• by Tony Silber , Staff Writer, April 12, 2022

There was a story in the New York Times on Monday about why workers at Condé Nast are unionizing.

It’s an engaging report. It uses the infamous summer 1999 launch party for Talk Magazine as Exhibit A for the extravagant excesses of the dot-com era and the golden age of print-media dominance.

Those days are gone.

It was always true that lower-level workers at the prestige print-media companies, including Hearst Magazines, Condé Nast and Time Inc., did not earn glamour wages. But they nevertheless came mostly from society’s privileged classes. Family connections and social networks from elite universities served as an entrée into a certain exclusive club, with the promise of career-long stature and eventual economic opportunities that made up for early years of grunt work.

The Times story effectively lays out these characteristics well, but notes that now, those top-tier companies are either struggling or out of business, and print no longer has anywhere near the stature it once had.

As a result, with some level of incongruity, workers at those companies are unionizing. 

But then I look at the actual numbers and the trends they show. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers subcategoryof the BLS’ News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists category had an annual mean wage of $49,470 as of May 2021, with the sub-ategory employing 15,410 people. (Because of the way the BLS organizes its data, this number understates total employment. It doesn’t include editors, freelancers, contractors, videographers, photographers, audio and video technicians, and more.)

However, both figures are a decline from 2020, when the BLS reported a mean annual wage of $53,410, and total employment of 16,890. In 2019, total employment came in at 18,940, with the mean annual wage at $48,280

Regardless of how the job functions are categorized, you don’t have to look hard to find massive decline in the number of people employed in these professions -- largely legacy newspaper and magazine reporters. This has been the trend for years, and shows no sign of abating. Nor is the growth of digital media companies matching jobs one for one.

At some point, stature isn’t enough. It looks like that time has arrived.