FEW IN OUR INDUSTRY HAVE been insulated from the tumult in the media during the past year, particularly with newspapers large and small laying off staff and offering buyouts to save money. But an annual survey of more than 2,200 recent journalism and mass communication grads shows the cap-and-gown crowd is having the same luck finding jobs this year as they did a year earlier.
Only in these rough economic seas can treading water pass for a positive development.
“Given the turmoil in the traditional media industries and the large number of layoffs, particularly in the daily newspaper segment, the consistency in the experiences of the 2007 graduates probably can be treated as good news,” said researchers with the University of Georgia's James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research.
The Cox Center, in its annual survey, reported that journalism and media graduates found the job market in the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008 had remained largely unchanged from a year earlier. And nearly the same percentage of graduates in 2007 found full-time jobs within six to eight months of graduation as in the previous year, and salaries remained static, the University of Georgia researchers reported.
Lee B. Becker and Tudor Vlad, who direct the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates, released the results in August at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago. "Nearly all of the 2007 bachelor's degree recipients who looked for work had at least one in-person job interview in the six to eight months after graduation,” the survey found.
The median salary earned by 2007 bachelor's degree recipients was exactly the same as the median salary earned by bachelor's degree recipients in 2006.
ASNE is a sponsor of this survey: www.grady.uga.edu/annualsurveys.*