Do we really want a new Federal Writers Project?

Now that Obama is self-consciously echoing Franklin D. Roosevelt in his approach to our current economic bad times, everyone has his hand out to get some of the new New Deal. And the latest is Mark Pinsky of the New Republic who argues that the federal government should set up a new Writers Project similar to the Federal Writers Project of the New Deal. And who are those unemployed writers who would get jobs in this new FWP? You guessed it! He is thinking of all those journalists who have lost jobs as media organizations contract.

Today, there are many dislocated "old media" journalists from newspapers, radio, and television on the street--here I declare my personal interest, as one of them--who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP. But since these journalists represent only a fraction of the larger displaced workforce, it is fair to ask what the public benefit would be of money spent.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.

When it seems like every second person has a personal blog, why does the federal government have to subsidize unemployed journalists to go find out what the public thinks about anything? And unlike the 1930s, we have many more academics today to perform that sort of research.

I have a better suggestion for these unemployed journalists. We have a great need for teachers in inner cities. Why don't they go apply their writing skills to teaching those children how to write. We don't need the government to subsidize every block of workers whose jobs have been lost due to changes in the marketplace. Those media jobs aren't coming back and while I feel for everyone who has lost a job, it is no kindness to have some short-term fix to keep them employed in a career that is disappearing. IT would be more of a kindness to help them to retrain for the marketplace of the 21st century, not that of the 1930s.