future-of-journalism

Mark Glaser, who writes the MediaShift blog on the PBS website from is San
Francisco vantage point, has written a thorough roundup on the state of
journalism jobs. His conclusion -- plenty of opportunity for those who
take the time to learn digital storytelling skills.

He starts . . .

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. Dan Rohn, a former reporter for the Washington Post who has run JournalismJobs.com since the late .90s, says he is contacted by reporters doing the same stories on layoffs in the newspaper industry about every six or eight months. But the reality is that job openings are still plentiful . including print jobs at newspapers around the country.

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO FULL STORY:
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/08/digging_deepertraditional_jour.html