Just when the nation’s employment picture started improving, Colorado’s jobless rate went south, hit- ting a record 9.3 percent in February. That’s roughly 247,800 people out of work here.
Among them are people like Rabbit (“Just Rabbit,” he said), who told me that until two years ago, he worked for a Denver firm that made icing for cakes for companies including Sara Lee and Duncan Hines. On March 31, Rabbit was the first person in line at the Colorado Department of Employment at 12th Avenue and Grant Street, waiting for the doors to open at 7:30 a.m. He said he’d been there since 5 a.m. because “I’m broke and my rent’s due.”
I had business at the Department of Employment because on March 22, my job at went dark, as did the website, after AOL Inc.’s acquisition of The Huffington Post and the consequent shedding of some 1,000 positions.
It’s been a hard few years for the news industry. From 2008 to 2010, nearly 17,000 U.S. journalism jobs vanished, according to . Among them were scores of jobs lost when Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed in 2009, just shy of its 150th birthday.
Technology and the Internet have caused a sea change in reading habits, and revenue from classified ads, newspapers’ cash cow, dropped 92 percent — from $8.7 billion in 2000 to $723 million in 2010.
Technology has also revolutionized the news-gathering business itself. Today, anyone with an Internet connection and a cellphone can be in the news business. These citizen journalists — untrained, unpaid writers, bloggers, reporters and videographers — gather information on the street, or share their thoughts in a blog, and disseminate it around the world. They do it without compensation for a number of reasons — because it gives them an audience, because it can lead to a job or promote an idea, or because in some places, governments lie and repress the news, and citizen journalists are the only voices of truth.
Most citizen journalists who blog or write for free do it for the public exposure it gives them. Supporters say the free digital content they give websites adds a fresh voice to the conversation and frees a bunch of old journalists to do something more productive.
But critics complain citizen journalists lack the training, experience and pay incentive of news professionals. The price is a poorly or misinformed democracy, they argue, and the dangerous loss of a government watchdog. In addition, by writing without pay, citizen journalists have devalued the work of professionals, critics say.
Lately, there are signs of unrest. The 26,000-member Newspaper Guild of America recently urged the legions of unpaid citizen journalists at The Huffington Post to strike, stating that “working for free does not benefit workers and undermines quality.”
And this week, a group of bloggers filed a class-action suit against The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington and AOL, seeking back payment of up to $105 million for articles they have been posting for free for years. They argued the site, which AOL bought for $315 million, was built largely on their contributions, and they deserve their cut.
In a statement, the Huffington Post Media Group called the suit meritless.
All of it makes me miss the pre-Internet days in the newsroom, when the biggest things you had to worry about were spelling names right and making deadline.
Forecasters say the journalism jobs will continue to shrink, as will salaries. Cindy Perman, author of “Disappearing Jobs,” writes there are 61,600 reporters and correspondents in the United States, that their numbers will decline 8 percent in the next decade, and that their average salary will be $34,800.
Tools of the trade have also changed forever. At , Perman advises journalists: “With Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs becoming quick and dependable sources of information, those who want a news/journalism career can explore jobs that embrace these technologies.”
And it’s sad but true that any journalist who doesn’t “embrace these technologies” will probably embrace the unemployment line.
Freelance columnist Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver is a former Rocky Mountain News writer.
