Over the past few months I noticed a lot of “news” reports appearing in my news aggregator that are fluffy news stories. Many take the form of “Someone said something to someone and the Internet reacts”.

I wondered, why are we seeing these useless news reports? Who writes them?

Content Mills

As I began exploring this I discovered “content mills”. These are web services that specialize in producing topical content – say on travel, or beauty trends, or tech, or cars – whatever they wish. Their content is generated mostly to deliver click-bait headlines and thence, eyeballs to advertisers.

Who works at content mills?

Many hire freelancers to produce articles, paying pennies per word, or a few tens of dollars per article. One freelancer on her LinkedIn profile says she is paid to write six articles per day – which means she’s making a bit better than minimum wage but not much.

Much of this content is outsourced to freelancers living overseas in cheap locations. Many are Americans who attended good university programs in the U.S. This was perplexing and sad – people with Masters degrees in journalism make their living writing crap stories for click-bait.

Most writers have degrees in English Lit, Creative Writing, History, sometimes political science or journalism. And many went on on to get an MA in one of those subjects, often from a “name” university.

How Did This Happen?

My guess is the job market for writers changed dramatically in the past 10-20 years as newspapers downsized. In the U.S., the number of newsroom jobs at newspapers fell by -57% from 2008 to 2022.

Where did all those people go? To “digital media” content generation outfits that specialize in cranking out the words and selling them to online media distributors. As newsroom jobs plummeted, employment at these new-media companies has increased by a lot.

Starting in the late 2010s, a huge number of web sites began to appear that all look, basically, like blogs. Each has a content focus like living frugally, or travel, or gaming, etc. They often have weird names like “Dad Answers All”, “Mama of Five”, “Kinda Frugal”, “Mrs. Daaku Studio”, “Savoteur” and other unpronounceable names.

On their “About” pages, they all have similar “missions and goals”. Most of them seem to be content mills, employing out of work former reporters to crunch out content as fast as possible.

The Elite Connection

Along the way, I wanted to know more about who works at these places – assuming the bylines are real, and assuming their Linkedin Profiles are real – I cross checked with LinkedIn.

Many fall into two camps – obviously former news writers since they have those jobs on their bios, or young, recent college grads, looking to make money as writers. There seems to be a bias towards young women, rather than guys, but that may be because 62% of those majoring in journalism today are women. As the jobs draw from other fields like English Lit, these ratios might be different in other fields.

While doing this, I cross checked the backgrounds of reporters whose bylines appeared in stories.

The short summary is that an overwhelming majority of national news reporters (think NY Times, WSJ, national TV news, Washington Post) are a true elite. This was also the finding of a 2018 study.

From their LinkedIn, many attended private K-12 or private high schools (costs ranging from $30k to $80k/year), private universities and typically “name” universities, where the annual cost of attendance (tuition, fees, housing, etc) is $80k per year or $320k for a 4 year degree (of course, not everyone pays full list price due to discounts and scholarships).

One reporter I saw had an undergrad double major in Literature and Religious Studies, plus an MBA from an elite school. The total list price of this person’s education was $480k (if they did not receive a discount).

Many have invested in educations, like these, for an industry where the average annual pay is about $50k/year: Media and Communication Occupations : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)

For comparison, the pay range in tech is generally between $80 and $130k/year: Computer and Information Technology Occupations : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)

Attending elite private colleges, taking on student loan debt, to enter a shrinking field where the pay is terrible makes no financial sense. Many spent $300k-$400k on degrees in subject known to pay poorly.

They may have done this because they came from significant family wealth – hence private schools and private elite colleges and universities – with one or more study abroad programs thrown in too. Striving for a high paying job was not necessary due to their financial situation? They could pursue the dream of being a free-lancer writer – simply because they came from money.

The national media who report the news to us are not like the rest of us folks. Instead, they come from elite lives of wealth and privilege, and possibly power. In other words, they are the elite who will tell the rest of us how to live our lives.