By NYU Staff

The lining in the economy is still more gray than silver for the media industry, as jobs continue to dwindle faster than we can write about it.   And as job security in journalism becomes a thing of the past, some say the concurrent shrinking of internship programs—the traditional doorway to journalism jobs—may threaten the quality of future journalists.

Media jobs have been slashed month after month, since the beginning of the recession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September employment data, the information industry, including print and broadcast news, lost 87,000 jobs so far this year and 60,000 in 2008.  And the bad news keeps coming, with The New York Times cutting another 100 or 8% of its workforce in October, followed by a round of layoffs at The Associated Press in November, a bloodbath at BusinessWeek under Bloomberg News’ plan to cut 25% of BW employees as part of its acquisition, and most recently, a 5% staff reduction at USA Today.

At 2.25 million, jobs in the news industry are the lowest they’ve been since January 1999, according to the BLS database.  But despite the cheaper cost of interns, whose pay is generally lower and health care cost is nil, the malaise has seeped into internship programs.

“Paid internships have diminished drastically and a lot [of media companies] have stopped having internships all together,” said Reginald Stuart, journalist and corporate recruiter for The McClatchy Company.

The Poynter Institute, a journalism school and resource center, reported the beginning of budget and internship cuts in 2007, when The Los Angeles Times cut its summer intern class by 50% from a 2004 high of 10.  The Boston Globe and McClatchy lost 5 to 8 slots, respectively, due to budget cuts.  And those that did receive internships saw pay cuts or no pay at all.

Stuart, a former employee of Knight Ridder, which is now a part of McClatchy, estimates that five years ago the company had 100 paid internships annually.  Now the combined media company has 12 paid internships, he said.

According to Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), internship cuts are typical in economic downturns.  But the danger of this round of cuts is that they are deeper than ever before and brought on by a fundamental, not simply economic, shift in media business models.  Some say this transformation threatens the training and potential of the next generation of journalists.

“If companies are holding back on full-time hiring—a lot are—[it] hurts the interns of today because you need a full-time job in a professional setting to take your skills to the next level,” said a Reuters News editor familiar with intern hiring.

The shrinking pool of internships may also close the door to students with financial challenges and limit diversity.  The American Society of News Editors’ annual newsroom census, released in April, found that the percentage of journalists of color dropped from 13.5% in 2007 to 13.4% in 2008 and journalists of color in supervisory positions declined from 11.4% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2008.

Industry insiders say a major hurdle for interns is that there is a concerted effort to protect the quality of news, the very thing that they say will save the industry, and a key input unseasoned interns often lack.

“It’s rare that an intern will produce the same quality of work as a seasoned journalist,” said Stuart.  They tend to be “good on quantity and technological skills, but they still have a lot of work to do to increase [the quality of work].”

Still, those lucky few that land internships are seeing more opportunities, as companies like McClatchy, Dow Jones, and Reuters take advantage of the cheaper labor to write feature stories and for additional reporting and research help.

It may be too soon to tell if internship programs will be ratcheted up, in line with improvements in the general economy.  But a recent CareerBuilder.com survey shed some light on the prospects.  It found that, one-in-five of the more than 2,600 employees it surveyed this year said they’d be hiring interns, with nearly 50% saying they were likely to hire interns as full-time, permanent employees.   Though the media industry tends to follow suit, a turnaround is expected to lag the general economy.

For the impatient, Joe Grimm, a media recruiter and visiting journalist at the Michigan State University School of Journalism advises creating your own silver lining.  “Things are still in a tremendous state of flux,” he said.  “If, ultimately, you wind up with nothing, start something on your own.”