This year has been a grim one for journalism, with layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, NBC News, Forbes, National Geographic, Business Insider and Sports Illustrated. Further cuts loom in newsrooms across the U.S.

Growing numbers of reporters and editors, tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop, are exiting the profession, citing burnout as the reason for their departure.

When scholars of journalism study the effects of the shrinking press corps, they usually focus on how it hurts civil society. Vast swaths of the country are at risk of becoming “news deserts,” with limited access to reliable local journalism. This state of affairs makes it harder for people to make educated decisions and is linked to reduced political engagement, research shows. What’s more, fewer reporters means less oversight of those wielding political and economic power.

But to me, those concerns – while important – ignore another issue, one that extends well beyond the news industry. As I argue with Sandra Vera-Zambrano in our new book, “The Journalist’s Predicament,” fewer people are seeing a life in news as a worthwhile career. This reflects a broader problem – namely, the ways that relentless economic pressures are pushing people away from socially important careers.

Meaning over money

As an occupation, journalism is attractive to many people because they can be paid to do work that’s interesting and socially beneficial.

In this regard, it is similar to otherwise very different jobs like nursing, teaching, social work and caregiving.

These are “vocations,” in the sense that sociologist Max Weber described them more than a century ago.

Based on strong personal commitments, vocations promise recognition and a sense of self-worth for doing work that’s connected to broader values: healing people, fighting injustice, imparting knowledge, serving the cause of democracy.

While these jobs have never paid especially well, people could get by and raise a family on them. That’s becoming less and less the case.

Across all of these professions, issues with recruitment and retention are so common that the term “crisis” is no longer an exaggeration.

Dreams clash with reality

Journalism, in many ways, represents ground zero for the crisis that confronts contemporary vocations.

For one, pay in the industry is stagnant.

With a median wage in 2023 of US$57,500, journalists’ salaries have not kept pace with inflation or jobs in public relations and corporate communication.

Job security, as ongoing layoffs suggest, is nearly nonexistent. Recent drives to unionize newsrooms have done little to stem losses, and they do nothing at all for the freelancers that constitute a growing share of all journalists – and, for the most part, belong to no union at all.

Inside or outside newsrooms, work typically involves longer hours and more demands.

And to what end? In many cases, it’s to perform tasks that aren’t that interesting or socially valuable.

The journalists we spoke to bemoaned the relentless demands to churn out new content for websites and social media feeds. They talked about using multimedia to report on topics that were assigned primarily for their potential to amuse and entertain, rather than to inform or provoke thought. They griped about spending more time sitting at their desks sifting through press releases instead of gathering original reports from the field. And they described fewer and fewer opportunities to pursue stories that are personally interesting and socially valuable.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that many people decide to leave journalism, or avoid a career in it entirely. Jobs in public relations pay substantially more, with a $66,750 median annual wage, and involve fixed hours and more stability.

To be sure, these alternative careers might not promise the same adventure and excitement of journalism. But that also means people in that field are less likely to find themselves frustrated by unmet expectations.

More surprising – and relevant for considering the crisis vocations face more broadly – is the fact that so many people, despite these conditions, nonetheless still find work in journalism appealing.

This appeal is not naively held. Surveys regularly show that aspiring journalists are well aware of the troubles confronting the industry. They’re nonetheless still willing to sacrifice better pay and job security for work that allows for self-expression and connects to broader values.

Their persistence, in spite of these conditions, highlights something important about journalism and vocations more broadly: These are careers that provide rewards that cannot be reduced to money.

Creeping disillusionment

The enduring attraction of contemporary vocations clarifies the nature of the crisis. In contrast to older vocations, such as the priesthood, many people still dream of being journalists, nurses and teachers.

But people who seek out these vocations today routinely find themselves exhausted and demoralized.

Nurses and caretakers are encouraged to eliminate “inefficiencies” so that the provision of care does not impede their employers’ ability to make money. Teachers are tasked with imparting practical skills to students while becoming more “entrepreneurial” themselves as budgets get slashed. Journalists are asked to produce news that conforms to, rather than challenges, audience expectations.

Add in the low pay, and these conditions threaten to reduce the belief that such jobs are worthwhile.

Many of the journalists we spoke to while researching our book find ways to manage the disappointments that come from doing work that stands in tension with what initially drew them. Or they reorient their work to better adapt to the profession’s commercial needs.

The fact that so many persist in the profession – at least for a while – should not distract from the frustrations and dissatisfaction that this produces.

At some point, the grip of market forces could erode interest in vocations to such an extent that they disappear altogether. In fact, some vocations today are probably sustained more by their idealized reputations on the silver screen – in films like “Spotlight” and “Dead Poets Society” – than they are by the experiences of actual reporters and teachers in 2024.

For the moment – and for the foreseeable future – the more likely development is not disinterest, but a struggle to have a career in these fields. That’s not just a failure of a profession overtaken by commercial considerations. It’s a reflection of a society unable to satisfy its citizens’ basic desires for finding meaning through the work they do.

Matthew Powers, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With the current buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), it would be easy to assume that it is a recent innovation. In fact, AI has been around in one form or another for more than 70 years. To understand the current generation of AI tools and where they might lead, it is helpful to understand how we got here.

Each generation of AI tools can be seen as an improvement on those that went before, but none of the tools are headed toward consciousness.

The mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing published an article in 1950 with the opening sentence: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”. He goes on to propose something called the imitation game, now commonly called the Turing test, in which a machine is considered intelligent if it cannot be distinguished from a human in a blind conversation.

Five years later, came the first published use of the phrase “artificial intelligence” in a proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.

From those early beginnings, a branch of AI that became known as expert systems was developed from the 1960s onward. Those systems were designed to capture human expertise in specialised domains. They used explicit representations of knowledge and are, therefore, an example of what’s called symbolic AI.

There were many well-publicised early successes, including systems for identifying organic molecules, diagnosing blood infections, and prospecting for minerals. One of the most eye-catching examples was a system called R1 that, in 1982, was reportedly saving the Digital Equipment Corporation US$25m per annum by designing efficient configurations of its minicomputer systems.

The key benefit of expert systems was that a subject specialist without any coding expertise could, in principle, build and maintain the computer’s knowledge base. A software component known as the inference engine then applied that knowledge to solve new problems within the subject domain, with a trail of evidence providing a form of explanation.

These were all the rage in the 1980s, with organisations clamouring to build their own expert systems, and they remain a useful part of AI today.

Enter machine learning

The human brain contains around 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, interconnected by a dendritic (branching) structure. So, while expert systems aimed to model human knowledge, a separate field known as connectionism was also emerging that aimed to model the human brain in a more literal way. In 1943, two researchers called Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts had produced a mathematical model for neurons, whereby each one would produce a binary output depending on its inputs.

One of the earliest computer implementations of connected neurons was developed by Bernard Widrow and Ted Hoff in 1960. Such developments were interesting, but they were of limited practical use until the development of a learning algorithm for a software model called the multi-layered perceptron (MLP) in 1986.

The MLP is an arrangement of typically three or four layers of simple simulated neurons, where each layer is fully interconnected with the next. The learning algorithm for the MLP was a breakthrough. It enabled the first practical tool that could learn from a set of examples (the training data) and then generalise so that it could classify previously unseen input data (the testing data).

It achieved this feat by attaching numerical weightings on the connections between neurons and adjusting them to get the best classification with the training data, before being deployed to classify previously unseen examples.

The MLP could handle a wide range of practical applications, provided the data was presented in a format that it could use. A classic example was the recognition of handwritten characters, but only if the images were pre-processed to pick out the key features.

Newer AI models

Following the success of the MLP, numerous alternative forms of neural network began to emerge. An important one was the convolutional neural network (CNN) in 1998, which was similar to an MLP apart from its additional layers of neurons for identifying the key features of an image, thereby removing the need for pre-processing.

Both the MLP and the CNN were discriminative models, meaning that they could make a decision, typically classifying their inputs to produce an interpretation, diagnosis, prediction, or recommendation. Meanwhile, other neural network models were being developed that were generative, meaning that they could create something new, after being trained on large numbers of prior examples.

Generative neural networks could produce text, images, or music, as well as generate new sequences to assist in scientific discoveries.

Two models of generative neural network have stood out: generative-adversarial networks (GANs) and transformer networks. GANs achieve good results because they are partly “adversarial”, which can be thought of as a built-in critic that demands improved quality from the “generative” component.

Transformer networks have come to prominence through models such as GPT4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4) and its text-based version, ChatGPT. These large-language models (LLMs) have been trained on enormous datasets, drawn from the Internet. Human feedback improves their performance further still through so-called reinforcement learning.

As well as producing an impressive generative capability, the vast training set has meant that such networks are no longer limited to specialised narrow domains like their predecessors, but they are now generalised to cover any topic.

Where is AI going?

The capabilities of LLMs have led to dire predictions of AI taking over the world. Such scaremongering is unjustified, in my view. Although current models are evidently more powerful than their predecessors, the trajectory remains firmly toward greater capacity, reliability and accuracy, rather than toward any form of consciousness.

As Professor Michael Wooldridge remarked in his evidence to the UK Parliament’s House of Lords in 2017, “the Hollywood dream of conscious machines is not imminent, and indeed I see no path taking us there”. Seven years later, his assessment still holds true.

There are many positive and exciting potential applications for AI, but a look at the history shows that machine learning is not the only tool. Symbolic AI still has a role, as it allows known facts, understanding, and human perspectives to be incorporated.

A driverless car, for example, can be provided with the rules of the road rather than learning them by example. A medical diagnosis system can be checked against medical knowledge to provide verification and explanation of the outputs from a machine learning system.

Societal knowledge can be applied to filter out offensive or biased outputs. The future is bright, and it will involve the use of a range of AI techniques, including some that have been around for many years.

Adrian Hopgood, Independent Consultant and Emeritus Professor of Intelligent Systems, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Your spacecraft is spiralling out of control, and you will hit planet Arakis unless you fire up the thermal after-boosters. Which of the two buttons below would help you fire up the boosters on time? Would you be more likely to survive if the cockpit designer had installed the button on the left or the right?

If you picked the left button, congratulations! Science suggests you might have just survived the crash landing. But what is it about these buttons that made you pick one button over the other?

The short answer is beauty, with the button on the left being more aesthetically appealing than the one on the right – making us spot it quicker. That may seem surprising. But beauty is more important to us than we tend to realise. As the poet John Keats put it: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know.”

How much we like something and how beautiful we find it, can have a compelling effect on our experience and behaviour. Research shows that when we see beautiful things – be it a person, a painting or a kettle – we attribute a whole host of positive affectations to them like truth, innocence and efficiency.

Beauty emerges from different properties of the loved thing. Sure, though there is a certain degree of subjectivity in what we like – I may love something that you don’t – but, when it comes to beauty, there are some well-established properties that matter.

These include certain properties of the object itself, such as proportion, symmetry and curvature, as well as the relationship between the object and the viewer, including the degree of familiarity.

For instance, we tend to like classic architecture such as the Parthenon, because of its alluring proportions (such as the golden ratio), and we tend to find paintings of familiar motifs more beautiful than those of unfamiliar ones.

A generally accepted principle accounting for what we like is the processing fluency theory: the easier it is to understand something, the more we like it.

Aesthetics matter

But why care about beauty? Why not take a utilitarian approach and embrace the functional above all things? Put simply: aesthetics matter, and it shows in our behaviour and performance.

We surround ourselves with things we like, objects that are appealing to the eye. We visit art galleries and look at beautiful paintings. We surround ourselves with nice things at home.

We also tend to persevere more with things we like. A case in point is mathematics, where an elegant and beautiful equation is preferred over a clumsy one. We tend to think that beautiful things will work better and be easier to learn and use. And sometimes we are correct – such as when we reach for a simple pencil sharpener because we think it will work better than a more cumbersome design.

But aesthetics can also influence performance in tasks where efficiency – speed and accuracy – matters. Even when we’re not aware of it. In my own research, my colleague and I asked participants in our lab to find icons on a screen. After controlling for several variables – such as complexity, meaningfulness, familiarity and concreteness – we found that participants spotted appealing icons faster than their less appealing counterparts.

But this was only when the task was difficult. That is, when the icons were complex, abstract or unfamiliar, there was a clear advantage for the more aesthetically appealing targets. By contrast, when the icons were visually simple, concrete or familiar, aesthetic appeal no longer mattered – the task was easy enough already.

In the figure at the top, both spaceship booster icons are complex, but the one on the left has greater aesthetic appeal — and that is why the left button would be the better one to put into your spaceship.

Aesthetics can beat the blues

Shops often carefully select music, objects and scents that can influence our buying behaviour. In our recent study, we showed how and why this works.

We put participants in a positive or negative mood by listening to either a happy or sad piece of music and reading a list of statements. We then asked them to complete a timed search task. Previous research shows that negative moods can negatively affect our performance.

People in a positive mood found the appealing icons more easily than the unappealing icons. This benefit, however, also emerged for participants in a negative mood, but a little later. We concluded that the appealing stimuli must be inherently rewarding, with aesthetic appeal helping to overcome the detrimental effects of negative mood on performance – that is, appeal can beat the blues.

It seems that being in a positive mood makes us more likely to engage with beautiful things. But even in a negative mood, appealing items are likely to capture attention and influence behaviour – as long as we remain exposed to them long enough.

There’s increasing evidence that small doses of psychedelics in a controlled environment such as a clinic can help treat depression. Such drugs typically produce intense experiences of beauty – in terms of colours and shapes – and help us feel more at one with our surroundings.

Small but significant effect

Aesthetic appeal can decrease a participant’s response time by roughly one tenth of a second. This may seem small but can be quite significant: savings of even a few milliseconds at a time all add up when dealing with a bad wifi connection or a slow 3G signal on a smartphone.

Visionary leaders and innovators have long had an intuitive grasp of the importance of aesthetic appeal and simplicity in industrial design — perhaps none more so than Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, whose commitments to aesthetics and simplicity were legendary.

Sadly, it appears as though many designers did not follow Jobs’ visionary intuition. Perhaps the accumulating data will finally convince them that design has an important impact on performance.

The next time you’re designing a disruptive mobile app, or even the control centre for your spacecraft, remember how important aesthetics and beauty are — it just might save your crash landing.

Irene Reppa, Assistant Professor, Psychology, Swansea University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 1987, the fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier shot the supermodel Naomi Campbell in the desert wearing a gold Chanel jacket. It’s a stunning photograph and a historic one. This image featured on the December issue of British Vogue that year – it was only the third time the fashion magazine had a black woman on its cover.

The picture is so iconic it was acquired by The National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection in 2016. It can currently be seen at the V&A in an exhibition celebrating the life and career of Naomi Campbell.

Born in the 1980s myself, my teenage years were during the 1990s, when Campbell rose to fame. It was uncommon then to see a woman of similar skin tone to me in mainstream media. This cover was groundbreaking, coming at a time when fashion editors believed that black models didn’t sell issues. It was also taken in the first year of Campbell’s career – a career which would go on to break so many more barriers.

As the fashion expert and writer Michaela Angela Davies puts it: “Black and non-white models are still generally regarded as a trend — seasonal and largely disposable in a mid-20th-century Dior-esque kind of way. Naomi Campbell disrupted that disregard. She was perennial, inevitable, and undeniable. Naomi was the activator.”

Naomi at the V&A is the first exhibition ever to focus on the person who wears the garments, rather than the designer who created them. It goes some way to correcting the historical oversight of the significant effect of models on fashion culture.

This exhibition is a testament to just how important the black British model has been to wider culture and representation, in the fashion world and beyond.

Produced with Campbell, the exhibition features pieces from her own wardrobe along with loans from designer archives and objects from the V&A’s collections representing key moments in her 40-year career. Spread across two floors, intricately woven along these pieces is the story of how she succeeded despite the immense challenges of being a young black woman in this era, which inspired her activism.

It begins with a section on the early years of her life. You can hear Campbell’s own voice talk about the “the freedom of expressing yourself through dance”. Campbell was scouted in 1985 at the age of 15 when she was pursuing her dream of becoming a dancer. The exhibition shows how this background set her up for her unexpected career as a model.

Campbell’s first catwalk was for French designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1987. In this section, a photograph of her entry pass for that show sits close to a pair of scuffed ballet shoes. As Davies said: “No one walks like Naomi Campbell. She walks like a warrior and navigates the territory of high fashion with supernatural flair.”

A video montage of such striking walks down catwalks greets visitors before you even enter the exhibition. In it, you see Campbell stomping the catwalks of Anna Sui, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood and Prada. Each frame appears a work of artistry and a testament to her commanding presence.

“God bless Yves,” she says in a caption that appears on the label prefacing the feather dress she wore her first couture. She attributes Laurent as the designer who helped change the course of her career.

Yves Saint Laurent reportedly threatened to withdraw his advertising from French Vogue if they continued to refuse to cast black models for their cover. Yet, as much as the exhibition is about the clothes, accessories, and the collaborations, it very much connects to contemporary conversations about diversity in the fashion industry. In Campbell’s words:

When I look at Iman and Beverly Johnson and Naomi Sims and Peggy Dillard, and all the others, I appreciate the fact that they opened the door for me. If they had not come before, I would never be as far along as I am now. And I hope that I’m opening the door for people who’re behind me.

This exhibition portrays Campbell not just as a supermodel, but as a cultural innovator, highlighting her role in disrupting established norms, breaking racial barriers and using her platform to empower new creatives, advocate for equality and drive social change.

As one of the first black supermodels to achieve global recognition, she defied convention and broke the mould of what was considered the accepted beauty standard of the time. Her career success has contributed to improving standards for the representation of other ethnically diverse models in fashion.

While this metamorphosis continues, we should take a moment to enjoy all that the glitz and glamour this exhibition has to offer. It celebrates the rise of a supermodel icon – and the transformative power of fashion.

Tania Phipps-Rufus, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of the BA (Hons) in Fashion Culture & Business, University of East London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Like making best friends with the strangers in the next tent, peeing in a cup because you can’t face the queues for the portaloos and using wet wipes as a shower substitute, being a bit messy is all part of the summer festival experience. But, while you might not wash your hair for days – no matter what state it’s in – and you face is caked in the same glitter for the duration of the festival, there’s one rule that you must follow if you want your festival experience to be as fun as possible: wash your hands regularly.

You might think that should go without saying – but it doesn’t. In 2023, a UK survey of 1,500 18- to 24-year-old festival goers found that 22% of young people do not clean their hands the whole time they are at festival, even if they are there for days. A further 26% said they cleaned their hands only once a day – and 31% admitted to not cleaning their hands even after going to the toilet.

Most participants suggested their lack of hand hygiene was due to queues for facilities – or a lack of facilities. But, in many, much larger studies – conducted when when facilities are available – only 51% of people clean their hands after using the toilet. Even during the COVID pandemic, only 42% of university students in the UK reported “mostly” or “always” cleaning their hands when recommended.

So, although a lack of facilities may be part of the problem at festivals, there is clearly more going on.

Hand washing sounds like such a simple – and quick – thing to do, but research shows that bad habits, being in a rush and having other priorities are all reasons why so many still don’t clean their hands. According to a 2022 study conducted in Canada, some 18- to 25- year-olds reported a perception that cleaning hands in dirty facilities would leave hands more contaminated than skipping hand hygiene altogether.

Other participants said they “forget” to wash their hands. University students sometimes had “unrealistic optimism”, believing that infections happened to other people but were unlikely to happen to them.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• Headed to Glasto? How to stay healthy in the festival heat

• Four ways to cultivate a unique taste in music in the age of streaming algorithms

• Social media will tell you birth control causes mental health issues, weight gain and infertility – here are the facts

Whether a shortage or lack of facilities is the reason for grubby hands or whether normal hygiene rules don’t seem to fit in with the happy-go-lucky approach of festival life, festival goers should be still be scrupulous about washing their mucky mitts – even if they happily neglect every other part of their body. Why? Because dirty hands can quickly put an end to the fun.

Hand hygiene, washing hands with soap and water or using alcohol hand gel helps prevent infectious diseases, including those associated with diarrhoea, respiratory infections and the flu. The pandemic reminded us of the link between hand hygiene and infections – and also that we might not be washing our hands regularly enough, thoroughly enough or for long enough.

Dealing with a lack of facilities or dirty facilities is reasonably easy if you follow these simple tips:

Pack plenty of alcohol hand gel. And carry it with you during the festival. People got used to keeping hand sanitiser with them during the pandemic and gel is now readily available. Although it is not effective on some bugs, including norovirus, which causes diarrhoea – even more inconvenient at a festival than having to wash your hands regularly – it is better than soap and water in removing most bacteria.

Always wash hands after using the toilet. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people are using those toilets – most of them without washing their hands – so keep yourself happy and healthy by thoroughly disinfecting your hands afterwards.

Always clean your hands before eating. Festival food often involves meals that you eat with your hands, such as burgers, burritos, or pizza. To make sure you don’t pick up a stomach bug, always disinfect your hands beforehand.

Wash your hands with bottled water. Most festival goers carry drinking water in bottles. While it is less effective than using soap, the friction caused by rubbing hands under water not only removes physical and visible dirt but can also loosen bacteria from hands to rinse away. Most festivals have water fill centres to top up bottles. Don’t forget that the water bottles themselves can harbour bacteria. A rinse and rub of the bottle when filling could address that issue too.

Festival goers carrying their own supply of hand sanitiser can clean hands without missing a second of their favourite acts – after, all who wants to queue for the facilities when they could be watching Dua Lipa? For festival organisers, it might be helpful to distribute hand wash reminder stickers at key points such as food outlets, portaloos and mobile taps.

And food outlets should keep a bottle of hand gel at the counter for their patrons to use – it’s the least they can do for customers given the prices they charge at festivals.

But what about those festival goers who think “it won’t happen to me”? Well, infection will – and does – happen to younger people, although they are more likely to recover more quickly than older people.

Remember your festival mantra: clean your hands, avoid getting infections, and have fun – not the runs.

Judith Dyson, Professor in Implementation Science, Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Care, Health and Related Research (C-SCHaRR), Birmingham City University and Fiona Cowdell, Professor of Nursing and Health, Research School of Nursing and Midwifery, Birmingham City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Almost half of all Australian workers are currently watching for or actively seeking a new job, according to a recent Gallup report.

High stress levels, murky work-life boundaries and the fact that pay packets don’t go as far as they used to can all become compelling reasons to look elsewhere. Many may be tempted by the promise of a higher salary.

Of course the grass isn’t always greener, and there may be ways to make your current job more fulfilling. This could include inviting your boss to have a discussion about increasing your pay.

But both landing a new job and chasing a raise internally can put you in the sometimes tricky position of negotiating how much you’re paid.

Fortunately, like many other kinds of negotiation, there are three key principles that will offer you a better chance of success.

Know what you want and why

First, it’s important to know exactly what you want and why you want it.

In the case of looking for a new job, your aspirations should be based on your future, not driven by what is wrong with the job you now have. In what way do you expect the jobs you are looking into to offer you more than your current position?

Researching the relevant levels of pay for similar roles in your industry can offer you a sense of what’s reasonable and suggest where to place the goalposts.

Similarly, when seeking a pay rise, you shouldn’t just go in with vague hopes of being paid more.

It’s important to have a firm idea of how much more you’d like to be paid, and prepare a case for why – such as a recent improvement in performance or evidence of new responsibilities.

Step into the other person’s shoes

Important as your goals may be, any negotiation is two-sided. It is not only about what you want to achieve but what the other party wants, too.

This is the second principle of effective negotiation: other-directedness. Always negotiate from the perspective of the other party.

Imagine you are the other negotiator preparing to negotiate with you. Get to understand what they want, why they want it, what pressures might they be under and what constraints they might have to operate within.

Many organisations have a pretty firm salary and remuneration structure and it is unrealistic to think they are going to bust that structure wide open just to accommodate you. So be reasonable.

Just as importantly, you need to think ahead about what they are going to say in response to your request. What offer are they likely to put on the table – and what is then going to be your response? Plan for a range of different scenarios.

Focusing only on what you are initially going to ask for could see you lose control of the rest of the conversation.

Understanding the other party’s perspective puts you in a better position to present what you have to offer in a way that resonates with their goals. You may feel your extra effort should earn you a pay rise, but focus your request on the outcomes that have helped your employer achieve their goals.

Thinking about the other party also keeps your expectations more realistic. It’s important to set high goals, but if they are outside the other party’s ballpark, you might find yourself backing down or walking away empty-handed.

Have a solid backup plan

This leads us to the third principle of negotiation: knowing what you are going to do if you don’t get what you want.

A good alternative gives you confidence to restate your offer or claim even though the negotiator on the other side of the table has raised their eyebrows at it. Working out this alternative before you start negotiating is vital.

Depending on your circumstances, there may be a range of good alternatives when negotiating your salary for a new job. If you applied for multiple roles, you may be fielding other job offers. You’ll also often have the opportunity to just stay where you are.

Negotiating an internal pay rise might seem to have fewer tangible alternatives if it falls through. Disappointingly, you stay where you are and keep the salary you have.

But there are more ways to move yourself forward than just financially. For example, pursuing further accreditation, especially if subsidised or enabled by your employer, could help you stay motivated and improve your standing in future negotiations.

Remember, though, any negotiation is two-sided and the other party has alternatives, too.

In a job interview, if you have a rare set of skills and they have had a key employee suddenly leave, you could be well positioned to get a good outcome. Often, though, there will be someone else who can fill the vacancy and we might need the job more than they need us to fill it.

In that case, explore all the possibilities around salary – working arrangements, leave provisions and so on that will make the job more attractive to you. Before agreeing, always check that the prospect on offer is better than your alternative.

Ray Fells, Professor of Negotiation, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On June 12, Sydney musician and software engineer Harrison Khannah launched Triple J Watchdog, a website dedicated to aggregating and analysing the music played on Australia’s national youth broadcaster Triple J.

The site currently displays data from March 31 onward while Harrison continues work on backdating it to the beginning of this year. The site displays a range of Triple J metrics, including:

• top artist of the week
• top song of the week
• a breakdown of artists/bands played by country of origin
• a breakdown of artists’ pronouns (using data from Make Music Equal)
• the top 15 tracks and top 15 artists played
• the average popularity of artists played
• the average Spotify follower count of artists played (currently 3,242,692)
• the top ten genres played (cross-referenced and defined against Spotify categories)
• and the most played genre by hour for every hour across the day (based on data from Roy Morgan).

At a glance, the data aren’t surprising. Triple J plays more Australian artists/bands than from anywhere else, as well as more he/him artists (although the disparity isn’t particularly egregious). The station’s most played genre is “Australian indie”.

Close scrutiny, however, reveals a different story.

During the week of June 10–16, British pop star Charli XCX was Triple J’s most played artist. This was mainly due to her recent release, BRAT, being given the coveted feature album slot. Other 2024 feature albums have included Beyonce and Billie Eilish. Eilish also features as the second-most played artist since March.

Why is a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster that has historically been dedicated to breaking emerging local talent providing significant airtime to an artist whose biggest hit is widely recognised as a KFC jingle?

The breakdown of most played genres by hour further reveals pop is consistently played during drive time, when the station has its largest average daily share of listeners.

Since Triple J has no commercial imperative, it can theoretically program whatever it wants during these peak periods. Why, then, does it consistently play commercially oriented tracks when most people are tuning in?

Critiquing Triple J: a national pastime

Australia’s music industries have spent decades decrying the national youth radio network for being too commercial. Several academics have also questioned the station’s significance and relevance, including Ben Eltham in his notable 2009 essay The Curious Significance of Triple J.

Despite being published 15 years ago, many of the arguments presented in Eltham’s piece remain relevant today: Triple J is more concerned with its own brand than with enhancing Australian culture and community.

The Triple J network retains substantial influence over Australia’s music market and the capacity for local artists to gain an audience. This is true despite declining ratings among its target demographic of 18–24-year-olds.

Its national reach means it also has an outsized impact on touring networks and festival lineups. This somewhat explains why many emerging and even established artists fear reprisal, should they speak out against it.

Triple J Watchdog isn’t the first time the station’s programming data have been publicly listed. J Play, a service run by The Brag Media, served this niche for many years until its cancellation in 2019. However, J Play was still very much a part of the music industry’s establishment, rather than a completely independent scrutineer.

Triple J Watchdog fills an important resource gap by providing transparent insights into the station’s programming data.

What was Triple J made for?

There’s a strong argument that Triple J’s programming of commercially lucrative artists comes down to a desire to drive people to the station.

In Eltham’s 2009 piece this was framed as a part of its model, wherein the station functions as a stepping stone in a chain of discoverability that begins with commercial bops and ends with community radio.

While this may have been true in 2009, the sector has shifted substantially. In the era of digital streaming and algorithmically-driven recommendation systems, discoverability has changed. Yet, Triple J’s influence on festival lineups and the national touring network remains significant. This influence becomes doubly important as opportunities for local artists continue to shrink due to festival cancellations.

As a public service untethered from commercial interests, Triple J has the potential to expand the horizons of Australian music. It may be easy to frame this perspective as snobby or elitist – especially when concerns are focused purely on issues of genre – but the counterargument serves the literal elites: the millionaires (and increasingly billionaires) who reign atop the music industries pyramid.

Public resources are meant to enhance our democracy and, in the case of popular music, our sense of belonging, community and cultural identity. With recent research suggesting the average Australian artist makes about A$23,200 from their art, we must continue to pay attention to which voices are given a platform and which are not.

Sam Whiting, Lecturer - Creative Industries, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.