Bah humbug

There were 15,554 job cuts in newspapers last year, according to a journalist who's been slowly putting all of the pieces together on a web site cleverly coined Paper Cuts. More than 830 jobs have already been lost in 2009, and it's not even February yet.

This is certainly not good news for me and any other graduating journalism majors. Sometimes I'd like to think that I'm special. That my passion and my knowledge and my experience will trump all of those other graduates and that I'll get the one newsroom job left in the country. Unfortunately, I can't sustain that optimism for much longer.

However, I'm no longer just competing with other graduates. I'm competing with those 15,000+ journalists who've lost their jobs in the past year.

So what are they up to now? Here are some stats from Paper Cuts:

- 53% of journalists found a new job, including about 20% who turned to freelancing full-time

- 10% of those journalists took longer than a year to find a job

- only about 6% found other newspaper jobs

- 85% miss working at a newspaper

- 78% enjoy their new jobs

Allow me to be whiny for a second. It's not fair that what thousands of people have been working hard for should be stripped away so quickly and leave so many people (85%) yearning for what they used to have. Yes, I know - it's life, it's growing up, it's the real world. But this isn't what I expected when I fell in love with this industry four years ago. And sometimes it's hard to accept and be okay with that.