What to tell the journalism majors about jobs

The Albany Times Union has a story on the "man bites dog" phenomenon of presumably skeptical, critically-thinking students choosing to major in journalism when all the job news from the news industry is about layoffs and cutbacks. The story quotes Lee Becker at the University of Georgia, who says survey results show students are optimistic that their communication skills will serve them well -- on the Web, or somewhere.

Here's the story:

Who, what, when, where and why is J-school so big? -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY

"Most people studying journalism and mass communication aren't interested in careers as old-school newshounds sniffing out scandals for newspapers, magazines and TV stations.
"Some study the news as a liberal arts subject like English, and then head off to law school. Other J-school grads become public relations people who shape the news or advertising people who create the commercials that pay for it."

Becker's last survey found 2007 grads getting an average of 1.6 job offers, with a median starting salary of $30,000. "That compares with $50,507 for economics grads," says the Times Union, without speculating whether that major's star has acquired any tarnish in the past year.

The News -- Win, Lose or Draw Us a Picture

The cartoon accompanying James Surowiecki's analysis of the decline of the printed-newspaper business (Financial Page: The New Yorker) offers a new look at the "inverted pyramid": The corner of a newspaper front page has become a funnel, with the letters of type dribbling out the bottom, leaving a blank sheet in its reader's hands. If you look closely, you can see the blackletter T of The New York Times in the pied type. The story and discussion are good too...

News You Can Lose

"For most of the past decade, newspaper companies had profit margins that were the envy of other industries. This year, they have been happy just to stay in the black.... Even online ads, which were supposed to rescue the business, have declined lately, and they are, in any case, nowhere near as lucrative as their print counterparts.
"Papers’ attempts to deal with the new environment by cutting costs haven’t helped: trimming staff and reducing coverage make newspapers less appealing to readers and advertisers. It may be no coincidence that papers that have avoided the steepest cutbacks, like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, have done a better job of holding onto readers."

One man band or VJ approach hits TV news in DC

Not sure what to call this job category... "One-person band" is less-sexist, but still sounds awkward.

Abbreviating Multimedia Journalist as "MJ" sounds like Peter Parker's girlfriend.

Maybe, since every journalist can pocket some kind of small video camera these days, we don't need a prefix at all. Just "reporters." We are all potential "photojournalists" or "videojournalists," I guess.

WUSA to Hire 'Multimedia Journalists' Who Work Solo - washingtonpost.com:
"Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person 'multimedia journalists' who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.

"The change will blur the distinctions between the station's reporters and its camera and production people. Reporters will soon be shooting and editing their own stories, and camera people will be doing the work of reporters, occasionally appearing on the air or on in video clips on Channel 9's Web site."

Twittering the News

I mentioned Twitter in one of my classes and was surprised that only one out of 34 students had heard of it.

I thought young folks were supposed to be ahead of gray-bearded old guys on this stuff... For any who are still in the dark, here's a nice explanation of Twitter as a resource for journalists -- from another guy about my age...

yelvington.com | Steve Yelvington's media weblog:
"Why do people use Twitter in the first place? That's simple: Humans are genetically programmed to thrive on conversation."

Coincidentally, I've just posted a bunch of links to Steve in my other blog, on the topic of news Web site management systems.

Historic magazine archive via Google

Just when my Media History students might need one more source for their final semester projects...

Wonder what the latest technology was in 1905? Go read Popular Mechanics for that year, back when "wireless telegraphy" was the hottest thing since the "horseless carriage." (I guess "...less" was "more" back then.)

This blast-from-the-past search is thanks to a new archive of old magazine articles at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

(For more about Google linking to historic newspaper archives, see my blog item from a few months ago.)

For background see this BusinessWeek article: Google updates search index with old magazines:

"Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine. As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago."

(Many thanks to Gerald Grow, a magazine-publishing expert and one of the most "sharing" professors on the Web, for an e-mail alert about this new Google search development.)

I haven't explored enough to see what publications are included... but Popular Mechanics and Popular Science are part of the collection, which will be useful for the "Media History" course when we talk about communication technology...

And I noticed New York magazine turning up in a quick search, which will be a resource for research into more recent journalism history -- and for news writing courses. Originally the Sunday magazine of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper, New York published a lot of great "new journalism" in the 1970s, including Tom Wolfe's article "The Birth of 'The New Journalism,'" which I was just talking about in class today, and one of my all-time favorite cover stories on investigative reporters. Amazing.

Here's a surprise: I did a quick search for the words "journalism" and "politics." The top two hits were not the first magazines I expected to see. They were Jet and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is archived back to 1945. Jet -- a great resource for studying African-American culture, apparently had regular columns headed "politics" and "journalism." (Ebony and Black World are also part of the collection.) As for the Bulletin, I guess the topics just came up regularly. This quote jumped out at me from a 1985 article, titled "The Media: Playing the Government's Game":

Before the atomic bomb, journalism never hesitated to march off to war, but the news media usually were eager to demobilize once victory seemed at hand ...

I haven't stumbled on a list of which magazines are in the collection, but I've noticed quite an assortment: Ebony, Mother Jones, Black Belt, Cincinnati Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Log Home Living, Bicycling, Backpacker, Vegetarian Times, Prevention, Runner's World, Baseball Digest, CIO... The themes suggest that publishers like Johnson, Emmis and Rodale have contributed groups of titles.

Finally, although you can search for any words in any magazine, the results delivered are full-page images. That means you get to see full-spread advertising layouts, which will be appreciated by students and professors interested in advertising and design.

Practicing 'theft superior'

I've alerted the keeper of the W.T. Stead Resource Site, a collection of writings by an influential 19th century U.K. newspaper editor, to what I take to be a wonderful typographical (or digital scanning) error that stumbles into a larger truth.

The essay in question is
W.T. Stead, "The Future of Journalism" (The Contemporary Review, 1886). The passage that caught my eye is this one, with a great opening (emphasis added):

"A man without a newspaper is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life. From being persecuted and then contemptuously tolerated, it has become the rival of organized governments. Will it become theft superior? The future of journalism depends entirely upon the journalist."

True either way, especially that last sentence, but I think "theft superior" is a bad scan of the word "their."

The ironic question today is whether corporate publishers with their eye on profit margins and stock quotes have been distracted by such "theft superior" and have led to the demise of the vigorous public-service newspaper journalism that might fulfill its promise as a democratic force.

(Stead wrote about that, too. See his "Government by Journalism.")

This week's end-of-semester question: Can some new online media financial model, community-funded (spot.us) or non-profit journalistic enterprises and bloggers fill the blank if newspapers are knocked out of Stead's opening line?

"A man without [a blog | Google | numerous RSS feeds | Facebook | Fox News | MSNBC] is half-clad, and imperfectly furnished for the battle of life."

40 years ago this week... the future as demo

I first read about Doug Engelbart's innovations in collaborative computer technology in mid-1980s books by Ted Nelson and Howard Rheingold, more than 15 years after Engelbart entranced an audience of engineers with a demonstration -- in 1968 -- of devices and ideas that most of the world wouldn't see for decades... the first mouse, hypertext linkages, expanding on-screen outlines, and a bigger idea behind them: That creative use of connected computers could augment human intelligence.

Luckily, that 1968 glimpse of the future was preserved on film and has been available in various Web incarnations. Now, for its 40th anniversary, you can read, watch and listen to more here:

The Innovation Journalism Blog: Come Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos":

"On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his team from SRI International Augmentation Research Center performed 'the mother of all demos' in front of a gaping audience of one thousand computer engineers. The demo let the cat out of the bag in a monumental way; Doug's big idea that the big thing about computers was not automation, but augmenting human intelligence was demonstrated in real life... The audience could do nothing but cheer."