After I went after Alvin Chang, I feel like I should point out I wasn’t mad because he said the emperor has no clothes. The journalism industry is in for a shake-up, and I don’t think there will ever be as many jobs as there are now. Before I say what I think it’ll be like in a couple years, some assumptions:

  • Journalism (especially the newspaper kind) operated on unrepeatable profit margins.
  • That situation can never happen again because of the internet.
  • Ads will mostly come back, but they’ll continue migrating online. Legal ads and real estate will follow.
  • None of the new business models will be as successful as the pre-internet one, although they will be able to support many organizations.
  • The worst of the recession will be over in a year or two (otherwise–who knows what’ll happen to anything?).

All these changes will combine to make the journalism job market a lot more competitive, but some jobs will still exist. It’s just that primarily-online organizations will have far smaller profit margins. They’ll need to hire a reporter who can do the work that five used to do–in other words, pretty much newspapers the year before the recession.

I was trying to find an analogy in the past, and I think any situation where technological efficiency eliminated some but not all positions in a line of work is an appropriate comparison. To stick with newspapers, think about newsies. There used to be lots of them on street corners, hawking the daily paper. But the invention of the car meant newspapers could be delivered far faster with a fraction of the previous delivery team.

Some newsies (or their occupational descendents) stayed in the newspaper delivery business, but there were fewer openings for those who wanted to deliver papers. Some doubtless starved, some migrated to the newsie-equivalent of PR (milk delivery?), and some managed to hang onto transformed jobs.

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