Mark Glaser (PBS MediaShift): Traditional Journalism Job Cuts Countered by Digital Additions. If you follow the world of traditional journalism, you can’t help but notice the seemingly constant stream of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations. But media observers don’t often emphasize the flip side: As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams.
That’s not all. There’s never been a better time to be a media entrepreneur.
The gloom and doom may not be overstated for the traditional business model and methods. But the world, as usual, is more complex than the bad news suggests.
on Aug 23rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Indeed, for every ten fact-gathers who are cut, that’s got to create a slot for at least one propagandist to replace them, another for an advertising person to sell the eyeballs, a marketer in general … and an evangelist who has the job of saying how this is all emergent people-powered democracy.
YAY!(?)
Look on the bright side!
“A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? That will be quite a sun. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor. “
on Aug 24th, 2007 at 6:47 am
Except that the baker couldn’t afford a new window as there was glass all over his pies, so he went bankrupt instead and the shop was boarded up…..
on Aug 24th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
“Mark Glaser’s dubious silver lining”
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/08/mark_glasers_fa.php
“Glaser tells us that, “when I heard about job cuts at the New York Times Co. last winter, I took a quick look at the company’s online job listings, and saw a healthy supply of digital jobs still up for grabs.” What, exactly, is “a healthy supply,” and precisely what sorts of jobs were they? He doesn’t say. He continues: “And while Tribune Co. has been in the news for all its devastating cuts to the L.A. Times staff, there’s still a selection of 85 interactive job openings at the parent company, including a handful at the Times.” I followed his link to the Tribune “interactive” listings – there are 86 of them at the moment – but what I discovered was hardly cause for excitement. The 86 jobs were split between business-side posts (ad reps and the like) and digital production jobs, bearing titles like Senior Internet Administrator, Web Developer, Junior User Experience Designer Intern, Fall Interactive/Website Intern, Managing Director of Software Engineering and Development, Database Administrator, Internet Software Development Administrator, and Software Developer, Ruby on Rails. Not one of the openings, so far as I could tell, was for a reporter, an editor, or a photographer.”
on Aug 28th, 2007 at 3:20 am
“Not one of the openings, so far as I could tell, was for a reporter, an editor, or a photographer.”
Sic.
And herwith you are getting pretty close to the essential inheritent interior essence which is hidden in the root of the kernel of everything.