As I looked out on a sea of shining faces at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication on Tuesday, I couldn’t help thinking to myself: “Man, I’d hate to be you guys.”
Prof. Ryan Thornburg had invited me and two other “new media” types to speak to his class about blogging. We met in something called a “convergence lab,” which was a room full of computers, with projectors to show Web sites on large screens.
It couldn’t have been further from the labs we used during my days in journalism school, which contained Remington typewriters, newsprint and carbon paper. Convergence in media parlance is supposed to capture the dynamic of old media converging with the new in ways that, somehow, will allow both to thrive, or at least survive.
But it struck me that the convergence that’s really happening to newspapers is similar to railroad tracks converging into non-existence on the horizon.
My, how things have changed since I was in journalism school (early ‘70s). Back then, there was a job waiting for everyone, and you knew what it was going to be: reporting or copy editing. If you were a competent newspaper intern between your junior and senior year, you were usually offered a post-graduation job before you left to go back to school.
Most cities still had a morning and an evening newspaper that competed against each other even if owned by the same company. Most cities had only three television stations, usually two VHF and one UHF, and still had a couple of radio stations that covered breaking news and local government meetings.
Cable television was in its infancy. People still laughed at the idea of actually paying for TV. Ted Turner was still fiddling around with his small UFH station in Atlanta. It hadn’t become the Super Station yet, and CNN was still years away.
If you got a job at a daily newspaper you became part of a very profitable and prestigious institution in your city and your state. If you were competent and wanted to stay in one place for life, you could. If you were restless and liked moving around (like me), you could always find a job somewhere else every couple of years, sacrificing only a pension. Hard to believe, but nobody had health insurance back then, so that wasn’t the barrier to quitting a job that it has become.
Even as recently as the late 1980’s times were flush at newspapers. When my newspaper asked me to start a daily newspaper in Chapel Hill in 1988 I hired 14 people in a two-week period, stealing some from other publications and hiring others straight out of Duke or Carolina. The demand was there, and so was the supply. Advertising dollars were plentiful and profit margins were high.
Sure, there was the occasional economic downturn, as in 1973, the Carter years and 1991. But everyone knew that was cyclical. Newspapers would always rebound with the next hot economy. People had to buy and sell appliances, clothes and cars, and the best way to do that was in the local paper, with retail and classified ads. Sellers had nowhere else to turn.
It was, indeed, a different world.
It all changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of the Internet. Editors and publishers whistled past the graveyard for many years, assuming that people would always desire good editors to help them sort through all that confusing stuff on the Internet. Boy, how wrong was that!
Nowadays, having an editor for things published on the Web is almost the kiss of death. Spontaneity and instant analysis are prized. Rank amateurs with no journalistic training have become famous as news aggregators. Hundreds of bloggers who hold day jobs are considered experts in their fields, exposing scandals that the mainstream media miss.
Some old hands dismiss all this as “pseudo-journalism” and advocate that it be fought with new business models that include taking money from charitable trusts rather than advertisers, and creating competition-eliminating certifications similar to those used by the medical and legal professions.
Jobs in newspapers were 50 percent of all media jobs in 1990. They make up only 38 percent today, and that’s going down daily as paper after paper announces job cuts, mostly in their newsrooms, the “cost centers.”
Editors, publishers and even journalism professors have no idea where this is all going. All they can do is guess.
This is the world the youngsters in Ryan Thornburg’s class are facing after graduation. Do they take courses to learn the skills that newspapers have always valued, or do they cast their lot with New Media and learn how to blog, how to write HTML code, PHP and Javascript? That’s a gamble too because New Media is changing on the fly. Yesterday’s hot item is tomorrow’s obsolete technology.
Will newspapers hire the graduates who are code geeks, who understand the Web, who have their own blogs? They will if they’re smart. But newspapers have been anything but smart in the last 15 to 20 years.
It’s gotten so bad that one of the nation’s top journalism school deans wonders out loud in an unguarded moment just how long J-schools can exist while the industry they support is dying.
Talented kids who embrace what’s happening will survive, but those looking for a secure niche at a newspaper, writing and editing just for print, will be sorely disappointed.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper Carolina Journal. He has worked at newspapers in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina.