Fewer than half of newspaper jobs from 15 years ago still exist
The newspaper industry has been hit hard -- and not just by Donald Trump knocking it for misleading claims of "fake news."
In the past 15 years, more than half the jobs in the news industry have disappeared, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week.
The bloodletting has mostly affected newspaper publishers, which is the sloping blue line in the graph below. Back in January 2001, the industry employed 411,800 people. In September 2016, that number had dropped to 173,709.
Overall the BLS data on the "information industry," which includes everything from newspaper publishers to book publishers to greeting card makers to online news makers, shows jobs went from 1,057,396 employees in January 2001 to 790,362 in September 2016. Not as bad as half jobs cut, but still a big drop in the 15-year period.
More optimistically, online news employment prospects are on the rise. Those jobs jumped from only 67,000 in January 2007 to 206,000 jobs in September 2016. The internet will save (some of) us!
Upset journalists compared the huge job loss to the coal industry, which Trump has been working hard to revive. Here's mining jobs unemployment rates in the past 10 years.
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Luckily Tuesday is "Hug a Newsperson Day," and any surviving journalists still out in the wild could really use something -- anything -- to feel better these days.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
