The media’s lost generation

By Lesley M. M. Blume

updated 9:45 a.m. ET May 6, 2009

Last month, a media executive met with a headhunter to plan his next career move. With years of experience at a major media organization, the executive figured that he had some good ammo to jump to the next level, even in the current economic climate.

The meeting did not go well.

"The headhunter essentially told me not to even bother trying," says the executive. "He told me, ‘The old media model is broken.' The message was that there really isn't a next step to take."

Like many industries, the mainstream media — newspaper and magazine companies in particular — have been ravaged by the recession and the infringing Internet over the last six months. Professional viability in this brave new world has become akin to winning a high-stakes game of musical chairs. The media business has always been a deeply competitive bastion of ambition; yet today's journalists — including both those sidelined by layoffs and those still clinging desperately their workplace desks — have been left to wonder whether the very idea of ambition makes sense anymore.

"How do you progress in an industry that has no clear path to anywhere?" asked Glynnis MacNicol, a media analyst and editor of FishbowlNY. "Right now, the definition of success in the media is not to be unemployed."

Just a year ago, media careers still had clear, relatively linear trajectories. If you worked in publications, you started as an editorial assistant and worked your way up the ranks of editorships until you reached a grand prize. In television news, you started as a desk assistant and progressed from there; in 10 years, you could be a senior producer, correspondent, or even in senior management.

Those days may be over — or at least on hold indefinitely.

"I think people are aware that the great pot of gold at the end of the rainbow might not be there anymore," says one television producer at a prestigious network news show. "You used to be told, ‘You will one day be the leaders of this organization.' Now, who knows if any of us are going to have jobs in five years?"

For many, goals are no longer defined in specific terms, such as "I'd like to be the Style section editor at the New York Times"; rather, journalists now describe their aspirations in broader strokes: "I'd just like to be a published writer," "I'd like to be paid to be a writer in some way," or "I want to be a journalist in whatever form that takes down the line."

Even more recently forged new-media career ladders appear shaky. For the last decade or so, many young journalists cut their teeth at online sites and then leapfrogged into prestigious positions at magazines and networks. One success story: Jake Tapper, who hailed from Salon and became ABC News' senior White House correspondent. Another example: columnist Jessica Coen, who skipped out on Gawker to a gig at New York magazine.

Yet what happens to this trajectory when the ABCs and New Yorks of the world simply aren't hiring fresh talent, no matter where it comes from?

And it's not as if the Internet itself is offering up obvious substitutes. Many business analysts are less convinced that such venues are viable in the long term.

"Take the Huffington Post, for example," says one analyst, who specializes in media at a private-equity firm. "They don't pay their writers, and who knows what the value of the company is. That company might not exist five years from now. It's the big success story, and it's not successful."

Many journalists interviewed for this piece — on both sides of the old/new-media divide—say that they are eagerly waiting for a 20-year-old to crack a Facebook-esque code of some sort, a college kid who will come up with a business model that will redeem the media world and everyone in it.

That makes the new-media order a strange place indeed: The recent college grad isn't supposed to fetch coffee or fill the copy machine; he or she is supposed to be the messiah of the company, albeit at a very low salary.

"There's been an inversion of experiences," says MacNicol, citing a memo that the New York Times management recently circulated to its whole newsroom — from the most junior to the most senior employees — soliciting ideas from everyone about how to increase revenues. "When the Times is doing that, you know that we have lost the traditional definitions of success."

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