Does anyone miss journalists yet?

I’ve been doing my accounts this week, and it’s official. I’m no longer a journalist.

I call myself a freelance writer because pretty much everything I do boils down to that in some way or another. But I’m probably a blogger more than I’m a journalist these days. Certainly, if you look at what I’ve earned so far this year, blogging is what's paying the bills. Not every quarter is quite this dominated by blogging - the first part of 2010 was dominated by the MAD blog awards and for the Tots100 index of parenting blogs that I produce each month - but in general, it's the way my work is heading.

As a fully-paid up member of the blogosphere, I think I’m supposed to be cheery about this change. I’m supposed to be glad that mainstream media is dying on its feet, replaced by enthusiastic bloggers free of the shackles of publishers and advertisers. I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that nobody needs to pay for content because it's the Internet, and who buys Empire when Rotten Tomatoes is free, right?

And yet, and yet.. the phrase that keeps rattling through my head at the moment is “society gets the media it deserves”.

Why do people not see that the good content on Rotten Tomatoes is pulled from newspapers, and written by professional film reviewers? Or that the content that’s endlessly duplicated and stuck on news websites ultimately got written by some professional reporter working on the story. Or that the features they’re so enjoying are being written by freelance reporters who are having to work harder than ever for rates that haven’t increased in 10 years just to keep their heads above water?

If nobody is willing to pay those people, pretty soon they won’t exist. And I for one think society will be poorer for it. User-generated content isn’t some democratic utopia where we all have a voice and the quality rises to the top. Because, let’s face it, the real quality will have buggered off to do something that actually pays the mortgage. Looking at some newspapers today, I suspect a big chunk of the quality has already jumped off the sinking ship. 

What will be left will be the corporates with the budget and the SEO expertise to pump out content expressing their particular world view, and the people who feel strongly enough about issues to generate content for free – and history suggests these are not necessarily going to be the most balanced observers of life. As someone who writes a good deal of corporate copy, I know that the majority of it is well-researched, accurate and truthful - but it will never pretend to be objective.

So I for one am keeping my fingers crossed that the Times experiment in paid-for content works. And I'll pay the subscription. Because, God knows, someone needs to try something to preserve the value of what I used to do for a living. Oh, and I still subscribe to Empire.