Mark I. Pinsky: Why Barack Obama should resurrect the Federal Writers Project and bail out laid-off journalists
[Mark I. Pinsky, former religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel, is at work on his fourth book.]
Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to jump start the economy with an economic stimulus proposal featuring infrastructure repair. If so, it may be time for the man who would be FDR to take a look at another successful--but largely forgotten--jobs program from the Depression era: the Federal Writers Project.
America's newspaper industry has been imploding in the last few years, a development that predates the Wall Street collapse but has been hugely accelerated by the economic meltdown, forcing thousands of journalists onto the street. Hundreds more have now joined them from retrenching magazines and faltering websites, bringing the year-to-date total to 14,683 according to the tracking website Paper Cuts. Hundreds more have now joined them from retrenching magazines and faltering websites. Every day the journalism clearinghouse Romenesko links to stories of layoffs and downsizing--Gannett has been cutting 2,000 jobs across the chain, and Newsday has just announced another five percent in the last week alone. Any federal effort to put back to work the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work in the nation's hard-hit industrial, construction, airline, and financial sectors should consider displaced news media workers--including those newly laid off from the publishing industry--as well.
The Federal Writers Project operated from 1935-1939 under the leadership of Henry Alsberg, a journalist and theater director. In addition to providing employment to more than 6,000 out-of-work reporters, photographers, editors, critics, writers, and creative craftsmen and -women, the FWP produced some lasting contributions to American history, culture, and literature. Their efforts ranged from comprehensive guides to 48 states and three territories to interviews with and photos of 2,300 former African-American slaves. These are preserved in the seventeen volumes of Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
Less overtly political and thus less controversial than the Federal Theater Project, the FWP nonetheless included some groundbreaking projects among more than 250 books, documenting the lives of racial minorities, factory workers, and sharecroppers, titles like These Are Our Lives, The Negro in Virginia, Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, Bibliography of Chicago Negroes, and Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Each participating state project had a staff of editors that commissioned, approved, and supervised young field researchers who worked for about $80 a month....
Read entire article at New Republic
Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back to the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to jump start the economy with an economic stimulus proposal featuring infrastructure repair. If so, it may be time for the man who would be FDR to take a look at another successful--but largely forgotten--jobs program from the Depression era: the Federal Writers Project.
America's newspaper industry has been imploding in the last few years, a development that predates the Wall Street collapse but has been hugely accelerated by the economic meltdown, forcing thousands of journalists onto the street. Hundreds more have now joined them from retrenching magazines and faltering websites, bringing the year-to-date total to 14,683 according to the tracking website Paper Cuts. Hundreds more have now joined them from retrenching magazines and faltering websites. Every day the journalism clearinghouse Romenesko links to stories of layoffs and downsizing--Gannett has been cutting 2,000 jobs across the chain, and Newsday has just announced another five percent in the last week alone. Any federal effort to put back to work the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work in the nation's hard-hit industrial, construction, airline, and financial sectors should consider displaced news media workers--including those newly laid off from the publishing industry--as well.
The Federal Writers Project operated from 1935-1939 under the leadership of Henry Alsberg, a journalist and theater director. In addition to providing employment to more than 6,000 out-of-work reporters, photographers, editors, critics, writers, and creative craftsmen and -women, the FWP produced some lasting contributions to American history, culture, and literature. Their efforts ranged from comprehensive guides to 48 states and three territories to interviews with and photos of 2,300 former African-American slaves. These are preserved in the seventeen volumes of Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
Less overtly political and thus less controversial than the Federal Theater Project, the FWP nonetheless included some groundbreaking projects among more than 250 books, documenting the lives of racial minorities, factory workers, and sharecroppers, titles like These Are Our Lives, The Negro in Virginia, Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, Bibliography of Chicago Negroes, and Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Each participating state project had a staff of editors that commissioned, approved, and supervised young field researchers who worked for about $80 a month....