What’s the fate of journalism?
As the months go by I feel less and less inclined to take a job in the journalism field. The job cuts, the shrinking newspaper/magazine companies, the madness. Sure the economy is bad, but there are still jobs available. Jobs are shrinking in this field particularly though. I feel that journalism is changing. Now that people can get the news through their cell phones and on the web, most of them are opting out of newspaper subscriptions and purchases.
Big advertising companies who threw their money like it was nothing at these magazines and newspapers are now having to cut back drastically with their ad dollars in this state of economy. Ads are what drive income for publications. Do you know how much it costs to run a full page ad in Cosmopolitan? THOUSANDS of dollars.
With less ads, that means less revenue for publications, less money to pay their workers and less money for opportunity to grow. Job cuts means that the remaining employees are thrown an even larger workload and not compensated for it.
The good thing about this generation of journalists that will be emerging from college is that we are a group of people who know how to do many things. We are not only learning to write, but we are learning how to design websites, how to do HTML formatting, video among other things. We are more computer savvy.
In the future, there will still be magazines and newspapers, but I also see a huge majority of them moving to online only. That’s where I get all of my news anyway, but it will be strange to not hold a newspaper in your hands. At least it would be better for the trees.
