During the last two decades, local journalism has devolved in pay, benefits, staffing, and working conditions in a brutal way.
There was a time when a television reporter actually had a team. The reporter gathered the information, interviewed the witnesses, developed sources, and told the story. Photographers shot the video. Editors edited it. Producers helped write and shape the finished product.
Today, many reporters are expected to do damn near everything themselves. They research the story, shoot the video, conduct the interviews, write the script, edit the video, prepare material for the web and social media, and sometimes even set up their own live shots. The corporations discovered they could eliminate jobs and simply dump the work on whoever remained.
Newspapers may be in even worse shape. Almost nobody wants to buy a newspaper anymore. The public has become accustomed to getting information instantly and, preferably, free on the Internet. Convincing people to pay for yesterday's news printed on paper has become an extraordinarily difficult business model.
For a young person choosing a career today, journalism may be one of the worst bets available. The traditional employment opportunities are shrinking while the workload imposed upon those who remain continues to grow.
Then artificial intelligence walked through the door.
Writing was once the reporter's great professional advantage. A skilled journalist could take a complicated collection of facts, interviews, documents, and observations and turn it into a compelling story. Today, an amateur can provide a poorly written overview of an event and have artificial intelligence transform it into polished copy in seconds. Suddenly, everybody can write like Hemingway, or at least convince themselves they can.
That does not make everybody a journalist. AI cannot magically give someone judgment, sources, skepticism, investigative instincts, or the ability to recognize when somebody is lying. Those abilities still matter enormously. But AI can eliminate much of the mechanical work that once required trained people, and media companies will certainly notice the potential savings.
Meanwhile, corporations have taken over enormous portions of American television broadcasting. Too many important news decisions are now made by executives and bean counters who have little or no experience actually gathering news. That doesn't prevent them from making decisions about how news should be gathered, packaged, staffed, and sold.
And that brings us to the question every working reporter should be asking:
You just got laid off from your reporting job. What are you going to do next?
Some journalists are turning to podcasts. That sounds easier than it actually is. Producing a podcast is relatively simple. Building an audience is not. There are millions of people talking into microphones. The difficult part is convincing thousands of strangers that what you have to say is worth hearing every week.
Fortunately, advertising and sponsorships have created legitimate opportunities for successful podcasters. If you can build and maintain a substantial audience, there is real money to be made. But the audience has to come first.
Another possibility is education. An experienced journalist might earn a master's degree and pursue teaching opportunities at a community college or university. Others may take their skills into public relations, corporate communications, documentary production, investigations, research, or independent digital journalism.
Whatever the choice, journalists should recognize what is happening before the pink slip arrives.
The old career path of joining a newspaper or television station at 25 and retiring from journalism decades later is disappearing. Technology is accelerating the transformation, corporate consolidation has changed the economics, and artificial intelligence is about to rewrite the rules yet again.
Journalism itself will survive because people will always need reliable information.
The uncomfortable question is whether journalism as a dependable career will survive with it.
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