| No Images? Click here   You know the trope. Millennials are lazy and entitled, right? They live with their parents and expect participation trophies for the slightest of efforts. Of course any money they earn gets blown on avocado toast and other frivolity.But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, circumstances in which millennials are currently living are more dire than most people realize, like Depression-era bad. Michael Hobbes, a millennial reporter, dove deep into the problems of his generation, where he discovered a bleak future.How did this story come about? Whose idea was it? How did it take shape?Like most journalism, it started as a nitpick. For years I’ve had this feeling that the media narrative around millennials—we’re lazy, we’re entitled, we’re eating avocados instead of learning how to code—was utterly false. The editors at Highline and I started talking about how it would be interesting to try and unravel what’s really going on with young people in this country. Tracing the trends backwards to things like welfare reform and the financialization of the economy, but also forward to what’s going to happen to us as we age.What was the hardest thing about reporting, writing or editing this piece?The hardest thing was the overall structure. Every economic challenge facing young people is related to two others. Rising housing prices, for example, are partly attributable to the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. And that, in turn, is related to things like globalization and outsourcing. So the process of reporting and writing this was trying to narrow this big story about the world changing into a small story about how American political and social structures have responded to those changes.What did you expect to find? What surprised you?Going in, I knew about things like exploding college costs and rising income inequality because those are part of the narrative that we’ve constructed around millennials. What I didn’t know about, and had to find out myself, was how wage volatility for young people is rising. Or that the net worth of older people has risen since 1980 while ours has fallen. Everything that contradicts the stereotype of millennials as spoiled and entitled wasn’t factoring into the narrative about us at all. But the minute I went looking for it, it was staring me in the face.Did you learn anything that might be useful to other writers or reporters?The most fun thing I did for this story was to just go talk to people. I spent the day at a community college. I went to fast food restaurants and interviewed the employees. I volunteered nights at a youth homeless shelter. As a reporter, it’s tempting to find sources by using social media or the internet, but that can put you in contact with people who are similar to you or who’ve been quoted by like three other publications already. There’s no substitute for just going out into the world and asking people to hear their stories.What do you think readers should take away from this story?The biggest takeaway for me was the extent to which these giant economic forces, things like globalization or automation or the housing crisis, have been described to us as out of our control. But once you start looking into them, you find that each one has been accelerated and exacerbated by deliberate political decisions. All of the challenges that young people face now are partly the result of laws and policies that were passed in broad daylight. Which means we can fix them the same way.Love, |
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