Vibe magazine closure shocks staff
 June 30: Vibe Media Group (VMG), publisher of urban music magazine Vibe, announced it will be folding. In a letter today, VMG CEO Steve Aaron informed his employees about the closure. “It is with a heavy heart that I share some tough news, VMG is closing down effective today, June 30th.”
Vibe Magazine was one of the first consumer magazines to cater to hip-hop culture. Its closure is a major blow to the industry and hip-hop fans. Founded by legendary music producer Quincy Jones, Vibe Magazine was launched in 1993. The glossy monthly underwent a redesign in 2008 and had a circulation of approximately 800,000.
Vibe editorial staff members were shocked by the news, including deputy managing editor Angela Watford. “Let me just say we’re very upset. We’re horrendously angry and sad,” Watford told inVocus.
For some, though, this news did not come as a surprise. In early May, rumors began to surface on several hip-hop blogs that VMG was in financial trouble and had filed for bankruptcy. The company denied the assertion and announced it was actually expanding its brand with the launch of MOST! Magazine, a tabloid-style publication.
As in most recent media closings, the nation’s current economic conditions played a major factor in VMG’s shuttering. Aaron attributed the company losing its top print advertisers over the past year as a driving force behind the company folding.
--Doug Quzack
The new online newspaper model?
Two startups using the Web to save newspapers
June 26: Two separate Internet startups intended to help newspaper publishers get paid for their Web content have recently revealed details of their services. Both are expected to be available in the fall. Journalism Online, from entrepreneur Steven Brill, would feed multiple sources of news content to subscribers. The browser add-on Circulate, being released by CircLabs Inc., is billed as a “personal Web assistant” that learns what Web users want and guides them to it.
 Brill, known in media spheres as the founder of American Lawyer magazine and Court TV (now truTV), told reporters in New York on Wednesday that Journalism Online would give subscribers one source for content from multiple Web sites. Users could choose the top content on general subjects such as business or entertainment, or receive stories on focused topics such as national politics.
The goal of Journalism Online is to get 10 percent of Web users who read news content online to pay for it. Today, users access newspapers electronically through numerous entities. Journalism Online would act as the agent of publishers to deal with those entities, said Brill, whose fellow principal on the project is former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz.
“We will negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries, such as electronic readers, search engines, and other websites," read a slide in Brill’s presentation.
Circulate, a browser add-on and a potential competitor to Journalism Online, “puts the user at the center of the universe and brings relevant content to the user, based on expressed preferences,” said CircLabs executive vice president Martin C. Langeveld in an e-mail interview.
The concept for Circulate originated several years ago at the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. It is now a private venture coming from CircLabs Inc. in Vermont, with research assistance from the Associated Press and the Institute as an investor.
Users arriving at newspaper content through Circulate would’ve already indicated that’s the type of material they were seeking. Newspapers participating in Circulate could then charge via subscription or á la carte, if they were inclined to charge at all. However, because Circulate is centered around meeting the needs of users, the browser add-on could also be instructed to steer clear of paid content, Langeveld said.
The situation is critical for newspapers because approximately 25 percent of the newspaper industry’s advertising revenue has disappeared since 2005. Journalism Online predicts it will bring millions in yearly revenue to newspapers, with subscribers potentially willing to pay an average $300 a year for a dependable, one-stop source of professional news on the Web.
With Internet newspaper content having been essentially free since the 1990s, skeptics more than abound. Jack Shafer, Slate’s media critic, is particularly dubious of Brill’s plan. He believes Brill is essentially trying to erect an online wall around newspaper content, which has almost always failed.
“Maybe Brill's business model should find a way to start billing the millions of free-riders who pick up pre-read copies in coffee stores or family members who share newspapers at home,” Shafer blogged.
Langeveld said users may be willing to pay for content, but the change in usage patterns and perceptions of what should be free or paid for will be evolutionary in nature. He equates it to the advent of cable television.
“Once upon a time, television was free – it came in through your antenna. Gradually, however, most people became willing to pay for TV content as cable systems improved signal quality as well as selection,” he said. “The tiered pricing model of cable is something that could eventually develop for online content.”
--Michael Blankenheim
Big cities becoming one-newspaper towns
June 22: Twenty years ago, the idea of a one-newspaper metropolis seemed preposterous, but it is quickly becoming reality. The Houston Post closed in 1995, making the country’s fourth largest city a one-newspaper town with only the Houston Chronicle. Last year, the Cincinnati Post went under leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer on its own, and Denver became a one-newspaper town Feb. 27 when the Rocky Mountain News closed its doors. On March 17, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last edition and went totally digital, shrinking from 175 employees to approximately 20.
 In Boston, there is The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. But for months, there have been reports that The Globe’s owner, The New York Times Company, will close The Globe unless the newspaper’s union agrees to a variety of deep cuts. A contract vote is expected in July.
So who is next?
Many media experts view the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle as extremely vulnerable. Things are not much better in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Philadelphia and South Florida, where the financial struggles continue for one or both of the two major papers in those areas.
When the newspaper industry first began showing signs of trouble, joint operating agreements (JOAs) were set up as a way to help newspapers struggling in the same city. A JOA is an arrangement that enables two papers to share business services, including advertising and printing, in order to maintain two editorial voices in the area. The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News were part of a JOA, as were the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times. It now looks like the early effort to save newspapers did little to help. There are similar agreements in Detroit and Salt Lake City, which doesn’t bode well.
Should the public relations business stand aside and see what papers come out on top? There is now one less paper to pitch in Denver. Does that mean editors and reporters at the Denver Post are more selective with their story ideas?
“This doesn’t mean we are going to lose 50 percent more news space. In fact the news hole these days is larger than it’s ever been with newscasts and online options,” said Gina Seamans, a senior counselor for JohnstonWells Public Relations firm in Denver and the president of the Public Relations Society of America, Colorado chapter. “We just need to think about things differently and make sure our pitches are stronger.
“The biggest point to make is that we still have to have a good story to pitch,” Seamans added. “There is always room for good stories. Maybe now our pitches need to be better to make sure our stories are relevant.”
--David Coates
Find your voice, find your following on Twitter
June 16: The rise of Twitter continues to amaze the skeptics. In just two short years, it has become one of the most popular online applications for people who are building a niche, reaching contacts, or spreading a message online. But according to a Nielsen study, Twitter also has a high drop-off rate after users sign up. Many social media experts are unfazed though, and not just because Twitter remains the fastest growing social network in the country. They say many of those “Twitter quitters” eventually wander back once they find the right people and connections on Twitter. Still, if you're a public relations professional with limited time and resources, how do you cut through the clutter on Twitter and find the right media professionals? Here are three free tools designed to help you target the right people on Twitter and get the most out of the relationships you form.
 Start off on Twitter by searching for the journalists you already know. Twitter allows you to search for users by name and through your e-mail address book. While some journalists post their full identities on their Twitter pages, many don’t publicly share their names in an attempt to decrease spam. You’ll need the right tools to find the journalists you want to follow. Muck Rack aggregates journalists’ tweets, allowing you to read through them before following the journalist. Muck Rack also maintains a list of journalists by beat and news source. On its Twitter page, Muck Rack tweets what the biggest trending topics (the topics being most tweeted about) are among journalists, letting you know what the news buzz of the hour is. Still having trouble finding journalists you want to follow? Media on Twitter keeps an updated database of over 1,000 people in the media. Like Muck Rack, it allows you to search through journalists by name as well as associated news outlet and beat.
If you don’t mind having your Twitter habits analyzed, Mr. Tweet could help you build a valuable following rather quickly. It recommends people for you to follow based on your network and recommends you to other people. In addition, it collects statistics about the frequency and popularity of your “tweets.” @TheRootBuzz is a journalist for the Washington Post, but he focuses on news of particular interest to African-American readers. He says public relations-types have found him through Mr. Tweet and he says this kind of outreach works well. “The more organic, the better. I find ‘pitches’ to be awkward and uncomfortable ... charisma is key,” he says. HAVE A RELATIONSHIP with the journalists you want to pitch.
Do you want to find out what other Twitter users in your network are doing or talking about in real time? Sure, you could scroll through various user accounts or do a search by topic. But, the more efficient way is to use a Twitter client that keeps track of search terms. TweetDeck presents your Twitter account as a personal browser and functions as a dashboard. It shows all of the people in your network, conversations going on between them, and replies to your messages. You can even respond to tweets right from TweetDeck, without opening another window for Twitter. @BRLANewsGirl, a television news journalist, tweets from TweetDeck and has been approached through this Twitter connection. She considers it part of the job. “People do use it to contact me with questions, which I don't mind,” she says.
If your scope is centered on a specific geographical area, a location-based Twitter service could help you build your connections. The Twitter client Nearby Tweets is a must for anyone interested in making local connections, planning events or targeting users by geography. It can group followers by location, help to initiate relevant group discussions, and monitor local buzz about a company or product. For example, if the promoters in charge of the AdColor Awards are using Nearby Tweets, they already know their Kick Off Party was successful in stirring up buzz in the New York area for their upcoming awards show. Among the Twitter users chatting about the event was Vibe Magazine editor in chief Danyel Smith, known on Twitter as @danamo.
With 17 million registered Twitter users in the U.S., the possibilities on Twitter are endless. But, when reaching out to journalists via these Twitter tools, public relations professionals should use the same considerations as when pitching to bloggers. Twitter users are bound to be more receptive to someone who has actually read their tweets, blogs, and articles. Remember, the conversation shouldn’t stop with 140 characters. Take advantage of the back-and-forth Twitter naturally fosters to build continuing connections with journalists.
-- Erica Thompson Briggs
Christian Science Monitor, Seattle PI drop print, keep readers
June 11: The familiar rustle of paper or hands ink-stained with newsprint is becoming a thing of the past, while the news of the future comes via the clicking of the keyboard and from the beep of cell phones and Blackberries.
 As the Web continues forward with its domination over paper, pioneers of daily digital newspapers claim that monthly unique visitors are increasing. (A site’s number of unique visitors grows when a new individual visitor is detected through cookies or the IP address from an individual computer.) Despite what appear to be positive stats, some industry experts are saying it’s too soon to celebrate.
Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma agrees with that sentiment. “We’ve been Web-first for six weeks,” said Yemma in an e-mail interview. The Christian Science Monitor dropped its daily print edition in April and opted for daily Web coverage and a weekly print edition. “Our uniques are up modestly, but it really is much too soon to see a big difference.” The Monitor, he continued, never expected to see immediate results and is sticking to a five-year goal, starting with further Web development and a 30 percent increase of online traffic by May 2010. “So the real comparisons, just as in financial accounting, have to be year-over-year, not month-over-month,” he said.
And yet, Hearst Corporation officials in Seattle say they are hopeful. Only two months after the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer folded at the ripe old age of 146 and a circulation of 117,600, the company is touting the still-young stats of SeattlePI.com. The largest paper to have gone completely online thus far, it has seen monthly unique visitors increase to 4.3 million in April 2009 from 4.2 million in April 2008.
“While uniques are up, page views are down, we need to see how that trend continues,” Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc., said in an e-mail interview. (A page view is a request to load a single page of an Internet site.) “The PI is doing smart local aggregation, including Seattle Tweets, which is a model worth watching.”
But media blogger Peter Kafka wonders if the particular SeattlePI.com model can be profitable. He notes that Web sites which have the number of visitors that SeattlePI.com has, for example one of the Gawker Media Web sites, typically support 12 editorial staffers, not the 20 employed by Hearst in Seattle.
In a press release, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) reports that across the newspaper industry, monthly unique figures for newspaper Web sites have risen, increasing 12.1 percent from 2007 to 2008.
The NAA also maintains that online newspapers are benefitting from advertising relationships with Yahoo, with several newspapers having sold over $1 million in advertising through Yahoo. SeattlePI.com is following a similar path by using its existing partnerships with advertising placement companies including Kaango, Metrix4Media and Yahoo to create a local digital advertising agency, Hearst officials said in their press release.
Other papers riding the digital wave include the Kansas City Kansan and Kentucky Post. The Capital Times of Wisconsin, excluding a weekly print edition, moved its daily coverage online in the spring of 2008, and boasts a 57.6 percent increase of unique visitors from 2007 to 2009. In July, the Advance Publications-owned Ann Arbor News will close. The parent company will then launch a new online publication called AnnArbor.com, which will produce daily news coverage on the Web and a twice-a-week print newspaper.
The bottom line is that creating revenue for newspapers is always going to be an issue, said Yemma. "But what else is new? We have to fight for every dollar using a combination of publishing platforms (Web advertising, print advertising, print subscriptions, newsletter subscriptions, syndication, and perhaps Kindle and iPhone routes)." As for SeattlePI.com, the fellow onliner thinks they are going to make it.
“They have a brand, so people know to turn to them. They also, from what I’ve read, have a very low cost structure. I don’t think being “exclusively” online is a hindrance as long as your name is known,” said Yemma. “Print was a way for your name to be known because your brand was broadcast around the city every day via your newspaper delivery system. So Web-only operations that can ride benefit from that, have a natural advantage.”
--Katrina M. Randall
Eyewitness News is now on channel 4 AND channel 5
June 8: Driven by the recession, competing local television stations are beginning to do the once unthinkable: sharing their video and even their on-air talent.
As revenues have declined, masses of reporters, cameramen, producers and assignment editors have been let go, leading stations in nearly a dozen media markets to pool resources.
 Newsroom management may become more centralized in these markets, said Julie Holley, a former TV news producer. It may be possible to have one story appear on two stations by approaching one assignment editor. She warns, though, that shared-content stations should be contacted only once, or you risk being perceived as a spammer.
Holley, now managing editor of the Vocus Television Team, worries that shared-content stations could erode the depth of television news reporting even further. With less manpower covering fewer story angles, she wonders if viewers can count on locally pooled TV news for fair coverage. “There’s one less voice in these markets,” she said. “There’s a chance they’ll miss a piece of information.”
The trend has now come to the nation’s largest media market, New York. On Monday, four major stations announced they have formed an LNS (local news service) to pool video newsgathering. The TV stations, Fox-owned WNYW, NBC-owned WNBC, CBS-owned WCBS and Tribune-owned WPIX (CW), said the rest of their news operations would remain independent.
Last month, four of Chicago’s largest stations banded together to provide pool coverage of general news events such as press conferences and local sports. Several TV stations in Cleveland (including WCMH, WSYX, WTTE, WOIO and WKYC) have done the same. The stations now rely on just one crew to go out and cover the region’s routine news events.
In an April news release, Scripps and Fox also announced that its stations in Detroit, Phoenix and Tampa, Fla., are participating in an LNS. Scripps and Fox said the pool arrangements will free reporters at each station to pursue greater amounts of enterprise and investigative journalism across media platforms. “We’ll now have the resources to deliver that content with deeper storytelling and richer context,” said Scripps’ senior vice president of television Brian Lawlor in the release.
Three separately owned stations in Dallas are now sharing newsgathering resources. Fox owned-KDFW-TV, NBC-owned KXAS-TV, and Tribune-owned KDAF-TV (CW) formed an LNS in early May and are now regularly sharing video. KDFW and KXAS even began sharing a news chopper in January.
In addition to sharing video content via pools, stations are combining newsrooms and on-air personnel. At times, newscasts on different stations mimic each other and run similar stories. It’s been legal for media companies to own two or more television stations, a “duopoly,” in the same market since 1999. During the recession, it is becoming not uncommon for these joint ventures to share staff.
And there is speculation in the blogosphere and among media observers that The Tribune Company, which has filed for bankruptcy and is the owner of 23 TV stations and 12 newspapers, may soon outsource all its TV news operations. NBC-owned WCAU-TV already produces newscasts for Tribune’s WPHL-TV (MyNetworkTV); both stations broadcast to the Philadelphia area.
Jill Geisler, who advises newsroom managers for the well-known Poynter Institute, blogs that the pools present a variety of risks for TV news managers and staff, including dilution of coverage. The pools are designed to cover scheduled events, which may lead savvy media relations professionals to arrange more of them. She warns assignment editors, though, to be wary of professional spinners staging blatant publicity stunts to take advantage of the needs of video-hungry pools.
It’s up to the news staff to turn the risks into opportunities. “I'd like to think that the news directors who have launched news sharing agreements know and care about these risks. That they talk about values and vigilance with their staffs. That they exercise the kind of leadership necessary to prove that pool coverage can make sense,” she blogged.
--Researched by Stacey Acevero & Chanelle Sirmons
Vocus journalists panel: Not all media telling the same story
June 5: At the 2009 Vocus Users Conference, a panel of three journalists and one moderator were called upon to answer some of the pressing questions about today's changing media landscape. The answers to the general question of "what is going on here?" were not homogeneous. Aside from the common factor of losing money and doing more with less, each panelist shared a unique  piece of insight from his media position.
Revenue is a hot topic right now among all media types, but Richard Dunham, Washington, D.C. bureau chief of the Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers, stated that they are seeing an increase because the paper's subscription price has gone up. But only considering revenue leads to tunnel vision. "Our readership is down," said Dunham. "Newspaper readers are like smokers. The ones we have now are addicted. The only problem is what we're going to do when they die off."
Dunham also described the training that editorial staff members have gone through to learn new skills. They have all been trained now on Web videos, photos and some HTML. Their skills make them more flexible and highly-capable. "It's exciting," said Dunham. Yet journalists remain cautious. "The only question is, ‘are we going to have a job tomorrow?’" Most one-newspaper towns, he warns, shouldn't get too comfortable. Just because they are the only newspaper today does not mean there won't be zero newspapers in that town next week.
BusinessWeek is seeing the opposite problem; the magazine’s circulation numbers are up, but their advertising numbers are down. "Magazines as a whole don't have the same problem as newspapers," said Steve Wildstrom, who created BusinessWeek’s Technology & You column. "We just need to find a new business model." That’s easier said than done, and editors are still in the process of experimenting with content, especially at this newsweekly. The same story running in the print edition will have a different headline if it runs on the Web site, as online news must be tailored for search engine optimization. BusinessWeek’s Web site includes more than articles. The choice of additional online content will be different from the print edition’s focus as well, Wildstrom says, pointing out that online, there are many more international readers. Pageviews may help BusinessWeek’s ad numbers, but the drive to stay on top keeps magazines from standing out online. "We waste a lot of time chasing the same stories as everyone else," said Wildstrom, "simply because it may be a popular search item at the time."
The International Data Group (IDG) News Service held up a successful business model record until the recession. "It's been a bloodbath," said Grant Gross, correspondent for IDG. "We were hyper-focused on whatever our niche is, but we're not doing as much product news." Gross, whose content the technology industry relies on, admits that they have started to run a lot of videos from PR folks on their Web site.
All three panelists are facing massive change as readers use the media in new ways. Journalists know they must fit readers’ needs in order to survive, but their strategies are all very different. Even as they face a recession and dwindling revenue, media companies are learning how to deal with the hurdles as they work towards a presence on the profitable Web.
Photo Caption (left to right): Moderator Bill Wagner, Steve Wildstrom, Richard S. Dunham, Grant Gross
--Rebecca Bredholt
Obama's campaign manager:
Today’s strategies target local, social media
June 4: David Plouffe (pictured) speaks as clearly and measured as the current president whose campaign he helped to run. At a keynote speech to Vocus Inc. subscribers at the 2009 Vocus Users Conference on Thursday, June 4, Obama’s chief campaign manager offered some choice words regarding the technology that was so influential in the presidential campaign. As he went into detail about how his team implemented their campaign strategy, one theme he dropped on the crowd was picked up by other speakers throughout the day: national media should not be your main focus in a grassroots campaign. The statistics he brought up, also echoed by others, showed that national media is not always the best way to reach a nation. He pointed out that the number of CNN viewers at any given time pales in comparison to the number of subscribers on then-presidential candidate Obama's e-mail list (13 million). They started with fewer than 5,000. And that, folks, is the future.
 "The undecided voters were not [necessarily] watching cable news," said Plouffe. "The insiders in Washington were.” While noting that "a human being talking to a human being is the most effective communication there is," Plouffe credited a great deal of success to the mostly under-30 crowd who technologically drove their strategy. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are not going away, he says. So "corporate folks and lawyers are just going to have to get over it." Some rogue posts will appear that companies do not want posted. However, he noted, "that's the price you pay to be interactive."
Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks PR and also a speaker, stated that "we go after the A-listers," referring to PR professionals targeting media contacts at national outlets. Like Plouffe, he is critical of this strategy’s effectiveness at keeping your message visible. Solis said, “that’s going to mean less to you in the long run.” Even Web traffic from a national pick-up should not be the goal, he says, as “most of those [Web site] visitors will go away." Solis says it's the peer-to-peer influencers and "magic middle" media contacts where the dollar signs can be found.
In his speech to Vocus users, Jay Hansen, vice president of government affairs for the National Asphalt Pavement Association, focused not around how to contact columnists at the New York Times, but how not to underestimate new technology. "We just need to learn to apply it to our mission and our message," said Hansen, whose main audience is typically those in the U.S. Senate.
Having watched more than 2,000 magazine and newspapers close over the last 18 months, the question of media influence continues to take center stage. Will the national media hold less and less influence in a more social media friendly nation? Or will local media be the ones to pick up the slack? "Questions from local media were substantive," said Plouffe, reflecting on the campaign. "From the national media, we got processed questions with no depth, although there were some exceptions."
Not so long along, the media was easily separated: local, national and international. Today, the direction of news is changing. Local news is becoming influential and the media is decentralizing from a national approach. News no longer comes from a national media center, distributed to distant cities. Instead, local chatter is rising to the point where national outlets are compelled to cover it.
Media focus is changing not only geographically, but sociologically. Top publications, which only recently began complementing their print coverage with online videos, podcasts and blogs, are rapidly making a presence on Twitter and Facebook. Now the New York Times has a social media editor. But the accessibility of these new platforms makes it just as easy for PR to reach a massive audience. It’s up to leading PR strategists to determine where they want to focus their influence. One thing is clear: the mainstream is evolving, not disappearing. Those ready to face the future are the ones adapting.
--Rebecca Bredholt
Staying afloat: Novice and experienced journalists fighting to survive
June 2: As newspapers around the nation cut costs or close, thousands of journalists are losing their livelihoods. Young people entering the industry are forced to watch newsroom veterans fade away. But some things aren’t changing. A passion for news and the desire to tell it is the tie that binds those journalists still in the field. And whether they’re overworked or unemployed, they’re still hungry for great stories.
Bradley Zint works in a two-person newsroom in the tiny island town of Kodiak, Alaska. He covers multiple beats as a general assignment reporter, takes his own photos, and paginates the paper. The workload is sometimes overwhelming, but he has no complaints. After all, he has a journalism job.
 He is one of a lucky few – a 2008 college graduate with just enough experience to be invaluable to any newsroom struggling to stay afloat.
Granted, Zint had his eye on the Last Frontier for some time before being hired by the Kodiak Daily Mirror (KDM). Yet, he admits that sacrifice is a big factor if young job seekers like himself are to be successful. Zint attended college at sunny California State University, Long Beach, where he was editor of the campus newspaper, the Daily Forty-Niner. He said a willingness to move for a job helped him get one after graduation. “All too often, people I know haven’t gotten jobs quickly or at all because they weren’t willing to move from their present location to someplace new,” he wrote in an e-mail interview.
Flexibility also helps. “I was aware I’d be doing just about everything,” Zint said of his position in Kodiak. While he prefers reporting and doesn’t consider himself to be a very creative designer, he said that versatility is essential. “Because there are so few reporters at KDM, what’s overwhelming is trying to grasp and keep on all the various beats at once.”
Back in California, veteran journalist Aaron Crowe is struggling in a different way. He has learned about WordPress and search engine optimization (SEO), and took a PowerPoint class. He does some freelance work, but the bottom line is that he is unemployed. But he’s not jumping ship yet.
He was assistant metro editor of the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif., until he was laid off in June 2008. Within weeks of receiving his pink slip, he started AC Consulting, a freelance business with a few small clients. But he is open about his status as an unemployed writer on his blog, www.aaroncrowe.net. He said a college friend he found on Facebook passed the blog link to her editor at AOL’s WalletPop.com. This brought him some part-time work writing and editing about personal finance for WalletPop and doing SEO articles for AOL Shopping.
But the Web is bringing him down. Crowe said that most of his trouble looking for a full-time job involves transferring his newspaper skills to the Internet or PR. “I always lose out to someone with even a little experience in that field,” he said in an e-mail interview. “My skills transfer, they say, but another applicant had some experience doing what [the company is] doing.”
Despite his hardships, Crowe doesn’t blame his misfortune on his age. “Young and old journalists have a chance, they just have to find their niche,” he said. “My years of experience should count, since I’ve worked as an editor. But I’m catching up,” he adds, “as fast as I can on online ways to inform people.”
He is still aware of the conditions in his old newsroom because his wife works nights on the copy desk. “Her work overload is increasing,” he said. Meanwhile, she has endured furlough and lost vacation accrual and 401(k) matching. And the Times isn’t hiring young journalists, because it isn’t hiring at all.
 The reality is disheartening, but it’s a message that Alvin Chang, who graduated last month from New York University (NYU), didn’t hear at school. He found the lack of candor detrimental to his future and that of his fellow students. “Tell me I won’t have a job,” he pleaded in a student newspaper column earlier this year.
His despair seems melodramatic, but Chang, a former editor of NYU’s Washington Square News, deserves credit for being a realist. He said in an e-mail interview that professors dodged questions about the future of the industry with sarcasm or vague answers that left students guessing. At job fairs, media companies have spots in their internship programs, but can’t offer much else due to hiring freezes and cutbacks.
Chang even has the multi-platform experience that editors love – from PhotoShop to InDesign to broadcast. “It’s frustrating because I have these skills,” he said, “but it doesn’t seem to translate perfectly into anything.” He knows that today’s journalism students have slim chances of finding work in newspapers. “The reality of the situation is that we will likely be unemployed and it will be one heck of a journey trying to figure out what to do from there,” he said. Chang admitted in early spring that he would consider working at a bookstore if he could not get a writing job after graduation. For now, he is freelancing for ESPN.
Young journalists willing to take on multiple roles have a fighting chance in newspapers. But there is no skill set or level of experience that guarantees job placement in today’s newspapers. Instead, luck seems to be the operative word. So Bradley Zint will be grateful for his job in isolated Kodiak. Aaron Crowe will learn as much as he can to market himself in job interviews. And Alvin Chang will keep his fingers crossed.
All three are apprehensive about the future of the medium, but they aren’t joining the mass exodus that many have been making from journalism into PR. These journalists are hunting for story ideas and are still making connections, be it through Twitter, LinkedIn, or old-fashioned e-mail. Those journalists who are still committed to the craft don’t plan on going anywhere. “For those few who have this burning passion,” Chang said, “we’ll have enough strength to fight through whatever hellish journey is ahead of us.”
--Lisa Rowan
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