Bailout

Media goes barbell

By Felix Salmon

As journalists get laid off across the world, the number of professional bloggers is growing fast. Michael Learmonth today has a look at AOL’s fast-expanding suite of web properties, with a quote from AOL’s Jeff Levick saying that he “will continue to grow these sites and launch new sites”. Meanwhile, TPM Media has just posted seven new staff positions in one day.

My feeling is that there’s media jobs are looking pretty much like a barbell these days: you either work for a last-man-standing monolith or else you’re part of a small and nimble team. It’s the media properties in the middle — regional newspapers, small cable-TV properties, anything with high fixed costs and less than a million paying customers — which are suffering the most. And it’s not going to be at all easy for the journalists at those properties to move into the world of blogs.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on June 29, 2009 (boomark / email).