It’s something I’ve witnessed many times before in discussions about journalism careers: A journalism student, nearing graduation and scared by the rapid collapse of traditional media institutions and the  still-in-question profitability of new media companies, asks someone who’s supposed to be in the know — be it a professor, a publisher, or working journalist — what they think about the career outlook for professional journalists. The answer the student gets is some variation of “The world will always need good journalists” or “There will always be a spot for journalists who do X, Y, and Z.”

I’ll be blunt here. The next person to give that as career advice to aspiring journalists deserves to be held down and have citric acid squirted in their eyes.

First of all, it’s a nebulous, cop-out non-answer. Secondly, and more despicably, it’s a misleading response, if not a lie, aimed at not telling the students the truth — that the likelihood of them finding full-time employment in journalism after they graduate is not good. It’s feeding them feel-good fluff when what they need are cold, hard facts.

If you truly want to give students useful advice on which they can base their decisions about their futures in journalism, point them to things like this story and the University of Georgia study it quotes instead of misleading them into thinking, “If I do X, Y, and Z, I’ll be able to find a job. Those people who won’t have jobs are the ones who can’t do X, Y, and Z.”

Why It’s Misleading

By themselves, statements like “the world will always need good journalists” are OK. However, when you give them as responses to questions about the probability of finding jobs or building careers in journalism in the present landscape, it’s almost tantamount to a lie because you are not telling the students the other half of it: The world will always need good journalists, but there aren’t anywhere near enough jobs for good journalists, and you may not be among the good journalists who get hired.

This is a bit like the “Most Likely to Become President” picks in high school yearbooks. In every class at every high school in every school district in every state in America, there are bound to be a couple of people who are so brilliant that their classmates look at them and say, “They’re going to be somebody important.” And of course, within the tiny fishbowl of that one particular class of students, they stand out. Throw all those brilliant people from all the graduating classes across America into one big fishbowl, however, and you can see how much the odds are against any one of them becoming anybody important, much less president. In other words, as talented as you think you are, you are not all that unique, especially when, according to that UGA study, journalism schools are dumping 55,000 new graduates a year into the labor pool. Even if only 1 percent of those graduates are as talented as you, that’s still 550 people. In just three years, you will find yourself competing against more than 1,500 people who have the same talent as you, and two-thirds of them will be younger and cheaper than you.

Catch 22

The AP article I linked to above cites the example of a recent J-school graduate who had to take a marketing job in order to avoid having to turn to her parents for financial support because the journalism gigs she has pay little or not at all. For her, journalism has had to become a hobby rather than a career. I can see that being the case for more and more new graduates, considering that the UGA study found that 40 percent of J-school graduates fail to find full-time employment within six to eight months of leaving school.

Journalism as a hobby is fine if you are content to merely dabble in the craft, but if you want to make a career out of it, I can see several problems:

• Every year you stay out of the game, you have 55,000 newcomers in the job market who are a year younger and a year cheaper and, at least theoretically, possess knowledge that’s a year more current, fighting for the same entry-level positions.
• Considering the rate at which J-schools continue to pump out graduates, even if the journalism market starts to rebound, there will still be a huge pool of surplus labor out there for years to come. Factor in the exploding availability and plummeting profitability of content online, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what that will do for future journalist compensations. This definitely is, and most likely will be, an employers’ market.
• The longer you stay in a non-journalism job, the more you’ll likely have to give up to go back into journalism. Aside from the non-career-related responsibilities that come as part of getting older — family, mortgage, and various other types of property — you probably would’ve also moved up on the career ladder in whichever field you went into instead of journalism in order to keep the bills paid. How willing will you be to give that up, especially in the face of increasing financial obligations, to go back into a field with little security and long lines of applicants eager to do your job for less?

Oh Crap! I’m Graduating This Year! What Should I Do?

From what I’ve written above, you might think I’m against people pursuing journalism careers. But I’m not. I loved my six years as a full-time journalist and think some journalism experience would do any new graduate, not just J-school students, some good. However, I don’t want graduates making their decisions based on the false promise of “If you do X, Y, and Z, you’ll have a job.” I want them to look around and realize that there are plenty of people who do X, Y, and Z who are sitting at  home unemployed. I want students to know what they are getting themselves into. Know that it’s a job market where the numbers are not on your side right now and may not be for years to come. Know that it’s a time with tremendous opportunities for new inventions, but that for every success, there are going to be many more failures, and the failures won’t all be due to lack of talent, vision, or commitment. Know that there’s a good chance you’ll spend months, if not years, without a full-time journalism job after graduation. Know that many of you might have to swallow your pride and turn to your parents for help to get by. Know that even after you get that full-time gig, there’s a good chance you’ll lose it in a couple years to someone younger and cheaper.

Now, if upon knowing all of that, you still want to go into journalism, then I salute you and wish you the best of luck with all sincerity. Just don’t let me see you complain on Twitter a year from now that no one is hiring a journalist who can do X, Y, and Z. I told you: They do need those people and they are hiring them; you’re just not one of the ones they hired.