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Death of the newspaper?

Merry Christmas Toronto Star editorial staff. Go clean out your desks.
The Toronto Star has announced it will be cutting 78 jobs from its editorial department, a move that will save the corporation $4 million annually. After the Star’s operating profit declined by 53 per cent in the last quarter, the paper will be asking one-fifth of the editorial staff to take a trip to the unemployment office.
Me? I applied for an internship at the Star last week in hopes of it leading to a job. I feel sheepish to say the least.
Gazette editor Lauren Pelley’s ongoing series about life past undergraduate studies has fascinated me (see P 1). I’m terrified that while I spent all this time spinning my hamster wheel, I could have been working towards a feasible, pragmatic solution to my existence by positioning myself for med or law school instead of journalism.
I hadn’t even thought about graduate studies until this year when everyone around me suddenly became lawyers, doctors and teachers-to-be. I’ve been in school since I was five. That’s 17 years of my life committed to education and, to be frank, I feel that I’ll be leaving my edification under the same circumstances I entered — jobless, broke and without direction.
I suppose I can blame myself for one thing. Last year I decided I wanted to be a journalist.
When I read stories about cutbacks at places like the Star I get scared. It’s not an isolated incident. The Globe and Mail laid off close to 90 employees last year. The London Free Press has also contracted its newsroom in the last five years.
Everyone from rookies to seasoned newsroom veterans has ended up unemployed during the decline of print media, and, as painful as it is to admit, it’s necessary for the survival of the medium.
Newspapers have to adapt to the changing landscape of the market — the archaic, advertising-based system just doesn’t work anymore. Newspaper ad sales are projected to have dropped 26.2 per cent by the end of 2009 according to the Newspaper Association of Canada. How is it possible to survive without a quarter of your largest profit sector?
Furthermore, by putting all content online for free, newspapers have devalued their content. If I can read all the stories on the Internet, why would I pay at a newsstand?
At the same time, when you force people to pay for content they feel they have the right to access for free, they will find ways around your roadblocks. Just look at what’s happened in the music industry. It wasn’t that long ago when the only option was to pay for music at something called a record store. Now we download and access music without even thinking about what the hard copy would cost.
Like myself, newspapers have found themselves lost in the wilderness.
Journalists need to adapt, turning to new platforms and new media to draw in eyes and ears. Media companies will continue to demand individuals who can work on a variety of platforms and engage the reader more than ever before. It’s where this ship is sailing, and those who deny it will eventually fall overboard.
That’s a lesson this hopeful journalist is learning the hard way. Next time around I’m going to law school.

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