by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
Once upon a time, if you wanted to be a journalist there were just a couple ways to go. You could start at a small-town paper as a glorified intern and learn the craft by covering local weddings and town council meetings, then move to a slightly bigger paper, and so on up the food chain until you landed at a major-city paper with millions of readers. Or you could get a journalism degree from a prestigious college, parlay that into an entry-level job at a major paper, and work your way up internally.
Either way, the eventual goal was to cover high-profile stories for a large audience, and, maybe, write books about the most interesting of those stories.
Then came the Internet, and traditional journalism got a lot harder. Newspaper circulation and revenues fell, mid-level reporters got the ax and those who remained had to accept an unprecedented level of career insecurity.