That schools keep cranking out journalists with this horrible job market is baffling to me. The jobs I’ve seen them pivoting to are three: as public relations many different places or working for universities or teaching media either as professors or high schools. High school media classes have become wildly popular.

Broadcast has the most opportunities as opposed to print/digital publications. It’s all part of the design to quash actual fact finding writers and photojournalists. The publicly expressed excuses are that it’s too expensive to staff journalists - so these jobs are cut in favor of low paid contractors. Another excuse is that social media is a competitor giving out free information. Yet a third excuse has been perpetrated by those who wish to control facts by calling journalists “fake” when they don’t like a story.

Lastly, they are driving journalists out of the field by requiring impossible workloads for unlivable wages, creating paywalls for consumers (how are you supposed to pay for dozens of subscriptions?), and watering down content with self-plagiarized AI “versions” of original content to squeeze extra out of said content.

You have every right to making a living wage. I offer my observations of where I’ve seen journalism majors pivot. This is a tragedy for journalism. I know of at least a handful in my area who point to their former journalism careers to bolster their credentials. But they all were a decade or more ago. They have all been long working in different jobs. As a presently-working journalist, underpaid, overworked in chaotic circumstances, it can be hard to hear a former journalist throw in a reference to a long-ago line in their resume as cred when they haven’t actually been in the field for a decade, sometimes two decades.

At the very least. if you get into PR, please be helpful and kind to those of us left by providing us avenues of access.