USA TODAY Column: …Why the happy face? For one thing, Pew is excited about the digital players who are plunging deeply into the serious side of the news business. BuzzFeed, identified with such fare as “Which Rock Star Should You Hook Up With?” has a news staff of 170 and has plunged into investigative reporting, foreign news and longform journalism.Vice Media has 35 foreign bureaus. Vox Media is launching a website for explanatory journalism under the leadership of highly regarded policy wonk Ezra Klein, formerly ofThe Washington Post. Tech site Mashable has 70 news staffers in the lineup.
For the first time, the project tried to quantify the number of journalism positions at digital-only news organizations. It found about 5,000 working for 30 major digital news outlets and 438 smaller ones…
The report makes clear that problems persist at traditional news outlets. Newspaper newsroom jobs declined by 6.4% in 2012 and there were doubtless more losses in 2013, it says, adding that despite all the cool new kids in the game, “the vast majority of bodies producing original reporting still lie within the newspaper industry.” … (more)
EDITOR: We recommend the article be read in full to get the full gist.
