The economic winter for jobs in journalism has thawed. But if you’re still waiting for traditional news organizations like newspapers to begin hiring again, you’ll be left out in the cold and might miss the massive shift to online.
Recently I wrote about a handful of recent college grads who parleyed digital skills into full-time jobs upon graduation. Now comes word that such a shift is picking up serious steam. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong told an audience at the Web 2.0 conference that his company has quietly assembled one of the largest online news organizations in the world. Here’s a snippet of CNet’s Caroline McCarthy report:
Armstrong, who joined AOL in March after a stint as head of sales at Google, said that recently the company has increased its roster of journalists from 500 to over 3,000, and that over 3,000 pieces of content are posted every day to AOL properties. It’s also now creating three to four times as much video as it was several months ago.
“We’ve hired people from places like The Wall Street Journal and ESPN,” Armstrong said. “You’re not just hiring a person, you’re hiring the community they come with, and I think that has been an important part when you look at the network effects of that.”
Also this week came word that Yahoo was getting into the original reporting game by luring Andrew Golis from Talking Points Memo to head up a political blog and aggregation effort for Yahoo News. The Bay Area News Group has begun hiring and job listings on sites like Wired Journalists are getting interesting.
I see a trend here. I hope you do, too.
Need more evidence? Look outside the U.S., too. Consider the newly launched Asian Correspondent site. Simon Owens (@simonowens) tells me “it’s basically like a Huffington Post for Asia,” with 50 bloggers writing for the site, which also publishes daily Asian-issue AP wire copy.
“Back in August I helped the site founders locate over 250 of the best English-language blogs in 13 Asian countries, and over the next month they narrowed it down to 50 that they approached,” Owens said. “The site owners then offered them year-long contracts. The bloggers are being paid a set amount rather than based on generated pageviews. In our first day we got over 20,000 uniques, and that number is growing as we finish up migrating all the bloggers onto the site.”
It’s a great lesson for out-of-work writers or yet-to-be-hired students. You don’t need anyone to publish you; publish yourself. Get writing and reporting on what interests you and, if you do it well, maybe someone will want your talent — and your audience.
Mark Briggs 
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