Fewer Journalists working in the Journalism Industry

North Korea’s nuclear test was the biggest news in 2007, so when Jia-ling Wong was assigned to her first story to cover this news announced by North Korea’s official news agency.

“North Korea’s official news agency reported that the country has performed an underground nuclear test, it was the biggest news of the time, and I only graduated four months ago. I had no idea how to cover such a major international story at that time,” said Jia-Ling.

Jia-Ling graduated from New York University and came to Los Angles in 2007. She worked at The Epoch Times as a reporter. After all, her story on North Korea’s nuclear test was one of the most read and reverberation stories of the company’s newspaper in years.

“Hard news aren’t like feature stories, they are stories with actions and emotions. Not everyone likes hard news, it’s all about access to facts and first-hand information.”

Jia-Ling explains that the newspaper industry has changed a lot within the past 10 years of her career as a reporter.

“After years of reporting hard news and always being in the front line, it tires me. And to be honest, many journalists like myself have gone into the PR industry since the Tech companies are rising. The reality is – they pay better,” said Jia-Ling.

For the past few years, it has been evidential that the financial realities are not friendly to news entities. According to the Pew Research Center, the total digital advertisement spending grew 20 percent in 2015 to $60 billion. However, journalism organizations have not been the primary beneficiaries.

The data suggested that only tech companies are having the business of journalism, and eventually technology companies such as Apple and Facebook have become an integral that dominates in the financial side.

“A quarter of advertising revenue comes from digital, thus newspaper companies are cutting reporters these years,” said Veronica Cooper, one of Jia-Ling’s colleague at the Epoch Times, who is now working at Super Micro Computer Inc’s PR department.

According to the Pew Research Center, Newspaper’s weekday circulation fell seven percent and Sunday circulation fell four percent, which are their greatest declines since 2010. In 2014, the revenue number has also declined from nine to seven over the past ten years.

The number of full time daily newspaper journalists is 32,900, collected by the Statistic Portal in 2015. Compare with 2010, there were 41,500 full time journalists working at daily newspaper companies.

Both Jia-ling and Veronica agree that many of their journalist colleagues are now working at the PR industry or jobs involved with social media, which is very comprehensive with their journalism background.

“Promoting is very similar to works we do as reporters, but with agendas and marketing purposes. I like to think of my work in PR as writing stories about products,” said Veronica.

Jia-ling recalls that about two thirds of the newsroom are female journalists when she was

working at the Epoch Times.

“Working with print newspaper is very different from working at television newsroom stations. When I was working at the Epoch Times, my colleagues are mostly female, and since the Epoch Times’ founder is Chinese-American, the majority of the journalists working here are Asians,” said Jia-Ling.

However, in 2016, according to the Statistics Portal, 62 percent of the journalists working in print newspaper are male. But 38 percent of journalists writing for the top ten widely circulated newspapers were women.

Will Carruthers, who is working at the Ingleside-Excelsior Light, said there are fewer journalists working at small newspaper organizations like himself. But he finds that the news industry has became more diverse in the recent years. 

“I have noticed that more minority journalists are working in the field in the Bay area, but the total number of journalists don’t seem to increase,” said Will.

According to the Statistics Portal, the data shows that the share of minority journalists working at daily newspapers in the U.S. reached 13.34 percent in 2014, but in 2015 it dropped to 12.76 percent.