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Mapping newspaper layoffs - where will the journalists go?

Ross Dawson, June 22, 2008 9:11 PM US PT

Erica Smith of Graphic Designer has done some great map mashups of US newspaper layoffs so far in 2008 (4,490+) and in the last seven months of 2007 (2,185+), as below.

While you can pick out trends from the maps such as a big rise in layoffs in the North-East, this is more about underlining the trends in newspaper jobs.

One of the key topics at the Future of Media Summit 2008 on July 14/15 will be the future of journalism. I absolutely believe that journalistic skills and training are immensely relevant in the economy today. However many current newspaper journalists will have to adapt their skills to new jobs and roles, often outside traditional media. We will explore, among other issues, how this transition might happen.

US newspaper layoffs: 2008 to date

US newspaper layoffs: June to December 2007

Thanks for the ref from CyberJournalist.net

2 Comments

Charlie said:

I have a few journalist friends and they are all very gloomy. They all have serious doubts about their long term career prospects. Most of them can't be certain they'll have a job in 6 months. I worry about living in a world in which journalism has been reduced to the reporting of press releases.

June 22, 2008 11:31 PM

displaced worker said:

All this fuss over some layoffs. What a bunch of cry babies. Now that the newspapers are going through what the rest of us have been dealing with for decades all of a sudden its big news. There are hardly any news articles about US companies replacing American workers with 65,000 H1B visa temporary workers each year and that is not even counting the L1 visas. Journalists callously wrote articles about how poor foreigners need those jobs. Well where are the articles about how the outsourcing in the news industry is good and helps poor immigrants get jobs. As far as I'm concerned, the current downsizing/outsourcing going on in the news industry is some much needed bitter medicine for the out of touch media.

July 2, 2008 4:43 AM