Not all news jobs are created equal

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, in its own words, a “a nonpartisan ‘fact tank,'” released its State of the News Media Report for 2011, an attempt to evaluate the robustness of media in the U.S.

In an overview of the report, PEJ breaks down the key findings. Some are surprising: “Local TV wins 2010 revenue race”; some are not: “Mobile has already become an important factor in news.”

But one conclusion, which looks like good news at first glance, is dubious: “Online news hires may have matched newspaper cuts for the first time.” Following this statement is a list of online news companies and their recent or upcoming hires: AOL/Patch.com (1,000); Bloomberg Government (150); and Yahoo (“several dozen). The summary concludes: “These hiring increases appeared to have compensated for the 1,000 to 1,500 job losses the study estimates the newspaper industry suffered in 2010.”

But what does “compensated” mean, exactly? Click through to the report, and you can read about the various innovations of these news organization (aggregation, curation) and a shift towards working with local news outlets to secure original reporting.

What you won’t read about is what, exactly, these new jobs offer. If anecdotal stories about what it’s like to “create content” for Yahoo or Huffington Post or one of many info factories are representative of these thousands of new online news jobs, the report’s claim that they are making up for those lost at newspapers across the country (a portion of them full-time jobs with benefits and security) is naive. Such claims do a disservice to journalists trying to navigate and make a living in today’s media climate.