Hobby journalism? Or: Why I like to be paid for work.

Just 26 years ago, I was a technical writer at Boston University's Academic Computing Center (now renamed the Office of Information Technology). I was out of school only six years, earning the equivalent of about $55,000 (adjusted for inflation). But I didn't really love writing and updating user manuals and teaching markup language skills to thesis-writing grad students, so I cashed in my IRA and took more than a few years off to pursue other interests — but that's another story.

Anyway, fast-forward to 2005: I got a part-time editing job for a weekly staff and faculty newspaper. My co-workers were great, the pay was not much and the work was mind numbing. So I enrolled in CU's graduate program in journalism, to formalize my qualifications as a writer and editor. Last fall, a magazine internship at a niche publication reinforced my conviction that magazine editing is the place for me.

Except: The publication had layoffs the second month I was there.
Except: They reduced the size of their print product — that is, they reduced content.
Except: The line between advertising and editorial got murkier and murkier — that is, advertisers frequently were sources for story background and quotations.
Except: The Web version of their product wasn't subsidizing print costs — that is, advertising on the Web and in print was down, another effect of the economic implosion.
Like newspapers, magazines are struggling to survive.

Last week, the day after The Rocky Mountain News closed its doors (swiftly followed by the announcement of a subscription-only hyperlocal Web site that may debut in April), the J School held a colloquium on "The Future of Journalism Education." Several faculty spoke on the topic, part of a larger discussion about changing the curriculum to prepare students for a swiftly changing world in which print is no longer the default. The faculty members had differing opinions on the state of the news biz, but they all agreed that the curriculum must be reformulated to provide technological know-how so that students can participate in the Web-based information revolution.

Here's the Cliff Notes version: Journalism students will learn to blog, tweet, socially network and code our own Web sites in html and CSS and Java (modern-day markup languages, oh joy). We'll research, interview, write, fact check, edit and post self-produced stories, podcasts, videos, audio files and digital photos on personal Web sites that have been designed using graphical user interface precepts and optimized for search engines. We'll create a brand for ourselves, pursuing our own beat or specialty in innovative ways that will draw lots of traffic to our sites, increasing our marketability.

Except: How will our sites be distinguished from the other 11-million-and-growing Web sites on the Internet?
Except: How will we newly minted journalists afford Internet access, computers, digital recording and photography equipment and software upgrades, while doing hours and hours of unpaid work to establish our reputations?
Except: How will any of this translate into making a living doing journalism?

At this point, I'm not wondering about marketability, I'm wondering what journalists can do to create a new business model that can sustain our profession.

Which brings me to recent blogs by Clay Shirky and Steven Berlin Johnson, each of whom muses about the post-newspaper, post-print media world. They say we're only in the beginning of a Web-based news age that is chaotic, unpredictable and not yet financially sustainable. They say we should abandon attempts to rescue the old newspaper model and embrace the unknown.

Shirky: "The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model."

Johnson: "... we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone."

Great, but what do the thousands of unemployed journalists (and about-to-graduate journalism students) do in the meantime? Yochai Benkler, writing in the New Republic, looks at a few examples of what seem to be self-sustaining Web news businesses. Of the three blogs, I find this the most useful, most relevant to journalists and the shortest (a real plus in Blog Land).

Benkler: "Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model--be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica--to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided in the networked public sphere."

But no matter what Shirky, Johnson or Benkler say, the plain truth of the matter is this: Right now there's no successful new (or old) business model —Web, print or iPhone-based — that pays living wages to increasingly large numbers of journalists for newsgathering, editing, writing and publishing.

I'm learning the craft just in time to practice it for free, as my new hobby. Tech writing is sounding more attractive by the decade.