Bloggasm

Editor and Publisher, a newspaper industry trade publication, ran dozens of stories in 2007 about job cuts, revenue loss, and other maladies of the daily newspapers. Every now and then it would publish a column to put this all in context, but for the most part the reader became desensitized to all the bad news. How much was the industry really hurting? There were some reports of job growth within online news sites, so it was hard to distinguish whether there was some balancing effect elsewhere.

Well, today we have some fresh numbers that might put 2007 in context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released data showing that for the first 10 months of 2007, the industry lost 10,000 employees, a drop of 2.8 percent.

So what does this mean? Well, I’m not going to start drawing generalized conclusions based on my meager math skills, but it’s worth noting that many of the revenue declines with the big dailies were as high as 10%. Most of the articles that highlighted these declining revenues only focused in on the larger newspapers, and there were some reports that smaller, more localized newspapers, were not only doing fine, they were growing in revenue. So while there was an overall decline in employees across the board, part of that decline might have been offset by the weekly and small daily newspapers.

So what about the actual job loss number: 10,000

I’ve noted on numerous occasions that it’s incredibly difficult to track the number of people who are becoming full-time bloggers. But let’s do a little math game. If you go to Technorati’s Top 100, a list of the top 100 most linked-to blogs on the internet, I can count up at least 150 full-time paid staffers divided among these blogs (a good bit of these come from Gawker and AOL owned blogs on the list). That’s just the full-time staffers that I know of, it’s a conservative estimate.

If this general trend were to continue for the top 1,000 most popular blogs, then that would mean that there are at least 1,500 full-time staffers that are tending to this segment. This is 15% of the 10,000 that lost their jobs in the newspaper industry.

And these are just blogs, it doesn’t even take into account the multitude of online-only news sites out there. It also doesn’t factor in the number of bloggers that are bringing in a decent part-time incoming from blogging.

What I’m trying to say is that even though it appears the newspaper industry is suffering, there’s a chance that the journalism industry as a whole (if you’ll allow me to group the bloggers in with other journalist) is still chugging along. For every Tree (newspaper) that falls, a hundred little weeds (blogs) spring up.

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