To stand above the daily news agenda, offering expert analysis and be a trusted guide. In this environment, to be a columnist is to wield substantial marketing power: readers tend to use them to differentiate between newspapers and so they affect buying behaviour.
As the 24/7 news cycle quickens, the more stories that pour in requiring more comment and analysis. One side effect is that it is very difficult for readers to keep up. Very quickly, the debate on important issues is pitched at a level that assumes a significant amount of prior knowledge.
Think for a moment about the really big questions we face today. The list might include the banking crisis, the environment, Europe, the Middle East and the public’s understanding of science.
Each of these subjects drives its own news agenda made up of hundreds and thousands of smaller stories that come at us at an ever-increasing speed. This makes the issues hard to understand for anyone without specialist knowledge, or who has not been following the story closely. This goes for journalists as much as readers.
Sometimes, in the rush to get to the clever stuff, the really simple questions don’t get asked. One of the criticisms of business journalism during the banking crisis was that the reporters just did not understand what banks did to make money.
The complexity of collateral debt obligations needed clever, experienced people to ask simple questions. This didn’t happen enough.
As Joris Luyendijk, Dutch anthropologist and writer said recently, Enron collapsed only when someone was brave enough to ask how it made money.
There is a social dynamic at work here too, which has broader implications. Journalism was once a trade which, along with many other trades, has been professionalised.
But things change when a university degree becomes an entry level requirement. It takes reporting (and soon, nursing, midwifery, police work and so on) out of the reach of many who would have been good at it but don’t want or can’t afford to go to university.
For those who can, it heightens the opportunity cost of entering that profession, meaning the value of the job you didn’t do, the road you didn’t take, is far higher and the pressure to “get on” is more intense. Meanwhile, the so-called “simple” questions go unasked.