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Emily, Hanna:
Two points.
are showing that men, too--maybe not those at the crazy-competitive high end of the spectrum, but still, a lot of them--want to spend more time with their children, but feel forced not to by the current order of things. They work in offices that value inputs not outputs, to use the language of economics. Or they support wives who don't work because (they feel) they've been forced out by professions that do the same. Or they just can't manage their anxiety about whether they're masculine enough. Whatever. A workplace in which it was considered desirable for employees to be good parents--perhaps such a workplace would only exist if created by government regulation, but it could exist--might protect such men from themselves.
2. I take
your point, Hanna, though it seems to me that you don't need to have a single person working a story for hours at a time, no matter how fast-breaking it is. There's no reason not to put teams of people on a story, and indeed, I see more and more joint bylines, which strike me as a good thing, a humane thing. The real problem in journalism, from the point of view of labor, is the move to the Web and the sweatshop ethos that it engenders, in which you the writer and you the editor (more and more the same person) have to post and edit seven million times a day. This is not a professional issue. It's a money issue. You Slatesters are absurdly overburdened, keeping up with a magazine that gets more and more bloggy and podcasty and video-based, because the Washington Post Company still isn't sure which aspect of the publication will take off, and they aren't going to invest huge sums of money while they find out. We won't discover the way out of this trap until our bosses figure out how to turn a profit at this thing, which could take a while.
But that's no reason to despair. What if the way to make money on the web turns out to be providing value-added specialized information, rather than glorified newswire copy or know-nothing bloviating, such as I'm engaging in now? Then we'd see less reliance on general-assignment reporters and pundits and more reliance on reporters and writers with expertise. This is already true to a certain extent. I can already imagine several stories in which you simply have to have, say, Dafna Linzer or Hanna Rosin, despite their nannys' deadlines, because they know more about Middle East weaponry or evangelicals or what have you than anyone else on staff. A focus on conceptual scoops over plain-vanilla news scoops would do wonders for the flex-time crowd. I realize that this doesn't make life easier for the junior metro reporter, and that the more journalism is a commodified object rather than a specialized, artisanal product, the worse off she is, which is to say, this is a class issue more than a gender issue, but hey. Maybe she can put in her time before she has kids.
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Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)
One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.
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