Layoffs, Inequity and COVID-19: A Longitudinal Study of the Journalism Jobs Crisis in Australia from 2012 to 2020

This research used both labour demand and labour supply data to analyse journalism jobs. On the labour demand side, we used a detailed dataset of over 8 million Australian job ads, spanning from January 2012 to March 2020. These data were generously provided by Burning Glass Technologies¹¹1BGT is a leading vendor of online job ads data. https://www.burning-glass.com/ (BGT). For labour supply data, we leveraged official employment statistics (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019a) and salary levels (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019b) provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) over the same period. These data sources provide longitudinal employment and salary information that have been disaggregated by gender, location, and types of employment (full-time and part-time). Further details of data sources and data construction are provided in the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021). While there are nuances to ‘journalism work’ and the requirements of journalism jobs have evolved over time (Macnamara, 2016; O’Regan and Young, 2019; Maares and Hanusch, 2020), this research defines journalism jobs by the official ANZSCO standards (ABS, 2019).

To analyse the underlying journalism skills within occupations, we implemented a skill similarity methodology adapted from Alabdulkareem et al. (2018) and then by Dawson et al. (2019) to calculate the pairwise similarities between skills from job ads.

Two skills are similar when the two are related and complementary, i.e. the two skills in a skills-pair support each other. For example, ‘Journalism’ and ‘Editing’ have a high pairwise similarity score because together they enable higher productivity for a journalist; whereas ‘Journalism’ and ‘Oncology’ have a low similarity because they are seldom required together. We measured the similarity of skill-pairs based on their co-occurrence patterns in job ads, while accounting for skill ubiquity and specialisation. To capture how journalism skills have changed over time, we measured skill similarity during calendar years.

Formally, given $J$ as the set of job ads posted during a specific calendar year, we measured the similarity between two skills $s$ and $s^{\prime}$ as:

where $j$ and $j^{\prime}$ are individuals jobs ads from the set $J$, and $e(s,j)\in\{0,1\}$ measures the importance of skills $s$ for job $j$ using theory from Trade Economics (Hidalgo et al., 2007). Skills $s$ and $s^{\prime}$ are considered highly complementary if they commonly co-occur and are both ‘important’ for the same job ads. Finally, $\theta(s,s^{\prime})\in[0,1]$, a larger value indicates that $s$ and $s^{\prime}$ are more similar, and it reaches the maximum value when $s$ and $s^{\prime}$ always co-occur (i.e. they never appear separately).

We build the top yearly lists of journalism skills by computing $\theta(Journalism,s)$ – i.e. the similarity between the skill ‘Journalism’ and each unique skill that occurs for each year from 2014-2018. The yearly top 50 skills most similar to ‘Journalism’ are shown in the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021) together with the full details of the $\theta$ measure.

In Australian journalism, 2012 is considered a watershed year. An estimated 1,500 journalists were made redundant, the majority of those from Australia’s two largest print companies, Fairfax Media (now Nine Entertainment) and News Limited (now News Corp Australia) (Zion et al., 2016). The severity of this industrial shock can be observed in Fig. 1. Against the left y-axis, the blue line shows quarterly job ads posting frequency for journalism jobs. As the graph depicts, posting frequency for journalism job ads experienced extremely low levels in 2012 until 2013, when they began to increase. The volume of vacancies increased until mid-2014, before plummeting in late-2014 to the levels last seen in 2012. From 2015, journalism job ads experienced strong growth, reaching a peak in mid-2016. Since then, journalism job ads have trended downward until the first quarter of 2020 (end of available data for job ads), albeit with volatile peaks and troughs. In summary, the data shows that journalism job ads had not been in freefall since 2012. Rather, there was erratic growth in journalism job ads until a peak in 2016, followed by erratic decline.

Similarly, employment levels underwent immense volatility from 2012 to 2013. Against the right y-axis of Fig. 1, the orange line shows the number of quarterly employed for ‘Journalists & Other Writers’ at the ANZSCO Unit level. Employment levels peaked in mid 2012, before dramatically dropping in early 2013. This is an effect of the mass journalist redundancies made in 2012, given that employment statistics are ‘lagging indicators’ and it takes time for labour markets to reflect changes in occupational statistics. Early 2013 marked the lowest point of journalist employment seen in this time-series. As also observed in job ads data, journalist employment levels grew until 2016-2017 and has since trended downwards, exhibiting volatile quarterly changes through to the first quarter of 2020.

COVID-19 and journalism jobs. The early effects of COVID-19 were apparent in the posting frequency of job ads in Australia. This was the case for most occupations, including journalists. Higher vacancy rates typically mean higher levels of labour demand by employers, which is a critical component of healthy labour markets. As Fig. 2 highlights, vacancy volumes declined for both journalism jobs and at aggregate levels in Australia. Since mid-February 2020, weekly posting frequency had decreased across all Australia job ads, as seen in Fig. 2a. Such a decline this early in the year is atypical. As Dawson and Rizoiu (2020) show, the frequency of job ad postings follow a yearly seasonal pattern, with late February and early March typically being a period of upward trend growth. However, late February and early March 2020 coincided with the international outbreak of COVID-19. During this period, the Australian government instituted widespread quarantine and social distancing measures, which significantly constrained economic activity (Boseley and Knaus, 2020). The impacts of these COVID-19 containment laws are starkly apparent in Fig. 2b. Posting frequency for journalism jobs were down 63 per cent when comparing March 2019 volumes to March 2020. This was significantly higher than the aggregate market of all Australian job ads, which was down 37 per cent over the same period. Fig. 2b shows that Melbourne appeared to be the city hardest hit, recording no journalism job ads in March 2020 and only 3 posts for the first quarter of 2020, even before the major lock-downs instituted for Melbourne in August 2020. Clearly the pandemic had an early and damaging effect on the journalism jobs market.

We compared salaries extracted from job ads with ABS reported wage data for ‘Journalists and Other Writers’²²2ABS wage data is reported biennially, with the latest reporting year being 2018. Therefore, wage values in the ‘odd’ years in between the reporting periods were interpolated, calculated as the mean of the previous and the subsequent years.. Fig. 3 reveals two main findings regarding journalist salaries. First, according to job ads data, journalists attracted considerably lower annual wage levels (solid blue line) than the market average (dashed blue line). As of 2018, job ads indicated that journalists earned approximately AU$10,000 less than the market average. These findings, however, are somewhat contrary to the wage earnings data collected by the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019b), according to which ‘Journalists and Other Writers’ (solid orange line) had been earning a growing wage premium over the market average (dashed orange line) since 2014. This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that job ads data tend to over-represent occupations in the ‘Professional’ and ‘Manager’ classes (Carnevale et al., 2014), which typically attract higher wages. As a result, the average salary levels from job ads data (dashed blue line) were about AU$20,000 higher than average salary levels from ABS data (dashed orange line), from 2014 to 2018. However, the salary levels for journalists were very similar when comparing across the two data sources.

Fig. 3 yields a second observation: journalist salary levels increased in both absolute and relative terms compared to average market levels, between 2012 to 2018 in both data sources. More importantly, the relative salary growth of journalists exceeded the market averages, during the period studied.

Posting trends. We constructed an auto-regressive Machine Learning model to predict posting frequency of journalism job ads in Australia (Taylor and Letham, 2018). The model accounts for long term trends, seasonality patterns and external events (see the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021) for technical details). We isolated the posting frequency trend component and, in Fig. 4, plotted it comparatively for ‘Journalists’ against two occupations that have experienced high levels of labour demand, ‘Data Scientists’ and ‘Data Analysts’, as well as against the aggregated market trend. Visibly, journalism jobs experienced varying degrees of growth until mid 2016, at which point growth plateaued, and started to decline. From the end of 2017 until 2019, the trend for journalism job ads has heavily decreased, even when compared to the aggregate market, which also shows a more modest decrease during the same period. ‘Data Scientists’ and ‘Data Analysts’ consistently grew throughout the entire period.

Quantify labour demand volatility. When constructing Machine Learning models, it is standard procedure to use error metrics to evaluate the prediction accuracy. Volatility in posting volumes inherently lead to lowered prediction performance and higher error values. Here we use the prediction error measured using the ‘Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error’ (Scott Armstrong, 1985; Makridakis, 1993) as a proxy for the volatility of labour demand for different occupations (see the technical section in the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021) for more details).

Fig. 5 shows the prediction performance for three occupations (‘Journalists’, ‘Data Scientists’, ‘Data Analysts’) and for the volume of ‘All Australian job postings’. We used a sliding window approach to obtain multiple predictions (see the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021)) that we aggregated as boxplots. The higher the error score on the vertical axis, the lower the predictive abilities for that occupation. As Fig. 5 reveals, predicting the daily posting frequency of journalism jobs was consistently more difficult than for the other occupations, and the market as whole. ‘Data Scientists’, an occupation undergoing strong relative growth, is also showing a high prediction error compared to the market as a whole, indicative of experiencing a degree of volatility. However, it was not nearly commensurate to the predictive difficulties, and volatility, of journalists. This was true from 2012 to 2019, and has become worse in 2020 with the spread of COVID-19.

There have been growing gender differences of employed journalists in Australia (North, 2016, 2009) and across the world (Hanitzsch et al., 2019); the data presented in this research reinforces these previous findings. Fig. 6a shows that the ratio of female employed journalists increased relative to male journalists (ANZSCO Unit Level) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019a). In 2014, the female-to-male employment ratio was 0.7. In 2018, the proportion more than doubled, with almost 1.8 female journalists employed for every male journalist. It then declined in 2019 to 1.35, but this proportion was still almost double that of 2014.

Fig. 6b also shows that wage inequality between female and male journalists worsened from 2014 to 2018 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019b). Since 2014, the annual salaries for female journalists increased by only AU$3,000, whereas annual salaries for male journalists increased by more than AU$30,000. Male journalists thus experienced an average wage growth that was ten times greater than female journalists from 2014 to 2018.

There were also changing age demographics of employed journalists during the studied period. The markers on Fig. 6b highlight the average age of journalists by gender, per year. Male journalists were getting older, their average age increasing by two years from 2014 to 2018. Female journalists, however, were steadily getting younger. The average age for female journalists decreased by more than four years from 2014 to 2018.

Fig. 7 plots the location and volume of employed journalists in Australia. Fig. 7a shows the absolute and relative number of job ads posted for each of the capital cities, and outside them, and Fig. 7b shows the location of employed journalists per state. Unsurprisingly, Sydney and Melbourne, the respective capital cities of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC), consistently had the highest job ad posting frequencies. However, the relative share of job ad posting frequency in Australian capital cities had shrunk in later years, with Fig. 7a showing an increase outside of major cities, both in relative and absolute terms. This trend reached a peak in 2017, when less than 50 per cent of all journalist job ads were for positions inside capital cities. A small rebound followed, and in 2019 Sydney commanded approximately one-third of all journalism job ads.

Figs. 8a and 8b show respectively the number of years of formal education required for journalists, and the experience requirements (both per year, extracted from job ads data). The education requirements consistently remained at market average levels, with journalists required to possess a Bachelor-level degree (approximately 16 years of education).

By contrast, the experience requirements were more variable. Since 2012, employers required fewer years of experience from journalists than was required in the market generally. However, the gap narrowed. In 2019, employers demanded of journalists, on average, half of an additional year of experience compared to 2014. This countered the general market, where employers’ demands trended downward from 2012 to 2019.

Casual and temporary work have become more commonplace in Australia (Gilfillan, 2018), and we study if this is also the case for Australian journalism jobs. In Fig. 9 we plot the number of permanent and temporary journalism jobs, per calendar year – in the job ads data, jobs are classified as either ‘Permanent’, ‘Temporary’, or not specified according to the content of the job descriptions. The number of ‘Temporary’ journalism jobs had increased in absolute terms since 2012, which made up the majority of all journalism ads in every year. It is noteworthy too that the share of ‘Permanent’ journalism vacancies had also increased since 2012. However, this trend should be interpreted with a degree of scepticism as only $\sim$ 50 per cent of all journalism job ads specified whether the roles advertised were permanent or temporary.

Growing demand for journalism skills.

Here, we analysed how the demand for some fundamental journalism skills changed over time. First, we selected three traditionally important skills to journalists that appear in job ads: (1) ‘Journalism’, (2) ‘Editing’, and (3) ‘Writing’. These skills were then counted across all job ads in Australia, regardless of their occupational class. While Fig. 4 shows that labour demand for journalists has decreased since 2016, Fig. 10a presents the more nuanced story, showing that the posting frequency for each of these core journalism skills increased from 2012 to 2019, with 2018 to 2019 being the first yearly decline.

The relative rankings of these three skills also increased. For each year, we counted the posting frequency of each unique skill that appears in job ads. We then ranked these skills by posting frequency as a proxy for labour demand. Fig. 10b shows that the rankings of all three of these fundamental journalism skills had improved from 2012 to 2019. In other words, not only did the posting frequency of these three journalism skills increase in job ads over these eight years, but their importance relative to all other skills also increased.

Changing importance of journalism skills. We wanted to determine whether the relative importance of the Journalism skill changed over time, using a skill similarity approach. Given the dynamics of skill requirements in job ads, skills can become increasingly more (or less) similar over time. We used the similarity measures in Eq. 1 to identify the skills that are becoming more relevant to being a journalist (see  Data & Methods for details, and the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021) for the top 50 skills for each from 2014 to 2018). The higher the similarity score, the more likely the skills pair will complement and support each other in a given job. Fig. 11a shows the changes in similarity scores between the skill ‘Journalism’ and each of the eight other top journalism skills (as per the top yearly journalism skills lists in the Supplemental Material Appendix (2021)). The greater the area covered in the radar chart, the greater the similarity score, with the blue area representing 2014 and the red area 2018.³³3At the time of analysis, 2018 was the final full year available of access to the required skills-level data. Visibly in Fig. 11a, ‘Social Media’ related skills became increasingly relevant for journalists, with the relative ratio of more traditional skills such as ‘Editing’ and ‘Copy Writing’ diminishing with respect to ‘Social Media’, from 2014 to 2018.

Occupations that require journalism skills. Here, we studied which occupations most required journalism skills, and their dynamics over time (according to the BGT occupational taxonomy). Given the yearly lists of top journalism skills (described in  Skill Similarity), we used Eq. 2 to determine the occupations with the highest intensities of journalism skills, for each year from 2014 to 2018. Intuitively, this allows us adaptively to identify occupations that become more or less similar to ‘Journalism’, based on their underlying skill usage. It also provides a means to assess likely transitions between occupations, as workers are more likely to transition to occupations where the underlying skill requirements are similar (Bechichii et al., 2018). Higher similarity lowers the barriers to entry from one occupation to another.

Fig. 11b highlights eight top occupations and their journalism skill intensity scores for 2014 and 2018. ‘Reporter’, ‘Editor’, and ‘Copywriter’ cover the highest percentage of journalism jobs in the dataset, respectively. While the journalism skill intensities of these occupations were relatively high in 2018, their growth since 2014 was relatively low. In comparison, ‘Photography’, ‘Communications’, ‘Social Media’, and ‘Public Relations’ experienced higher journalism skill intensity growth from 2014 to 2018. This provides insights as to where workers with journalism skills might have found employment outside of journalism.

Drawn from job ads and employment statistics, our findings reveal the highly volatile nature of the journalism industry. Compared to other occupations and the aggregate labour market, journalism experiences dramatic fluctuations that are unpredictable and irregular (see Fig. 5). The data also confirmed that journalism is an industry in crisis, worsened in the early stages of COVID-19. However, the data also reveals surprises, including that the number of journalism jobs ads and employment levels increased from 2012 until 2016. Since then, though, journalism jobs in Australia declined.

The volatility of journalism jobs in Australia was clearly apparent in Posting Frequency & Employment levels. Posting frequency of job ads ranged from near zero levels in 2012 and 2014 to more than 200 posts per quarter in 2016. These violent swings are also apparent in the quarterly employment statistics of ‘Journalists and Other Writers’. Following the mass redundancies of 2012, employment levels plummeted, reaching their lowest levels in 2013. They then increased before falling again into the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the data confirms that volatility of employment has been a constant for journalism, and that this has worsened during COVID-19.

Fig. 5 reveals this extreme volatility. The error metrics from the Machine Learning model used to predict daily posting frequencies of job ads (as detailed in Trend Analysis & Predictability) highlight the difficulties of making predictions about journalism employment. This lack of predictability is indicative of volatility. The higher the error scores for a given occupation, the higher the likelihood that the occupation is experiencing significant disruption. This becomes apparent when we compare journalism to other occupations. For example, the volatility of ’Journalists’ dwarfs that of ‘Data Scientists’, an occupation experiencing significant demand and volatility in Australia (Dawson et al., 2019).

The volatility of journalism jobs was further revealed by a time series analysis of journalism compared to other occupations (Fig. 4), a gender-based analysis (Fig. 6), a geographical analysis (Fig. 7) and an analysis of the temporary nature of journalism jobs (Fig. 9).

What is indisputably clear is that the advertising market for news and journalism collapsed, and, at the time of writing, continues to collapse (Shirky, 2009; ACCC, 2019; Doctor, 2020). Meanwhile, consumers have tended to show an unwillingness to pay for digital journalistic content: in 2019, Australian news consumers admitted they would much would rather subscribe to a video streaming service such as Netflix (34 per cent), than pay for online news (9 per cent) (Fisher et al., 2019). Admittedly, during COVID-19 some subscription rates have risen (Edmonds, 2020). Clearly, however, the Internet has detonated the advertising model that once sustained journalism, and simultaneously re-adjusted consumer expectations on the monetary value of journalism content. The fact that journalism is struggling is confirmed in several ways by the data, including by the unpredictability of job ads posting frequency and the clear shifts in employment levels, as shown in Fig. 1. To say that journalism has been disrupted is an understatement.

Volatility exacerbated by COVID-19. In a fragmenting news ecosystem, consumer demand for news and journalism is difficult to quantify. The Digital News Report: Australia 2019 has found that many consumers are disengaging, with the proportion of Australians avoiding news increasing from 57 per cent in 2017 to 62 per cent in 2019 (Fisher et al., 2019). Demand for ‘quality’ and ‘public interest’ journalism is even harder to quantify, given ongoing debates as to what exactly constitutes ‘quality’ and ‘public interest’ (Wilding, D., Fray, P., Molitorisz, S. & McKewon, E, 2018). Nonetheless, demand for journalism has surged dramatically since the outbreak of COVID-19.

The irony of the coronavirus pandemic is that even as it has been killing off journalism jobs, it has also created a heightened demand for, and appreciation of, journalism among the general public. As news analyst  Doctor (2020) wrote of the US situation in late March, ’The amount of time Americans spend with journalists’ work and their willingness to pay for it have both spiked, higher than at any point since Election 2016, maybe before … [but] how many journalists will still have jobs once the initial virus panic subsides?’. In the UK in March, The Guardian received 2.17 billion page views, an increase of more than 750 million above its previous record, set in October 2019 (Bedingfield, 2020).

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the volatility of the journalism jobs market has worsened dramatically. We noted above that in May News Corp ended the print run of more than 100 newspapers nationally In April, Australian Community Newspapers, which publishes 170 community titles, said it was suspending publication of some of its non-daily newspapers; as a result, four printing presses were closed and an unspecified number of staff were stood down (Meade, 2020a). Also in April, the federal government announced a AU$50million package to support public interest journalism across TV, newspapers and radio in regional and remote Australia (Hayes and Rubbo, 2020). And on April 20, the Australian government announced that digital platforms including Google and Facebook would be forced to pay for content as the Internet advertising business would be overhauled to help local publishers survive the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis (Crowe, 2020). The scheme, which would involve a mandatory code imposed on digital giants, would potentially set a global precedent. The combined and ongoing impact on journalism jobs of these sudden, cumulative developments are hard to predict, but will no doubt be profound.

At first glance, the data seems to suggest that gender equity is finally arriving in Australia for journalism – an industry that has traditionally been male-dominated – as more women than men are employed. As the data shows, in 2014 there were 0.7 female journalists employed for every male Journalist, but by 2018 the proportion of female-to-male employment more than doubled, with almost 1.8 female journalists employed for every male Journalist. It then declined in 2019 to 1.35, a proportion still almost double that of 2014.

However, further detail reveals that equity remained elusive. Specifically, wage inequality worsened. Since 2014, annual salaries for female journalists increased by AU$3,000, compared with an increase for male journalists of over AU$30,000 over the same period. From 2014 to 2018, average wage growth for Male journalists was more than ten times greater than for female journalists. Meanwhile, the average male Journalist was getting older, while the average female Journalist was getting younger. In 2014, the average age for a Journalist, whether male or female, was roughly the same: late 30s. By 2018, the average age for a male journalist was 42, whereas for a female journalist it was 34. These results support previous findings on the changing demographic characteristics of journalists in Australia. In a survey of female journalists in Australia, North (2016) found gendered divisions of tasks associated with reporting, where the majority of female reporters were assigned ‘soft-news’ areas, such as arts, education, and health. These gender and age inequities for journalists were also present in other countries (Hanitzsch et al., 2019). The wage and age discrepancies between female and male journalists observed in the employment statistics are consistent with the surveyed experiences of female journalists in Australia by North (2016).

The potential impacts of this worsening disparity are concerning. It is possible that senior positions responsible for major editorial decisions were increasingly being dominated by men, whereas junior roles were being filled by women who are younger and worse-paid.

Further research is needed into related issues of the industry’s composition, including, for instance, the ethnicity of journalists. A vast body of literature exists regarding the importance of diversity in news (Rodrigues and Paradies, 2018; Budarick and Han, 2017). Further work is needed into diversity (and its various sub-categories), and what effect diversity has, for instance, on the proportion of people who are actively avoiding the news.

As discussed above, the sustained pressures on regional and local journalism have led to a worrying growth of ‘news deserts’ in countries including Australia and the US. This trend alarmingly accelerated in the early stages of COVID-19, leaving many areas without any regional or local news coverage. For instance, as of October 2020, ‘Public Interest Journalism Initiative’ had documented a net decline of 124 newsrooms from January 2019 (PIJI, 2020). Hence, we might assume that journalism jobs in regional and local areas were been drying up, and that an ever-increasing proportion of journalism jobs were in urban centres.

The data, however, were not so clear until the end of 2019. As Fig. 7a shows, in 2012 fewer than a quarter of Australia’s journalism job ads were for jobs outside Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and the ACT or Perth. In every subsequent year, the proportion of job ads for journalism positions outside these urban centres was considerably higher. The peak came in 2017, when nearly half of all job ads were for positions outside the major cities. Does this suggest that in 2017 there were as many jobs for journalists in the regions as in the centres? Surely not. The explanation, we suggest, lies in various factors. These include that regional journalism jobs are hard to fill, perhaps because they offer relatively low salaries, and are hence re-advertised. It is also possible that there is a high turnover for some regional positions. In short, the job ads data may simply be an indication that the journalism industry is even more volatile in the regions than in major urban centres.

Research consistently and emphatically reveals that regional and local journalism have been suffering, with an increasingly bleak prognosis of cuts and closures (Abernathy, 2018; ACCC, 2019; Doctor, 2020). While the data shows a surprisingly high proportion of journalism job ads for positions outside the main metropolitan centres, this cannot be taken to suggest that journalism is holding steady in these areas.

Skills are the building blocks of jobs and standardised occupations. In this regard, occupations can be characterised as ‘sets of skills’. Intuitively, skills that are similar can be interpreted as complementary when they are paired together or relatively easy to acquire when one skill is already possessed.

This intuition provides insight into how journalism skills are evolving and where journalists might be finding alternate career paths. As Fig. 1 shows, both the demand for and supply of journalists have been declining in Australia since 2016. Therefore, a growing number of former journalists, who presumably possess an assortment of journalism skills, needed to transition between occupations to find new work. There are, however, significant transition costs moving between jobs (Bechichii et al., 2018; Bessen, 2015). These costs can come in the form of education, training, physically moving for new employment and other barriers. To reduce the friction of these transition costs, workers tend to leverage their extant skills, in concert with acquiring new skills, to make career transitions.

As seen in Fig. 11a, the skill ‘Journalism’ became more similar to ‘Social Media’ and more ‘generalist’ communications skills. After applying the Skill Intensity formula from Eq. 2, we identified the top occupations with highest intensities of journalism skills from 2014-2018 – these normalised measures from Eq. 1 and Eq. 2 take into account newly emerging and redundant skills. The Fig. 11b chart reinforces that top journalism skills were becoming more important to other occupations, such as ‘Photographers’, ‘Social Media Strategists’, ‘Public Relations Professionals’, and ‘Communications Specialists’. While it is certainly possible that journalism tasks were being performed in these different occupations, it nonetheless highlights the changing nature of journalism work and the occupations where journalism skills were of growing importance.

From the data, we suggest, three conclusions can be drawn, which supports previous research (Young and Carson, 2018; O’Regan and Young, 2019; Macnamara, 2014, 2016). First, to be hired, journalists are required to have a wider array of skills, such as photography and social media aptitude. Second, jobs requiring journalism skills were increasingly occupations in social media, generalist communications, and public relations rather than in reporting and editing. And third, we see hints as to where onetime journalists are finding alternate career paths. As employment conditions progressively worsen, journalists are seemingly pursuing new careers in the occupational areas seen in Fig. 11b, such as photography or public relations.

At a time of great uncertainty, with employment prospects deteriorating, it is no wonder that journalists look beyond traditional journalism for their futures. For society, however, the implications are significant. In this time of economic instability and polarising politics, the people who possess the journalism skills required to keep the public informed and hold leaders to account are, in many cases, employing their talents elsewhere. This places enormous strain on the health and quality of journalism in Australia.