A couple of things happened earlier this week that illustrate why the newspaper business is facing some real pain that just isn't going to go away. Poynter.org launched a career center and Editor&Publisher relaunched its classified job listings (the non-job classifieds, for printing equipment and such, aren't on the Web).
My dad was a newspaper editor and I grew up with E&P. At the first daily where I worked, the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, E&P was banned in the newsroom, lest it entice underpaid reporters to go elsewhere. There was a time when we waited eagerly for the arrival of each week's illicit copy, bought with subscription jointly funded by pooling our meager funds.
In those days, E&P was a lifeline to the outside world for working journalists all over America, and the classified section was fat all year except during the Christmas holiday. Those ads paid most of the freight for the magazine and were central to its business model.
Then came the Internet. And suddenly there were many possible lifelines to the outer world for journalists working in the 1,400 or so remaining regional daily newspapers in the United States. Word of mouth, through email, instant messages, forums and blogs, fills many jobs. Every newspaper company publishes its own openings on its own corporate website. New job-specific websites such as journalismjobs.com appeared. State and national press associations put up their own lists.
E&P has suffered through reorganization and downscaling as a result, and is now a monthly.
The point here is that in the old print world, content and advertising lived together in a marriage of convenience dictated by a scarcity of distribution. We no longer have a scarcity of distribution, and E&P has found its business disintegrated.
We do have a scarcity of attention, and there we have Poynter taking advantage of the considerable attention it commands with its website, by using the Top Jobs upsell technique pioneered by Bob Cauthorn. By the end of the week it has collected more than 50 postings, which isn't a bad start.
On the day Poynter launched its effort, VNU Media, the owner of E&P, fought back. It relaunched its jobs database by merging the listings from seven of its business publications. It makes it look like E&P is back on top ... until you actually look at the listings, most of which come from Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, et cetera, and have nothing to do with the newspaper business. Maybe that might help some print editors think about an exit strategy.
With the relaunch E&P gained RSS feeds of job listings, joining Poynter, NAA's CareerBank, Journalismjobs.com, Paidcontent.org and others that let true jobseekers hover over the inbox.
Most of these sites are charging $75 to $150 for basic listings. With the rise of specialty sites like VisualEditors.com, which lets you post jobs at no charge in the forums where design editors hang around, I have to wonder whether this situation is sustainable. Does that tell us anything about the future of classifieds in our own newspapers?
Comments
E&P was banned in my newsroom, too.
E&P was banned in my newsroom, too. The only time I could see was when I went to one of three libraries in far away parts of San Diego County that I knew carried it. As the recession worsened, my publisher became more and more of an ass, and there were fewer and fewer reporter jobs in E&P, and I couldn't get an interview, so I wound up taking a sabbatical from journalism.
These days, I do the hiring, and this has me looking at journalism job boards once in a while and I'm amazed, utterly amazed, at all of the job listed -- jobs that I would have jumped at had I known about them 20 years ago. I find myself woundering: Were those jobs always there and I just had no way to find out about them, or was the recession of the late 1980s/early 90s really that bad for journalists.
I think it's a great time to be a young journalist if you're willing to start at a small paper and work hard ... there are a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunity compared to what was available to me.