It’s uncommon for a news outlet to dedicate a reporter to 1 character, however the publication USA Today has determined Taylor Swift and Beyonce are phenomena requiring their very own beats.
The current announcement by Gannett, which owns USA Today, that it was in search of two journalists to cowl the largest names in music as in the event that they have been working for president triggered each pleasure and eyerolls — and broader dialog about protection priorities in an more and more fragmented and financially precarious news media atmosphere.
Gannett, which owns greater than 200 every day newspapers, has slashed jobs throughout native markets over the previous a number of years, shedding six % of its news division in December.
So news of the Tay and Bey positions struck a nerve.
“I suppose now is a good time to remind Twitter that I’m the only full-time news reporter left at my newspaper that was sold by Gannett in December,” stated Brad Vidmar on X, the platform previously often called Twitter.
Vidmar, 41, works for The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa that GateHouse, an funding firm-run publishing firm, bought in late 2016.
In 2019 GateHouse acquired Gannett and took its identify, changing into the biggest newspaper firm within the nation — and one with a popularity for scooping newspapers earlier than curbing their assets.
Gannett resold The Hawk Eye to a family-owned media firm in late 2022 — its workers a skeleton of what it as soon as was.
“They just kept cutting and cutting and cutting staff all across the board,” Vidmar instructed AFP. “What you saw was a situation where there are less reporters, reporters forced to take on multiple beats.”
Losing native content material meant filling the paper with wire tales or tales from the broader USA Today community, he defined.
Vidmar stated Gannett’s announcement of the Swift job made “my eyes roll.”
“They’ve been downsizing newsrooms for years now, but of course they need somebody dedicated to covering Taylor Swift,” he stated.
Gannett stated the brand new positions can be employed by USA Today and The Tennessean, the corporate’s Nashville-based paper.
The intention of the brand new jobs — that are along with three music reporters The Tennessean now employs — can be to “capture the excitement around Swift’s ongoing tour… while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and career,” Gannett stated. Another place is aimed toward equally analyzing Beyonce’s impression.
The NewsGuild’s New York department was skeptical, writing on X: “Gannett’s strategy to be profitable again: 1) Lay off hundreds of reporters 2) Destroy local news coverage 3) Hire a Taylor Swift reporter.”
Lark-Marie Anton, Gannett’s chief communications officer, stated in a press release to AFP that “these roles do not come at the expense of other jobs,” noting that in Gannett’s bid to “grow our audience” the corporate has employed 225 journalists since March and has greater than 100 open roles.
“Taylor Swift and Beyonce Knowles-Carter are artists and businesswomen. Their work has tremendous economic impact and societal significance influencing multiple industries and our culture — they are shaping a generation,” Anton stated.
Robert Thompson, a media scholar at Syracuse University, stated his preliminary response to the brand new jobs was questioning whether or not “this is a joke.”
But he stated after extra reflection “I think it would be silly to categorically dismiss this… There are so few things that everybody really kind of knows whether they’re fans or not, and Beyonce and Taylor Swift are some of the very rare ones.”
The jobs have the potential to permit for “really insightful ways to tell the story of 21st-century America through the lens of its most popular personages,” he stated.
On the opposite hand, Thompson acknowledged that unfavorable response to the brand new jobs in gentle of dwindling native news protection is affordable.
“If you were to get a bunch of people together and say, ‘We’ve got X number of dollars, how should they be spent?’ Most of them would probably not say the Taylor Swift beat,” he stated.
“But that doesn’t mean that separate from that context there can’t be some really good things to come of it.”
If carried out accurately, the brand new jobs usually are not essentially the “dream” careers some headlines have touted them as, he stated.
The fan bases for each Swift and Beyonce are notoriously defensive — music critics who make even the slightest unfavorable remark about their idols might be doxxed or obtain loss of life threats.
And together with the “organized wrath” of Swifties and the Beyhive, the worlds these artists have curated are famously guarded.
Plus, Thompson famous, “the eyes of the profession are going to be on these poor folks when they finally get hired.”
“That first piece that they file — it better be really good.”
© 2023 AFP