Should we write off journalism?

I was chatting with an all-around nice guy and sometime source at the Bellmore Family Street Festival recently. He told me he’s a tad worried about his teenage daughter. She wants to enter a dark profession. She wants to become a ... journalist.

This fellow was asking about the best college journalism programs she might apply to. I offered my advice. As we spoke, I could sense his apprehension. His daughter is considering a future in -- heaven forbid -- newspapering.

She loves to write, he said, but with all the cuts at big-time dailies these days, who knows whether there will be any newspapers left in a few years? Naturally, as her father, he’d like her to eventually be gainfully employed. Self-sufficiency is, after all, one of the chief aims that most parents have for their children.

So he’s probably wondering, where did I go wrong? Why journalism? Why now?

These days it’s really easy to believe that the journalism profession is collapsing. Here’s a small sampling of headlines from the past year:

• “Dolans Cutting 5 Percent of Newsday Workforce; More than Two Dozen Job Cuts Expected in Newsroom” (The New York Observer, Dec. 5, 2008).

• “Newspaper Industry Suffers Dual Blows” (Forbes.com, March, 9, 2009).

• “New York Times, Washington Post Cut Jobs as Ads Fall” (Bloomberg.com, March 26, 2009).

Only recently, The Times announced that it would slash 100 jobs from its vaunted newsroom, which now has roughly 1,250 employees. It will seek buyouts from reporters and editors, worth two weeks’ pay for every year of service at the paper. If management can’t find enough takers, it will resort to layoffs, Times officials said. Such cuts are occurring in newsrooms from the Miami Herald to the Sacramento Bee –– that is, from sea to shining sea.

Take it from someone in the know: Newspapering is no easy profession, layoffs or no layoffs. You can expect solidly middle-class pay, but unless you’re a top talent at a major publication like, say, The Times or CNN, never expect to get rich. That’s for Wall Street traders. Oh, sorry -- with all the layoffs in the financial sector of late, they’re about as destitute as everyone else these days.