Every business is looking for people who can craft a credible message
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
Trust is in short supply these days, which makes trustworthy information sources and people even more valuable. In this series on trust, I’ve been writing about how to counter trends of distrust in all our democratic institutions, including the press.
The drumbeat from journalism schools around the country has been mostly declining enrollments and staff cutbacks.
Skilled communicators in all forms of media are in demand, but there is not enough supply. Pixabay image by Jozefm84
One reason is that students — and their parents — see big media companies laying off thousands of journalists or shutting down. They worry that the investment of time and money in a journalism degree might not be worth it. (I wrote about this here: Layoffs and cutbacks at big digital news sites.)
The Covid-19 epidemic in 2020 contributed to a decline in overall college enrollments. Add to that the growing cost of tuition at four-year universities, and you have a strong economic argument against majoring in journalism or communication. I can’t blame their reasoning.
Among my counter arguments: In economic terms, the supply of college graduates in the traditional communications majors — literature, foreign languages, journalism, mass media, linguistics, history — is not meeting the demand.
Virtually every business today is its own media company — car companies, grocery chains, fashion retailers, you name it. They have web sites, mobile applications, news channels, YouTube channels, podcasts, social media feeds, and ecommerce sites. And they need people to staff them.
Overall decline in the Humanities
According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, citing statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, the bachelor’s degrees in the Humanities have been in steady decline for more than three decades. These degrees have often fed communications jobs.
On the chart below, the programs with fastest-growing enrollments are health care (highlighted) and engineering (right below it). These are areas with growing employer demand. To interact with the chart go to this link, and scroll down to chart II-03C.
The faint green line you can see, third from the bottom, to the far right, shows a two-decade decline in the share of humanities degrees among graduates. Again, you get a better view using this link.
How to find a good place
If you’re confused about where to invest your time and money at the beginning of your career, here’s some advice.
I’ve always told my students the same thing: pick an aspect of journalism and communication that you’re interested in, and start building a portfolio of work.
Your interest and skill might be in photography, video production, blogging, investigative journalism, screenwriting, feature writing, marketing, social media, event planning. Whatever it is, dig into it. Then develop a basic level of competence in other journalism disciplines.
There ARE jobs
Entrepreneurs and startups. Students — and their parents — worry about what kinds of jobs are available for journalism graduates. They’ve all heard about the big media companies laying people off.
The media companies that are hiring are the ones filling the big gaps left by the legacy companies — the startups that are creating niche media designed to serve smaller communities that have keen interest in particular topics or geographic areas.
These niche audiences are much more likely to be loyal consumers of the content, sharers of the content, and purchasers of the products and services offered.
Where to work?
- Look for media organizations that focus on teaching, learning, innovation, and connecting with their audience.
- Look for media that base their evaluation of a journalist’s contribution not on the number of articles produced but on how they meet standards of depth, accuracy and fairness.
- Look for media that search for explanations of why things are happening and what people can do about it.
Independent media have an idealistic mission: they hold the powers that be to account — whether business people, politicians, or other media. They speak up for the powerless. They provide a valuable public service so ordinary people can make decisions about how to govern their communities.
A lot of the news about the news industry looks bad, if you consider only what’s on the surface. But let me suggest some other ways of looking at things:
- Reasons for optimism #11: A Spanish watchdog, plus
- 10 Reasons for optimism about the news business (despite everything you’ve heard to the contrary).
- Project Oasis just published a directory of 3,000 independent digital media in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Many of these publications could be a great place to work.
And to you young people, good luck, and do good work.