The economic malaise visiting the country has rocked the newspaper industry to a degree that few in the business imagined possible just a few years ago. Newsroom executives are scrambling, cutting budgets, expenses, and newsroom positions. There is widespread talk among experts of "structural" change, that job freezes and "downsizes" are more than responses to the current recession they are basic, systemic changes in the economics of the newspaper industry. The lost jobs, they say, may never come back.

Perhaps no group has felt the weight of bottom-line newspapering more severely than entry-level journalists. The journalism schools continue to pump out graduates, but chances are that if the parchment says class of '91 or even class of '90, the graduate will be unable to break into the profession this year. I have taken to calling them the lost journalistic generation. As a hiring editor at a large paper, I've watched the parade of young applicants over the past year and listened to their tales and pleas for advice. No, I don't answer, I don't know where there any entry-level jobs.

Conversations with scores of students, J-school administrators, and newspaper recruiters reveal a number of disturbing new trends in entry-level journalism. Among them:

* The scarcity of full-time jobs has forced graduating seniors into their third or fourth summer internship. As a result, these training slots have been snatched away from undergraduates, who will be knocking on recruiters' doors in a year or two without the requisite experience.

Observes Chris Jones, a May Missouri grad who is currently a summer intern for The Kansas City Star: "The economy is forcing seniors to get internships -- positions they're overqualified for. And it's really pushing back sophomores and juniors a full year. I certainly wouldn't want to be a junior right now. I know sophomores and juniors who are going home this summer, to pump gas or work for their dad."

* Increasing numbers of skilled graduates -- many from the country's best journalism schools -- trying desperately to remain attached to the profession have become gypsy journalists, moving from one low-paying, morale-sapping temporary job to another. In most cases, they are charged with producing a kind of micro-journalism, with little room for creativity or skills development. Some have been stuck in such jobs for several years.

Says Richard Wright, director of the journalism department at Wayne State University in Detroit: "The biggest feature of the current recession is that nothing's permanent anymore. No one's hiring anyone for real. They want to hire you an an intern for six months and then they'll see."

* An increasing number of talented young journalists are considering giving up the profession, saying it offers too little opportunity.

Says Don Fry, had of the writing group for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies: "It's not just the graduating classes; it's those who came into the business the past two to three years and can't move up. They're looking for ways to get out of the profession. I've talked a lot of people out of going to law school." Arlene Morgan, who has senior editor/development heads newsroom recruiting for the Philadelphia Inquirer, adds, "I know I'm going to lose talent I've helped to develop, talent I've worked with, mentored. To what end am I doing all this?"

* Papers of all sizes are now demanding two years' experience or more for entry-level positions, further restricting the opportunities for recent graduates.

"I knew it was going to be competitive going in," says Todd Natenberg ,a Missouri graduate who is now an intern at The Arizona Republic on a ten-week Pulliam fellowship. "The problem is, you're competing against people with two, three years' experience for the starting jobs at the papers, not just the J-school grads."

If these trends persist, people like Natenberg and Chris Jones are likely to lead very different lives as journalists than those who entered the profession just a few years ago.

Such thoughts have crossed Chuck Bock's mind. Bock is a May graduate of Whittier College, a liberal arts school about fifteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles. He thought he had it all going for him. "I was the student speaker for the commencement ceremony. I had a sports reporting internship for the L.A. Times; I interned in sports at the Lexington Herald-Leader and before that at a small southern California daily. I really believed that with all the clips and experience I wouldn't have a problem finding a job."

Bock started getting nervous last spring, and even took out a classified ad in Editor & Publisher. Nothing. He sent packets to ninety papers and got ten letters back -- thanks, but no thanks. He took to calling editors, but found it too depressing. "They don't want to be on the phone with you at all and they convey that."

He tries to remain optimistic. "A certain part of me says at some point the recession is going to end and people are going to need young writers again." Still, he is haunted by the possibility of failure. "I have this fear of after twenty years I end up at The Idaho Spud, that I'm at a place that's not going to lead to anywhere else. But now, if The Idaho Spud opens up, you say to yourself, I'm not gonna be able to turn down an awful lot."

I could cite a dozen Chuck Bock-like examples. Yet who doesn't remember the brisk pace of a couple years back, when journalism conventions were crowded, electric; when papers competed fiercely for talent; when hiring editors could play mentor, directing novitiates not yet ready for metro dailies to readily available jobs in smaller, more forgiving newsrooms? But that was the go-go '80s.

We've come to this only four years after the Associated Press Managing Editors Association issued a special report that asked why "the best and brightest" were not going to journalism school. We now know the answer: they went, and now many are high-tailing it outside the profession to find a job.

There are some among us who are not so dismayed. David Hamilton, who as assistant managing editor at Newsday heads that paper's recruiting efforts, says newsroom hiring is simply resuming its normal rhythm. "There was this newspaper boom time of the eighties, this bubble that was high and warm and which seemed to describe life as it always was. Well, the bubble has burst and we're falling back to the ground." Hamilton adds, "When you get down to the desire to do the craft, the winnowing is not an undesirable side effect."

But for me, what we are witnessing is not winnowing. It is the wholesale squandering of a generation of talent that could come back to haunt already troubled newsrooms.

When this is all over, when newsrooms again start to hire young journalists, those newsrooms will have lost two or three years of fresh perspectives on newsgathering that a roomful of older journalists can't offer. They will have foregone two or three years of bursting-with-energy raw talent, talent that can bring refreshing changes to newsrooms deadened by routine. And they will have sacrificed two or three years of the maturing process that papers invest in their young journalists to ensure that wisdom is added to those youthful perspectives.

It is a tough time for aspiring journalists and for the industry they aspire to join. It is also a time for newspapers to consider young journalists as part of their capital investment budget. Call it R & D, whatever. The future of these young people is the industry's as well.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe