About the alarming condition of news media

Journalists are by nature alarmists and believe the trade's best days are behind it -- the good work alas dried up roughly a generation ago, never to be seen again -- and now everything is going to pot.

Two thoughtul articles have appeared this week to say it isn't so. They deserve your attention.

Our own Scott Bosley, is quoted in one of the articles.

Bosley, executive director of American Society of Newspaper Editors , says that his organization does a job census each year at daily newspapers in the U.S. If it wasn’t for the growth in online jobs and new free dailies, Bosley thinks job numbers would have shrunk; instead, they’ve remained steady. As for hiring trends in the future, that depends on how well newspaper companies come up with successful business plans online.

“There are a lot of tries and experiments going on, but there’s no clear answer yet,” Bosley said. “I believe that there will be a clear answer, I’m an optimist about it, and I believe there will end up being more people practicing journalism — not journalism as we know it, but journalism which is good journalism.”

The first article by William Powers, media columnist for National Journal magazine, makes several points. One is that Paper is not dying. Paper is arguably the most successful medium in human history. People have been communicating on it for roughly 2,000 years, and there is plenty of behaviorial evidence to suggest that they're not about to abandon it.

The other view is by Mark Glaser on PBS Media Shift. Here’s what he writes:

If you follow the world of traditional journalism, you can’t help but notice the seemingly constant stream of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations. But media observers don’t often emphasize the flip side: As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams.

For example, when I heard about job cuts at the New York Times Co. last winter, I took a quick look at the company’s online job listings, and saw a healthy supply of digital jobs still up for grabs. And while Tribune Co. has been in the news for all its devastating cuts to the L.A. Times staff, there’s still a selection of 85 interactive job openings at the parent company, including a handful at the Times. Similarly, the MTV cable networks have had far-reaching cuts and reorganizations , yet there are dozens of digital job openings listed online.

The staffing situation at traditional media companies is much more fluid than the simple cut-and-slash horror stories that play well in the press. The dire layoff scenarios at major news organizations are not as dire in smaller rural communities, where local newspapers and TV stations still perform well, or overseas where competition, audiences and ownership structures are different than in the U.S.

Sites such as JournalismJobs.com and mediabistro.com are far from hurting when it comes to media job listings.

“Right now we have 628 newspaper job openings in the U.S., from Alaska to Massachusetts to Florida to Indiana,” says Dan Rohn, former reporter for the Washington Post who has run JournalismJobs.com since the late ’90s. “It’s in small towns, and I think that’s because they’re owned by families or small chains that are successful and not being hit as hard. The big compainies, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, they are publicly traded and it’s a whole different ballgame. The small papers are still serving a need in their communities.”

Rohn says that big public media companies in tech-savvy and affluent areas like Boston and Washington, DC, push more tenured employees toward retirement and buyouts to save money, the better to please Wall Street investors and analysts.

So with news organizations here and abroad wanting to hire more versatile, multi-platform journalists, how are journalism schools reacting? Paul Grabowicz, assistant dean and director of the new media program at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California-Berkeley, said that so many students were taking the Intro to Multimedia Reporting elective that the school decided to make it a required course for everyone.

“Rather than complain about the job cuts at media organizations, J-school graduates are actually finding themselves in plum positions if they have digital skills out of college.

“Students who are well versed in digital media often find themselves being placed in key positions in news organizations that are trying to ramp up their multimedia or online operations,” Grabowicz said. “So it’s not just that it’s becoming a requirement for a job; for many students it’s an opportunity to help lead a news organization in the transition to digital media. Which is pretty exciting.”

Read the article “In Praise of Paper”


Read about Media Shift on how the much buyouts and layoffs are being offset by hiring for digital media with many job offers.

What do you think?