A few weeks ago a prospective journalism student told me that her careers class had been addressed by a newly redundant newspaper journalist. She told him she wanted to be a journalist, and he told her not to be crazy. There was nothing but gloom ahead.
The bitterness of those forced out of mainstream media is entirely understandable. Good journalists see the breaking of news as more than a job. It is a mission and a creative endeavor. To be wounded in one's sense vocation is traumatic indeed.
Yet there is another story to be told. In recent months, a brace of startup ventures in news media have entered the Australian market.
The Guardian in Australia launched its website earlier this year, and already claims more readers than The Australian newspaper. Its editor, Katharine Viner, says it is exceeding targets in both revenue and readers, and is planning to expand, establishing a Melbourne bureau in 2014.
A couple of weeks ago Britain's Daily Mail announced it will launch an Australian edition of its website in a joint venture with Ninemsn. It plans to recruit 50 journalists.
Both these British based operations are betting the farm on an attempt to transcend the limits of print, and use the web to become global media brands, drawing revenue from advertising to both local and international audiences.
So much for the big brands. The last few weeks has also seen the launch of The Daily Review, an extension of the Crikey brand, reporting on the arts. From the same stable, there is The New Daily, supported by industry superannuation funds.
Meanwhile Morry Schwartz, publisher of The Monthly magazine and the Quarterly Essay, plans to advance his existing position at the heart of Australian intellectual life by launching a new weekly print title, The Saturday Paper, carrying long-form journalism.
At the same time, flying beneath the radar of the gloom and doom merchants there is an armada of new media startup ventures such as Issimo Magazine, The Hoopla, Mumbrella, The Kings Tribune and The Australia Times, plus a rash of hyperlocal startups, such as Bluestone Magazine in Warnambool, Victoria. There are too many to list, and a new one every week. Many won't last, but some will. Many struggle to pay their writers, but increasingly the successful ones do. And their numbers are legion.
So how can the market support all these startups, particularly the big boys from the United Kingdom, when the local established media is in trouble?
It is a strange question. Those of us old enough to remember know that in the late 1980s most Australian capital cities supported two morning newspapers, and at least one afternoon newspaper as well. Since then, the population has grown by more than five million.
There has been no evidence at all of a decline in the appetite for news over this period. The crisis has been in ownership structure and business models, not audience demand. Mastheads closed because of the regrettable increase in concentration of media ownership following Murdoch's takeover of the Herald and Weekly Times. More recently, traditional media has had its profits eroded because of the internet undermining the business models, with audiences fragmenting and classified advertising disappearing online.
This year our major newspapers started charging for access to content online. This is delivering no more than a thin stream of revenue. It is not, and never will be, "the answer" to the collapse of old mass media business models - although it can and does work for high-end specialist publications. Notably, The Guardian and The Daily Mail websites are free to the user, and supported by advertising.
The cost structure of a purely online publications is different. These new ventures are not burdened by the high price of big legacy newsrooms, printing presses and distribution networks.
The enormous revenue streams that supported newsrooms of hundreds of journalists will not return. Journalistic salaries will probably never again reach the stellar heights of the last days of the golden era of print.
Instead, the new ventures plan to employ at most dozens of journalists, and rely heavily on partnerships with other producers of content. "Do what you do best, and link to the rest", as new media guru Jeff Jarvis has said.
So is everything rosy in media land? Of course not. No sector is changing faster, and the change is traumatic.
Contrary to most of the rhetoric, the evidence and recent research suggests that investigative journalism is not the thing primarily at risk. The old media organizations are quarantining it from cuts, and the new ventures are devoting limited resources to it. Plus which, we have organisations like Wikileaks and investigators in NGOs cooperating with media outlets.
Rather, it is the old fashioned idea of the journal of record that has suffered. The world's great mastheads, were founded with the aspiration to comprehensively and dispassionately record the affairs of civic institutions - the courts, parliaments and the business community. This was how they distinguished themselves from the yellow press of their day. It was their competitive advantage.
I think it is now clear that it is this kind of basic, not particularly glamorous reportage that has most sharply declined, and is most at risk. Courts, parliaments and local governments across the western world are radically underreported, and so far none of the vibrant startup sector have seen an opportunity in filling the gap. It is labour intensive, and therefore expensive.
The cost of the general public not being able to easily find out what has happened in the major institutions of democracy is likely to be considerable over the long term.
Gloom and doom? It is hard to be pessimistic in the face of so much activity and so many new ventures.
But change brings loss as well as opportunity, and we should heed the gaps and seek new ways to fill them.
Margaret Simons is an academic, freelance journalist and author.
