Among the articles is one by William Dietrich who writes about “Vanishing Jobs at Newspapers.”
Dietrich, a 1988 Nieman Fellow, an author and Sunday magazine writer with The Seattle Times, writes:
Employment news at newspapers is bad, but just how bad depends on who's counting. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of full-time editorial employees at U.S. dailies fell 8,438, or almost 13 percent, by the estimate of Indiana University professor David H. Weaver, a coauthor of
"The American Journalist in the 21st Century." The Project for Excellence in Journalism cites a smaller total of newsgathering and editing jobs—a peak of 56,400 in 2000—that had fallen to 52,000 by 2006, with most of the losses at the bigger papers. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has newsroom employment nationally rising from about 42,000 in 1977 to today's 52,000, a 19 percent increase in 29 years, even after the recent cuts (compared to a 36 percent increase in U.S. population in the same time frame).Editorial layoffs are making news: 45 jobs at The New York Times, 75 at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and 85 at the Los Angeles Times in 2005; and this year, 50 at the San Jose Mercury News, 111 at The Dallas Morning News, and 80 at The Washington Post, to cite some examples.
Another piece by Dietrich is titled “Are Journalists the 21st Century's Buggy Whip Makers?”
He writes that newspapers might vanish, too, if they continue to “dream of past dominance while taking their product and trying to fit it into their competitor's terrain.”
Summarizing Dietrich:
When anyone can record and post information—the commodity for which reporters, editors, producers and photographers are paid—journalists are in danger of becoming a luxury society no longer can afford.
The direct cause of shrinking news staffs is a loss of advertising and circulation to new digital competition. But my questions—and they are still only questions—are whether recent layoffs because of loss of revenue are only part of the technological earthquake. Will the ubiquity of information make traditional journalism less valuable or even obsolete?
People used to pay newspapers to gather information that was often expensive or tedious to find. But with the Internet, we have lost our monopoly on information. Yes, newspapers have numerous advantages, but so did horses. They were quieter than cars, less likely to get stuck, could be fueled in a field, and didn't depreciate as quickly. But have you commuted by horseback lately?
But the on-the-ground newspaper reporter—whose purpose is to fulfill an essential function of our democracy not just by disseminating information but also by analyzing it, detecting patterns, spotting trends, and increasing societal understanding—is being starved of resources. Lifetime security is long gone. Travel budgets are disappearing. Overseas bureaus are closed. The most veteran and knowledgeable reporters—expensive to keep on board—are being encouraged to leave through buyouts and cutbacks.
Despite this depletion of resources, the need to "make sense" will not go away. Those who are adept at being incisive and eloquent
Newspaper journalism has a strong case to make. At its best, it offers a combination of perspective, authority, penetration, accuracy, comprehensiveness, brevity and ease of use that other media can't match. And newspapers offer something the Web can never really duplicate—the serendipitous discovery of an intriguing article or a remarkable picture, an eye-opening cartoon or an explanatory graphic, all in the process of just turning the page.
Click on the headline to see other articles in “Goodbye Gutenberg”
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