Journicide: New Word, Sobering Concept

Here's an excerpt from a stimulating blog entry by a seasoned journalist. The comments following the blog entry are especially illuminating. To read the entire entry, click here.

Journicide: A looming, lost generation of scribes

Vanishing employment opportunities and shrinking freelance compensation threaten to wipe out a substantial percentage of the next generation of professional journalists.

This journicide, to coin a term, is not merely going to be difficult and disappointing for the affected young people, who mostly will move on to find rewarding careers in other endeavors.

But the loss of a substantial portion of what would have been the next generation of journalists also will be tragic for society. The loss will deprive citizens in the future with the insights that only can be delivered by dedicated professionals with the time, skills and motivation to dig deeply into difficult stories.

Bloggers and other bloviators, this writer expressly included, will not take up the slack. Absent some miracle that motivates someone, anyone, to start fairly compensating journalists again, we are going to lose something that has been very important to our democracy throughout the life of the nation. I can’t imagine what it will be like without professional journalists, but I don’t think we will like the outcome.

Journicide has been under way since newspapers and other mainstream media began losing their formidable revenue-generating juju in 2006. The elimination of full-time professional journalism jobs since then has been so relentless that it has become remarkably, depressingly commonplace.

Paper Cuts reports that nearly 15,000 newspaper jobs were eliminated so far this year, putting the industry on track to rival, or potentially surpass, the nearly 16,000 jobs axed in 2008. Last month, the Associated Press zapped 90 positions to cut 10% of its payroll costs, and BusinessWeek pink-slipped a reported 130 individuals, or approximately a third of its staff.

As bad as things are for still-working and formerly employed journalists – and they are bad – the opportunities are even worse for journalists seeking their first gigs. There are two reasons:

First, young journalists trying to land entry-level jobs find themselves competing with seasoned pros who have been knocked off perches higher up in the food chain.

Second, the miserable state of the media business has combined with a sharp increase in the supply of available journalists to reduce compensation to humiliatingly low levels.

As a consequence, young journalists looking for opportunities to start careers – even the idealistic eager ones celebrated here by David Carr – are looking at an almost universally bleak economic landscape.

Salaried, entry-level positions at traditional news organizations are almost entirely unavailable, because the organizations are trying to avoid laying off any more staffers than they already have.

This leaves phalanxes of young journalists to compete among themselves for low- or no-pay internships and highly exploitive freelance opportunities that typically promise rich “exposure” but scant, if any, hard cash.