Page 2: Millennial blues
So a kid walks into my office about six weeks ago. Clearly bright. Looking for a little summer work before he embarks on some globetrotting postgrad adventure with his girlfriend. He had just graduated from UC Davis and said he wanted to be a “data journalist.”
In other words, he wants to be like Nate Silver, the statistician who created the website fivethirtyeight.com (538 being the number of votes in the Electoral College). Silver is the guy who’s been predicting recent national elections with unerring accuracy.
I brainstorm a bit. I think geez, this may be a perfect opportunity to have an independent guy, new to town, perform an outside analysis of Mammoth Lakes Tourism. How is MLT spending its money, and what is the return? Is the outside analysis markedly different than what has been offered by the paid marketing firm at the biannual MLT open houses?
The second idea involved the Police Department. Years ago, Mammoth’s Town Council drastically reduced the Department’s budget and number of sworn officers. Since that time, reported crime has decreased. So, is reported crime a function of how many officers there are to fill out the reports? Is there a way to determine how safe or unsafe Town really is, or what impact a reduction of officers has really had or could have?
The kid decides to tackle the MLT project first. I give him no direction other than to follow the Yellow Brick Road and see what he finds. I get periodic updates about data he’s collected, meetings he’s had with MLT Exec. Director John Urdi, etc. I am cautiously optimistic the kid may produce something of value, but really, there are a lot of folks who express interest in writing/journalism, but once tasked with an actual assignment, they soon realize it’s tougher than it looks.
80% percent of the time, the story never materializes.
But I’m optimistic about this kid because he seems to grasp ideas pretty quickly. I tell him that the story he’s working on is important, and it is. The Town of Mammoth Lakes spends $6 million a year on marketing with very little idea (save the assurances given by the people who are paid to do the job) as to whether the money is well-spent or not.
Budget is equated with effectiveness. We spend a lot of money, ergo, it must be effective.
Eventually, the kid produces a draft. We go over it together. I have him explain things that seem unclear. Sometimes, during the course of his explanation, he makes an interesting observation that is not in the story, and I ask him why it’s not in the story. Don’t leave the good stuff on the table, I tell him.
As one might expect, the data he’s collected and analyzed offers a mixed bag of results. The good news is that the kid finds the ROI (Return on Investment) for the interactive/online advertising placed by MLT’s marketing firm Mering Carson is even better than what Mering Carson said it was.
The not-so-good news is that he finds the “public relations” spending on Ski Shows and social media and such is an utter bust.
However, there are, as always, caveats. Perhaps the P.R. spending produces a negative return in the short run, but has greater positive impact in the longer term.
I tell him I look forward to reading his final draft. I slot him in for publication the next day.
On deadline morning, I receive the following email: “On second thought, I don’t think I feel comfortable publishing my analysis at The Sheet. I [sic] seems like we have substantially different visions for the article, and I’m weary [sic] to publish anything that I don’t feel accurately represents my work. I’m really sorry if this inconveniences you in any way. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity.”
I call him. No answer. I text him the following: “Please come see me. I’m puzzled by your email. The reason I’m puzzled is because your analysis is ultimately a positive reflection on Mammoth Lakes Tourism. It doesn’t strike me as negative. Why not say it?”
Ultimately, I convince him to come in and talk to me. We talk further about the story. He reveals that he’s worried his analysis might cause someone to lose their job.
No one’s gonna lose their job, I tell him. And then I think to myself, that’s pretty audacious, as a cub reporter, to think that your work will have that kind of impact.
Again, I pitch. You’ve spent a lot of time on this. You’ve gathered a lot of information. Finish the job.
Almost two weeks goes by. I text him Tuesday. “Out of curiosity … are you completing the story?”
Reply: “Hey Ted, I was about to email you. After our last conversation, I spoke to Mike from the Mammoth Times. He offered me more regular work, so I decided to publish with them.”
When I was 24 years old, I was driving west on Interstate 80 (I can’t recall why or where I was going) and my car broke down in Elko. Serendipitously, the Elko Daily Free Press newspaper building was located right across the highway. So I walked down the off-ramp and hoofed it back up the hill and walked inside the Free Press offices and inquired about a job.
Even more serendipitously, the guy who covered the city and police beats had been arrested on a DUI the night before. I started work a few days later.
The Free Press was a family-owned newspaper (3rd generation). Three brothers operated it. One brother ran the press side of the operation, one brother ran the editorial side and one brother was sort of a black sheep who lobbed right-wing hand grenades with his pen.
As the city reporter, the brothers were keenly interested in my work. I was their man on the ground, and it was my job to root out graft and corruption, which they were convinced was rampant.
Each day, at 8 a.m. sharp, I would walk into the office and brother Rex from inside his glass-enclosed office would summon me with his finger. And I would sit down opposite him and he would lay out in great detail just how much I sucked.
I hated him. I feared him. And I wanted to please him. What a psychological brew. There were days I longed to quit but I couldn’t quit because I was broke.
Six months in, he gave me a 10% raise. I couldn’t see that was his way of telling me I was alright, especially when he kept telling me every morning how much I sucked.
I remember one particular morning when he was lecturing me about my lousy accident scene photography. Get closer, he admonished. You’re always too far away. I can’t see a damn thing.
Maybe a week goes by when my police scanner goes off reporting a rollover accident. I just happen to be in the area, and arrive on scene first. Indeed, the truck has rolled over, and the driver had been ejected through his own window. He lay on the ground, his head in a pool of his own blood, some bits of brain lying next to him.
I walked right up to him, and snapped several head shots from about three feet away.
I then stuck around for the emergency folks, took some more standard shots, and then departed.
The next morning, there’s that wagging finger.
I walk in and shut the door. It didn’t matter. The entire newsroom heard what came next. WHAT KIND OF A SICK F*%$ ARE YOU?
This is what I thought when the kid told me he was bolting for the Times.
I felt he was taking the easy way out. He wanted the story published verbatim, without professional critique. He didn’t want to be challenged, and wanted to make sure that the piece was properly watered down in all the right places.
He sought mediocrity, and was damn well going to find it.
Which, of course, baffles me just because this kid could whip me every time in an I.Q. test.
But then, if I were in his shoes … Elko was like a prison sentence to me. I counted down the days I was there, and left as soon as I could afford it.
I suppose the difference is I couldn’t just walk away at the first whiff of trial or adversity.
Rex Steninger has had a profound impact on my career. He may not have been the best manager of people; in fact he was wholly inept, but he was incredibly good at his job.
I spoke to Vane about what happened. Sadly, she is departing at the end of this month, just as Angela Evans departed in June. I will look back on these past few years with Katie and Angela as a real golden age of sorts with the paper. They were exceptional people and exceptional reporters and produced great work at a time when great work in this field is on the ebb.
I asked Vane to tell me something about Millenials. She busted out the following this afternoon in about two hours:
Although millennials perpetually take a beating in the press as lazy, selfish, and spoiled (Vane objects to these generalities as a millennial, herself), some journals are beginning to assert that millennials may have an intriguing way of approaching employment.
As Forbes noted in January of this year, the way millennials feel about their jobs is important, considering 86 million will be in the workplace by 2020, which represents 40 percent of the total working population.
Forbes quoted a study performed by the Intelligence Group that found millennials said the following about choosing a job:
64 percent say it’s a priority for them to make the world a better place.
72 percent would like to be their own boss, but if they have to work for a boss, 79 percent would want that boss to serve more as a coach or mentor.
88 percent prefer a collaborative work-culture over a competitive one.
74 percent want flexible work schedules.
It turns out that millennials appear to prioritize high paying jobs less than a job that they find personally fulfilling. Fortune Magazine picked up on this trend with an article this month that quoted a Pew Research Center study showing that while millennials value job security more highly than baby boomers do, they won’t stay at a job they don’t like.
According to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of surveyed millennials said having a job they enjoy was extremely important, compared with just 38 percent of baby boomers.
Millennials also felt strongly about job flexibility, and according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, many would give up pay or delay a promotion to achieve an ideal schedule.
A majority of millennials also said that they expected to move from company to company rather than staying put, according to a recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll. In that same poll, 53 percent of older respondents said that they thought it would be better to spend the majority of their lives working for one employer.
Perhaps millennials have the freedom to prioritize fulfillment over pay because, as many pundits have noted, they are increasingly waiting later to marry, have kids, or even move away from home (all of these likely because of high student debt, a still shaky job market, and the rising cost of purchasing a home).
Meanwhile the appeal of being their own boss—and the anticipation of moving from job to job—could be the product of the recession, which, as The Atlantic notes in a June article, forced millenials “to start their careers during a time of economic contraction with few traditional, full-time jobs available.”
Some journalists are calling millennials’ focus on making the world a better place and finding fulfilling work “optimistic.” Others argue that millenials’ pickiness about jobs is getting in the way of their starting careers. Both perceptions are simplistic. Although millennials may have a hopeful streak in searching for the “right” job for them, survey results also imply that they’re making the best of the unpredictability of the current job market. 44 percent of college graduates in their 20s are stuck in low-wage, dead-end jobs, according to the Federal Reserve of New York, and the Pew Research Center found that the number of young people making less than $25,000 has risen to the highest level since the 1990s.
Can you only find work part-time, or poor paying work in a job you know is going nowhere? If so, you might as well accept that you’ll be moving from job to job, rather than remaining at the same job for many years, as your parents did. Part-time work might also be training millennials to enjoy the time they’re not working as flexible time to be enjoyed as much as their finances allow. That flexibility might become addicting: why commit your life to eight hours five days a week when you can scrape by with a little less money and a little more time to do the things you love doing—until you find a job that you love just as much.
As for millennials’ pickiness about jobs, Vane freely admits that there is something to be said for millennials’ pickiness in general. This is the first generation to come of age with the apparently endless possibilities presented by the Internet, and that’s had a profound impact on the millennial generation.
Comedian Aziz Ansari details the effect this has on millennials’ dating lives in the funny and insightful book, Modern Romance:
“That’s the thing about the Internet,” he writes: “It doesn’t simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped to produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it. And in turn there are a whole bunch of inferior things that we’d be foolish to choose.”
Millennials may be finding it harder and harder to settle for a job that appears less then perfect—or a partner who appears less than perfect—because the Internet has created that idea of perfection. Of course, such perfection is unattainable. So perhaps millennials are missing out on jobs they might find fulfilling in time, jobs they might come to understand give back to the world in a significant even if in a small way. Perhaps they’re turning down or simply not pursuing those jobs. Or perhaps they’re not making the best of the job opportunities they do have, and instead restlessly searching for the next and better job.
But the interesting thing about millennials’ sense of infinite options is that, according to a study quoted by Ansari, “when we have more options, we are actually less satisfied and sometimes even have a harder time making a choice at all.”
What this means is a millennial might end up with her or his dream job, but because of that lingering sense that there must still be something better out there, she or he won’t find the job as satisfying.
In fact, Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, saw these exact results when studying college seniors preparing to enter the workforce.
“Rather than compare actual jobs, with their various pros and cons, in their minds they wound up selecting the features of each particular job and creating a ‘fantasy job,’ an ideal that neither they nor, probably, anyone else would ever get,” Ansari writes.
Which sheds an intriguing light on millennials’ approach to employment. On the one hand, their priorities and desires may be commendable—but if you’re working with that fantasy job always in the back of your mind, no matter how much you’re making the world a better place, how flexible your schedule, how much independence you have and how collaborative your workplace, you won’t ever be satisfied.
