Between child soldiers and columnists

 
Column The editorial middle class is thinning out, with serious consequences for journalistic quality. A field report. 
While Helvetia's press warlords are brooding over ever more convoluted attack and defense tactics, the writing rank and file are increasingly harboring escape fantasies. According to a report published at last year's publishers' conference, it is above all those ranks who would like to desert from the combat units of attention that once made up the majority of the guild as "drawing editors". Another thesis of this article, ironically written by the Journalist of the Year 2007: "Journalists are classless: they know and meet everyone, from construction workers to CEOs." From the audience's perspective, this sounds plausible. In their own industry, however, the complete opposite is true: newspaper people are often corporate soldiers who think and act hierarchically. However, their social categories have changed dramatically in recent times. The traditional command and career line of editor - department head - editor-in-chief is increasingly being overshadowed by a new trinity of young and willing free content providers, the aforementioned professionals with hard-won signing authority and a royal class of overpaid, hard-boiled columnists.
This model is based - as columns generally are - on emotionless and disinterested experience. As a professional informant, a.k.a. PR fiddler, I deal with all three classes on an almost daily basis and hear how the solid middle class complain about being under increasing pressure from above and below as "salami in a sandwich". The child soldiers in the press war are lowering the standard in terms of workmanship and pay, and the parallel rampant columnism is replacing editorial glosses and commentaries. Journalistic duty and freestyle thus have two (to this extent) new players that are worlds apart. The remaining universal editors of old grist and grit are annoyed and bored to death in between, resulting in a qualitative clear-cutting of the paper.
A pro-domo example: As expected, our engagement this year of actress Melanie Winiger for the WEF-critical Public Eye did not go uncommented. It was symptomatic, for example, that Zweihänder-Zimmi pulled out the red card in its .ch fringe column for the "merciless overconfidence of an ex-Miss who judges corporate compliance". As is generally the case in columns, judgment and knowledge are inversely proportional here. At the other end of the scale, a similarly half-baked and uninformed novice journalist reported today that "the two lovebirds" Winiger and Stress were also staying at the Davos hotel where the Public Eye took place. Whereupon Blick promptly reported the next day that a little mountain air would certainly help the tabloid dream couple's desire to have children.
In addition to such bullshit, Winiger's appearance also provoked cogent analyses of the impact of showbiz on the economy and politics, for example from a (drawing!) magazine editor. You guessed it: the result was no less critical, but far more qualified. This - by column standards - thoroughly representative finding confirms my initial thesis: the editor, frustrated and endangered by youth mania, red pencils and outsourcing, is the assault gun of quality journalism. Consequently, I should make the space in this column available to my esteemed former colleagues who had to laboriously demand, edit and produce this text. But here (and only here) I agree with Oscar Wilde: the only consistent thing is inconsistency.
Oliver Classen is press spokesman for the development policy organization Berne Declaration. He previously worked as a media journalist.