COLUMN: A changing industry means doom and gloom, right?
Sometimes I wonder why I got into the journalism profession.
As I get closer to graduation, I hear more and more about the "death" of the journalism profession. Sure, the industry has hit a rough spot or two.
The number of newsroom reporters is down to about 40,000 employees nationwide as of 2011, from a recent peak in 2006 of about 55,000, according to a 2010 census of newsroom employees by the American Society of New Editors.
Yahoo! recently ran an article listing "10 of the worst jobs for the future" with statistics from business and finance forecasting site Kiplinger, adding more to the so-called "doom and gloom" the newspaper industry is facing.
"The ongoing shift toward the digital consumption of news continues to pressure newspaper and magazine publishers, as well as television and radio broadcasters," the Yahoo article said.
With a bachelor's degree, the most journalists can make is $51,050. The number of journalism jobs is also expected to decrease 7.5 percent.
Others on the list, such as jeweler and door-t0-door salesman, are surely going extinct. We don't need door-to-door salesmen anymore.
We need journalists, though. Our society survives (and even thrives) on a free press. The wording of the article makes the journalist out to be a dying breed.
As journalism is adapting into a more digital-friendly world, reporters for brick and mortar papers are losing their jobs as these operations have shrunk to cut costs.
This does not mean journalism as a profession is going away any time soon.
The Los Angeles Times (4,356,555 readers) and New York Daily News (4,321,868 readers) lead the country's top-25 newspapers for the year 2012 in reaching their audience in both print and online mediums, a Scarborough Research report said.
Mail Online (with 50,067 unique visitors) and The New York Times Brand (48,695 unique visitors) lead the Top 10 Online Newspapers Worldwide, a comScore MMX survey said.
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reports 51 percent of those who obtain their news digitally do so on their smartphone.
"The majority of Americans now get news through at least one digital, web-based device," the survey said.
Seventy percent get their news solely from a desktop computer.
The task of delivering news won't change, but how we deliver it is changing and will continue to do so.
Journalism is not going away, and it never will. The way we consume news is changing, not the fact that we need news.
Perhaps that is why I am (and still plan to be) in the journalism field.
