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It’s rare for a media outlet to dedicate a reporter to a single personality, but USA Today has decided that Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are phenomena that require their own beat.
USA Today owner Gannett’s recent announcement that it was looking for two reporters to cover the biggest names in music as if they were running for president sparked both excitement and eyeballs — and a broader conversation about coverage priorities in an increasingly financially and fragmented context. precarious media environment.
Gannett, which owns more than 200 daily newspapers, has cut jobs in local markets in recent years, laying off 6 percent of its news division in December.
The news of Tay and Bey’s positions therefore struck a chord.
“I guess it’s a good time to remind Twitter that I’m the only full-time reporter at my paper that was sold by Gannett in December,” Brad Vidmar said on X, the platform formerly known as from Twitter.
Vidmar, 41, works for The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa, that GateHouse, a publishing company run by an investment firm, purchased in late 2016.
In 2019, GateHouse acquired Gannett and took its name, becoming the nation’s largest newspaper company — and a company known for scooping up newspapers before downsizing.
Gannett sold The Hawk Eye back to a family media company in late 2022 – its staff now a skeleton of what it once was.
“They kept cutting and cutting and cutting staff at all levels,” Vidmar told AFP. “What you have seen is a situation where there are fewer journalists, journalists forced to do multiple reports.”
Losing local content meant filling the paper with TV stories or stories from the broader USA Today network, he said.
Vidmar said Gannett’s announcement of Swift’s position made my eyes “roll.”
“They’ve been downsizing newsrooms for years now, but of course they need someone dedicated to covering Taylor Swift,” he said.
– “Shaping a generation” –
Gannett said the new positions would be filled by USA Today and The Tennessean, the company’s Nashville-based newspaper.
The goal of these new jobs — which are in addition to the three music journalists The Tennessean now employs — will be to “capture the excitement around Swift’s current tour… while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and his career,” Gannett said. . Another position aims to analyze Beyoncé’s impact in the same way.
The New York branch of the NewsGuild was skeptical, writing on »
Lark-Marie Anton, Gannett’s communications manager, said in a statement to AFP that “these roles do not come at the expense of other jobs”, stressing that Gannett’s aim is to “broaden our audience” , the company has hired 225 journalists since March. and has over 100 open roles.
“Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter are artists and businesswomen. Their work has tremendous economic impact and societal significance that influences many industries and our culture – they are shaping a generation,” Anton said.
– Under pressure –
Robert Thompson, a media specialist at Syracuse University, said his first reaction to the new jobs was to wonder if “it was a joke.”
But he said after reflection: “I think it would be silly to reject that outright… There are so few things that anyone really knows whether they’re a fan or not, and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are among the very rare.” those.”
These jobs have the potential to enable “really insightful ways of telling the story of 21st century America through the lens of its most popular characters,” he said.
On the other hand, Thompson acknowledged that a negative reaction to the new jobs in light of diminishing local media coverage is reasonable.
“If you were to get a group of people together and say, ‘We have X number of dollars, how should they be spent?’ “Most of them probably wouldn’t say Taylor Swift’s beat,” he said.
“But that doesn’t mean that outside of that context there can’t be some really good things to come out of it.”
If done correctly, the new jobs aren’t necessarily the “dream” careers that some newspapers have touted, he said.
Swift and Beyoncé fans are notoriously defensive: music critics who make even the slightest negative comment about their idols can be doxxed or receive death threats.
And alongside the “organized anger” of the Swifties and the Beyhive, the worlds these artists have organized are notoriously guarded.
Plus, Thompson noted, “the eyes of the profession will be on these poor people when they are finally hired.”
“The first song they put down, it better be really good.”
mdo/dw
