Now that I've actually finished the article (heh), I think it's asking a very good question.
What she's really saying is:
1) Readers want good long-form articles
2) Some sites are even willing to pay for it
3) But, there are no longer up-and-comers being trained to produce such work, there are only the writers who already have the experience.
What she's saying is not all that different from the complaint you see about hiring developers- Everyone wants someone with 5 years experience, but there's a lack of opportunities for people to get that 5 years experience.
I think that's an exaggerated complaint in the software industry, but maybe not as much in the journalism biz.
I worked in local TV journalism for about five years; an industry thrashing around to find its new footing to be sure. There are very few people there who are willing to do serious journalism. They don't know how to Google, or who to call. Many of those fresh out of college simply have no curiosity, and little imagination.
It's not unusual to talk to some and find out their dreams of being the next Oprah or Brian Williams. (I'm not knocking those people or celebrities mind you. Even then often the reporters don't realize the work and dedication those people put into their craft. They just know success when they see it.) These people are chasing the popular respect, popularity in culture, and money. Of course, not all. Just many.
There are some people who really do have an interest in the work. I say this as a producer with five years experience, who has been looking for a job just over a year now[0]. The three times interviews with top 80 markets have gone far enough to talk money the offers were around $20k. I'm going to have to take the next job like this offered to me.
[0] I lost my last job because I visited 4chan. My boss said the news wires we subscribed too had enough information, and there was no excuse to try to look at the site myself. Therefor, I was obviously going to look at porn. Which I assume there were thumbnails of on my harddrive.
I've mostly applied for other producer positions at TV stations. I've also applied for news writer positions and just a couple of journalism jobs in print/Internet media.
If you're asking what I was looking for money wise? I was in a market around 150 (DMA rank), in a city that was very cheap to live in. I had student loans of $800/month, and I'd like to be able to pay them, afford rent, water, power, food, and an Internet connection. I managed that in a cheap city with a roommate at 30k, so I'd like to make more in a larger city, given I have five years experience producing and five in the studio.
Which do you think unlikely? Me finding another job at all, or me finding a job that pays a wage approaching middle class?
A few different times they popped up in the news over the years I went there to get a feel for why people were joining in any certain cause, (yes, mostly for the fun of it), and often to find out exactly what they were doing.
Probably the best example is around Christmas 2010. People were pissed that credit card companies were not processing payments towards Wikileaks. There were tons of posts about taking down their websites (and arguments for Amazon). Of course, it did eventually happen, and while I was at work. It's not some major earth shattering story for a local newscast, but, it's easy to get.
Yes, a lot of the actual goings on of some of the operations are smaller clandestine groups on IRC and the likes, and I'd love to work my way into one or two of those. But a lot of them do rely on populist support, be it from actual outrage or potential for schadenfreude. A lot of wire copy is just "secret hacker group!"
It's not like I browsed it nightly lying in wait or anything. But it was in my history, and I when asked I told my boss that yes, I'd visited it. As I started to go into why, he stops me and tells me the company can't have people visiting these kinds of sites, etc... Had I been smarter, I could've made a better defense, like asking to be shown the offending material.
At first I was angry, depressed, and all kinds of other things. Now, I genuinely think it was just a case of wanting to get rid of someone, and look for a way to fire someone without paying them. I don't take it as personally. I don't think he thought I was trying to do anything untoward at work. (I mean, it's not like I didn't have a bigger monitor and privacy(!) at home... And if I was, why wouldn't I use Privacy Mode, or at least erase the history and cache?) I don't know. Just a bad situation.
I know several people who are amazingly talented writers who've been unable to find paying work. Writing prose is sort-of like software, in that you can get a lot of practice in before you ever get a job, but it's hard to prove that your practice was valuable until you've had a few years of professional experience.
This is the wrong approach. You don't train someone to produce such works.
These types of proses are more like a personal distillation of experiences. You can take a handful of olympic athletes, pair them up with a great editor and writer team, and come up with a great story about what happened at the london olympics. That would be a cover worthy story.
It's not about training writers who can churn out articles. It's about understanding that writing itself is an art, not something that can be trained, but something that needs to be invented.
Put it in terms that people on hacker news would probably understand - Writing a major New Yorker cover story is like finding the topic, writing, and then defending a PhD thesis. You have to come up with an original thought, support it with research and original experimentation, distill it down, test your hypothesis, and see if your thesis is still solid. After rounds and rounds of editing, repositioning, rewriting, and PIVOTING, you come out with a kernel of an article - the amount of words written would be approx 10 - 20 times the amount of text that would actually be published. The rest would be research material and stuff "left on the editing table".
You can't train that. Successful authors understand this - all of their advice to young writers would include something like - "only you know what kind of story you want to write" - "keep practicing" "keep writing every day".
There is no handbook to learn, no school to go to.
Journalism school gives you a template of what other people have done, but at the same time, I consider it a waste of time for writers. Just go out there experience the world, talk to as many people as you can, and write seriously every single day. You'll come out the other side with a comparable set of skills as someone who went to school for journalism.
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So what is the right approach? For me, it would be encouragement - start young - get education right. Bring up childhood and adult literacy, give people the ability to think and reason. Increase funding to schools and give teachers a better deal.
You'll find more and more kids wanting to write, keep practicing it, and thus we get better writers when they grow up.
For the immediate situation, the same thing applies - give people who want to write the chance to tell their story. Increase funding commitments to schools and higher education.
Get people talking about writing as an actual practice instead of as an advertising technique (ie writing copy) or as a purely legalistic/procedural language (ie taxes, lawsuits, and manuals).
People will become more interested in writing and the skills required in literacy.
Who knows, the best story might be hiding there in the heart of that guy you pass by every day living on the streets.
I think you're painting all of writers with a single brush. I just can't imagine that a good understanding of the basics (which can be taught out of school, but should always be taught in school) doesn't help most people in their art. And we know that not all people learn the same way.
I didn't go to journalism school. I don't even have a degree. (I dropped out of CompSci.) But I did work in news for five years (I pointed that out in another post. I know, it's starting to sound smarmy. Sorry.), and the vast majority of people did go to school for journalism.
I disagree with the general tone of your post. I regret not going to school for this. I think it would've made me an even more capable writer than I am now. That said, I do think that a slim majority of people I've met who did attend aren't great writers. As a TV news producer I spent a fair amount of time editing others' work and working with my reporters to help them better communicate what they mean. I often felt that some of the things we talked about were not only things probably covered in college, but some were definitely covered in grade school. I met an adult (well, a 22yo, which I consider an adult,) who had trouble with their/there/they're.
At least one person actually stopped seeking input from me after they found out I didn't attend school in the field.
And then I've met a few people, who also attended college, who could write circles around, well, any other people I've ever met. On in particular credits his school, and a couple of professors and friends he met there. He has no trouble being published when he takes the time to write something, but just prefers being on TV.
I think that some students better know how to take advantage of what schools provide, and that some schools, in their current form, aren't teaching. Both allude to problems that need to be addressed, but neither suggests to me that schools are completely worthless. Instead it says to me that some schools are really ineffective for the students they haveand that should be addressed, and we need to try to make sure all students know how to utilize the resources available to them.
That said, I think your second section is dead on. We do need to be better about encouraging people to tackle fields that interest them. School shouldn't be some thing that people feel labored by. I think that's why so many are ineffective, not proof they can't work.
