New article: I've been watching those "I quit my job to follow my passion" videos for years. I'm not immune to their allure. However, I started noticing what they don't show. The family money. The startup spouse with health insurance. The savings from the finance job they left.

The "follow your passion" narrative isn't about courage. It's about who can afford to take the risk.

#writing #ClassPrivilege #entrepreneurship #PassionEconomy #SurvivorshipBias #SelfMadeMyth

https://bit.ly/3ZTghLr

"We considered journalists to be those who worked for a media outlet with an identifiable focus on news, and who earned at least 50% of their income from journalism or worked at least 50% of their working week as a journalist. To be included in our survey, respondents also needed to work for a news outlet with a UK base and that was aimed, at least in part, at a UK audience.

After data cleaning, we retained a final sample of 1,130 respondents, a sufficient size to achieve a confidence level of at least 95% and a maximum error margin of 3%.

Our survey is part of the international Worlds of Journalism Study, which uses the same core questionnaire across 75 countries. The survey covers a wide range of topics, including journalists’ demographics, working conditions and their experience of safety and wellbeing.

For the UK study, we added two questions regarding journalists’ socioeconomic background. First, we asked what job the main earner in their households held when the respondents were 14 years old. Second, we asked about the school journalists attended: fee-paying private or state primary and secondary school, non-fee-paying selective secondary school (such as grammar school) or a school not in the UK.

The question on parents’ occupation allowed respondents to write in the title of the relevant job. We coded the replies manually using the nine categories of the Office for National Statistics’ 2020 Standard Occupational Classification.

Seventy-one percent of journalists in our sample came from a privileged background, with the main earner in their childhood household holding a job within the three top categories of the classification. Only 12% of our respondents came from a working-class background (sales and customer service occupations; process, plant and machine operatives and elementary occupations)."

https://theconversation.com/new-survey-shows-the-extent-of-class-privilege-in-uk-journalism-254838?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=bylinelinkedinbutton

#UK #Journalism #Press #Media #News #ClassPrivilege #ClassWarfare

Via #CovidMeetups I was invited to join a #Discord server of self-proclaimed #CovidCautious isolators. I’d never used Discord previously & tried my best to connect with the folks there. There were 500-odd members & the active ones all knew one another well.

I didn’t last long due to blatant #ClassPrivilege rearing its ugly head early on. Constant quips like “if you leave your home to get groceries, you can only blame yourself if you get COVID” w/plenty agreeing emphatically. Hello?!