Wealth & Money Quote by Benjamin Cohen

A journalist admitting he’s spending his time chasing money, not acclaim, reads like a small act of heresy inside an industry built on prestige. Cohen’s line is pointedly unromantic: 40 hours a week remains the baseline, but the metric for “good work” has shifted from bylines and buzz to revenue. That contrast does two things at once. It punctures the old mythology of the press as a noble calling insulated from commerce, and it also quietly indicts how fragile that mythology has become.

The subtext is less “I’ve sold out” than “the incentives have changed, and pretending otherwise is cosplay.” “Look good in the papers” is a sharp phrase from a journalist because it frames reputation as a kind of internal media loop: writers performing for other writers, editors, and awards committees. In that world, status is its own currency - until your payroll arrives. Cohen’s focus on what “can make money” signals the post-advertising-collapse reality where attention is plentiful, funding is not, and survival increasingly depends on products: subscriptions, events, syndication, sponsorships, maybe even the dreaded personal brand.

Contextually, the quote sits in the long hangover of digital disruption, when journalism learned that viral traffic doesn’t necessarily pay for reporting. It also hints at a psychological pivot: pride replaced by pragmatism, not because ideals vanished, but because the business model stopped subsidizing them. The line works because it’s both confession and critique: an insider naming the system’s pressures without dressing them up as heroic sacrifice.