Job Prospects for young journalists

Every semester, I spend the last day of my news writing and reporting class discussing jobs. It's a sad, depressing discussion but I feel that somebody's got to do it.

I bring them coffee and doughnuts and this year I joked that the doughnuts would be the only sweet thing I would be giving them. It wasn't a joke.

Some 5,900 jobs were lost in 2009, according to the Pew Research Center's annual journalism report. Newspapers, magazines and broadcast companies are all shrinking. There are 47,000 newspaper journalists unemployed nationwide. (This is where my students began looking shell-shocked).

I also told them that some journalists are getting web-related jobs. An annual survey of journalism and communications graduates by Lee B. Becker of the University of Georgia, found that nearly 56 percent of students who graduated in 2007 with communications degrees worked in jobs requiring web skills.

Good technology skills and hands-on experience are crucial in getting a job, I advised my students. I told them that in some ways they have a better job of landing a job than I do because they would be applying for entry-level jobs, while I would be applying for upper-level jobs (yeah right) that might pay more (snicker, snicker).

I was reminded of the recent Princeton conference on the death of newspapers at which Star Ledger Editor Jim Willse spoke. After losing 40 percent of their staff, the newspaper has hired several entry-level reporters straight out of college. Willse was frank about the reason: they don't have to pay them very much. He was also frank that losing all those experienced reporters created a tremendous void for the newspaper. But the Star-Ledger, like most newspapers, was and is fighting for survival and you do what you have to do to survive.

Hiring young reporters to replace older, better paid reporters has been a tradition at many news organizations that run on the power of enthusiastic young people who are willing to work long hours for little pay. I remember one editor calling me in to tell me that he just interviewed a Columbia Grad who was willing to sweep floors. I felt like saying, "I've swept floors. I'm done."

But now hiring young people for little or nothing has been institutionalized. Look on any journalism job site and unpaid internships abound. If you're a journalism major graduating this spring, you could get an unpaid internship, work as a waitress or waiter at night, and commute into the city from your mom and dad's house.

This is how I started out. I worked at a low-paying weekly newspaper and then tutored and worked at a bookstore to supplement my measly income while I lived with my mom in New York. But let's face it, that plan doesn't work well in the long run.

My students are understandably frustrated at the idea of making no money after graduating. A couple of years ago all my students wanted to go to graduate school or law school. Now they want to all go out and get jobs to pay off all those expensive student loans they've taken to be in college. The only problem is there are so few jobs out there and even the ones that pay aren't enough to live on.

One student asked me to tell them about my own experience. Did I want to teach when I graduated from college and grad school? I told them that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and I did get to do that and I had a lot of fun. But I quit that job when I had kids and went to freelancing and teaching. That worked until a few months ago when all my freelance jobs started drying up. Now I'm thinking of teaching high school.

I think they were pretty horrified by that as well. I guess teaching high school is a fate worse than death. But that's my Plan B and I might have to go there.

So my final words of wisdom for my crew of young journalists was to go for their dreams and not settle right away. I told them they should decide what they can't do as well as what they want most to do. If they know they would hate being an administrator or a bureaucrat they shouldn't do that. But they should decide what they are willing to do.

Follow your dreams, I told them, but have a Plan B just in case.