Bollinger, the 19th president of Columbia University
His specious logic rests on the fact that Americans — “ironically,” in a misuse of the word — already consume state-supported news in the form of PBS and NPR here, and the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV abroad and that all is well with that arrangement. It’s near impossible to get past the holding up of an official Chinese news source as an example of a flourishing press, but there’s more if you can control your laughter…
Can anyone explain to me why the recruitment market for entry- and early-mid-level journalists, and public relations people is still so insanely inefficient?
I used to think it was just me who had to dig for days to turn up a single good candidate. Maybe, I just didn’t know where to look. Maybe, as editor of Ad Age, or editor-in-chief of Breaking Media, I just wasn’t offering sexy enough jobs, after all the jobs I was looking to fill definitely required some business reporting skills. But over the last couple of years I’ve had the discussion with countless editors and publishers. In just the last month I’ve spoken to the editor of a section of a major national newspaper, the editor of a pretty-damn sexy magazine/web brand and a couple of editors of online properties, all of whom have been struggling to find the right candidate.
You might think that this makes sense. Maybe students have been forced into a sad-but-probably-practical conservatism by the pay-for-play education in this country, and are simply deciding not to rack up monstrous debts in an effort to join a poor-paying profession in which the largest employers have been cutting their staffs every year for a decade. But that’s not it. In fact, even in the mainstream-media maelstrom of 2009, the J-schools continued to report increased applications and graduate numbers have tended to tick up in recent years too.
