So, I'm curious ...

I'm a few years removed now from the daily newspaper grind, though I dip my ink in the freelance well from time to time.

What is everyone's inside perception of the state of the business? Are people getting hired? Are people moving up? Or just out? Is it as bad as it was? Are people getting raises at all?

I'm genuinely curious.

 

I take it from these questions that today is the first time you've ever visited the "Journalism topics only" board.

 

Nah. But it's all piecemeal when it comes to this. Layoffs at this paper. Hirings at this Web site. Stock price down at this chain.

I'm asking everyone to stop and assess the state of the industry today, from their perspective.

 

Fair enough.

I've been out for almost five years, and in that time, I've not heard a single thing about the industry that has made me regret the decision to leave.

 

I've been out 19 months after being in it 23 years.

I watch with great interest what's being put out there on what seems like 50 digital platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Upworthy, YouTube, BuzzFeed, Heavy.com, Snow Fall, Instagram, Tumblr, Vine blah-blah-blah. Click me! No, click me! Click Click Click Click Click Click Click! The clickification of digitalia.

That said, these are still the nascent years of New Journalism. Five years into the transformation, even guys like Paton struggles to deliver a coherent message: http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/now-what/

And he was supposed to be one of the visionaries of the transformation.

Even Aaron Kushner smashed into a brick wall with Old Journalism 2.0.

Journalism is stuck at the intersection of Cluster and Fuck.

 

industry.

It's never been better for Bill Simmons, Nate Silver, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein.

 

Ditto.

 

McArdle's talking about academia and the performing arts, but what she writes could just as easily be applied to journalism (ESPECIALLY sports journalism):

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-03/can-t-get-tenure-then-get-a-real-job.html

 

Tried to get out – went unemployed for a year, couldn't get an interview for a non-newspaper job to save my life. The two newspaper interviews (small, nearby dailies) I managed came to naught as the positions were eliminated rather than filled. Ultimately decided to go back overseas where, depending on your destination, the job market is a bit better than the US – emphasis on "a bit". Even out here, though, papers are cutting back and the expats they hire are either already in country or fresh out of school.

Unless you're somewhere with low Internet penetration, a booming economy or a populace already conditioned to reading newspapers, there's not much refuge for newspaper types outside US borders. This won't matter to most of the posters here as mine is a peculiar way to go about having a career, of course, but that's been my experience thus far.

 

I haven't done it full-time for almost 5-6 years, but I freelanced a lot until I got my latest job in 2010. Since then, I'll freelance if I get a lucrative offer and it stuns me that I still get them a couple times a year. I got a call to do radio a couple weeks ago and I said, "You must have a really old black book because I haven't covered that team since the 2008 season."

It stuns me that anybody goes to a newspaper for information anymore. I guess I understand if the reason you read is for HS coverage or obits or coupons or something like that, but sports sections are a third of the size they were 6-7 years ago and everything in there seems like old news. Columns seem like the only thing worth reading.

The exceptions seem to be the national papers.

If you're in the top 1 percent of the business, and you're willing to move around, you're never going to have a problem finding a job. Those people are fine and they'll always be fine. The other 99 percent are the ones who are fucked.

 

At the last paper where I worked (I left last summer), there's been a hemorrhaging of institutional knowledge in recent months. Some have left for other opportunities in the business, and a couple retired because they were fed up with the quarterly diminishing of the staff and the product. Among those who remain, there's been a lot of movement sideways rather than upward. Management roles have calcified, so people who might have looked at that track focus on different beats or different departments. That's nothing new, of course.

I get together occasionally with a colleague who, like me, left of his own volition to do something entrepreneurial. We still have to hustle, just in different ways and in service of our own businesses. The overriding theme in those coffee meetings is that we should have done this a long time ago.

 

When I interviewed at my last job back in 2003, one of the guys who took me to lunch was a news editor. He was management, was smart, has a degree from a good school and was highly thought of in the chain where I worked. He was let go a couple rounds after I was.

He works as a grocery clerk now.

One of the high school writers when I was there now works at Chipotle.