The Rise of the Amateur

Yesterday I wrote about the rise of the “just in time” employee. I think this mindset has created an unintended second order effect, the rise of the amateur. In this post I will explore two examples of this phenomenon.

When I started work back in 1973, we had secretaries. These women were expert typists. They were fast, accurate, and were familiar with the proper format for any correspondence or reports that were required by their job. With the rise of word processing software, the typing task passed to managers and engineers. These individuals could not type very fast or very well and they were frequently unacquainted with the style guide. Sending a document produced by an amateur to a customer was a bad idea, so review chains became longer and slower. However, the secretaries could be eliminated. Since engineers can charge the customer for billable hours and the secretaries are paid for out of overhead it is good thing for the organization. The engineer typist is generating income and the now unemployed secretary is not an expense. Often strange behavior in organizations is easily understood once one is familiar with the accounting rules.

The second example includes publications like this blog. Warren Buffet says, “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.” Attacking companies like Coca Cola or Dell Computers would be difficult for a startup. At best they could only chip around the edges, making an odd new beverage for a limited clientele or assembling a small number of custom computers in a residential basement on a special order basis. Starting something like a new railroad would simply be impossible. Printing a paper and distributing it was a significant barrier to entry. Now the Internet allows any penniless crackpot the opportunity to stand on an electronic soap box and share his opinions with the world.

Once every city of any significance had at least two newspapers, a morning paper and an evening paper. The articles in these publications were written by professional reporters, reviewed by professional editors, the layout was done by professional artists, and the paper was printed by skilled tradesmen. First network television news killed the evening paper. Then the electronic revolution killed the printers. Now the Internet and cable news are killing the surviving morning papers. Who wants to pay 50 cents for day old news that has to be recycled when it is available the instant it is happening on the new media?

The few surviving daily papers are fighting back with “just in time” techniques. Professional reporters have been replaced with stringers, essentially amateurs paid by the story or hired on a part time basis. Again this is nothing new. Freelance photography has always been a part of magazine and newspaper publication since the technology first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the continuation of an existing trend to new areas. It also appears that publications like USA Today are not as carefully edited as in the past. If the casual reader can routinely find spelling and grammatical errors in the articles (and they do) USA Today has a problem.

It is obvious to the author this blog could use the services of a professional editor, but since I can’t afford one, spell checker and an occasional consultation with the wife will have to suffice.