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How the journalism career trajectory is changing

It used to be that anyone trying to “make it” in journalism followed pretty much the same trajectory: They started out in some small, local market working for a tiny newspaper or TV news station. Then, as they began to accrue reporting skills and experience, they’d leapfrog into bigger and bigger cities, until they finally landed in a major metro area. From there, they could spend the rest of their career writing or broadcasting at the national level. Journalism legends ranging from Seymour Hersh to Walter Cronkite followed this career path. 

Hell, even I started down this road; my first two jobs were at small, local papers paying less than $30,000 a year. If you had asked me back then what I imagined my next 10 years would look like, I would have told you that I planned to spend another year or two at the local level before jumping to a small metro newspaper like The Richmond Times Dispatch. And then, after another two or three years, I’d make a go at NYC, with the eventual goal of landing at a magazine like The New Yorker.

There were certainly upsides to this approach. Local news outlets provided a great way for aspiring journalists to cut their teeth and learn the basics around establishing a beat and reporting out stories. And unlike the national outlets — whose limited number of entry-level positions mainly went to Ivy League graduates —  local newspapers and TV stations were very willing to hire people who were just out of college, or, in many cases, didn’t even have a college degree at all.

The downside was that, because your audience was local, you couldn’t necessarily transfer it from job to job, so it’s not like you were some known entity as you moved up market. You also had to keep learning new beats from scratch, which meant that your transferable job skills were limited. Prior to the Great Recession, when traditional journalism jobs were still plentiful, this didn’t pose a huge problem, but over the last decade or so this career path has become much more difficult to navigate. 

Casey Keirnan learned that the hard way. Growing up, he idolized ESPN sports broadcasters and wanted to one day appear on camera at the network. So after graduating college, Keirnan emailed a Los Angeles sports radio host named John Ireland and asked him for advice. “He sent me a two page long email telling me exactly what he thought I should do,” Keirnan told me in an interview. “And I followed his advice exactly: I emailed news directors all over the country, and this guy in Abilene, Texas took a chance on me.” He offered Keirnan $9 an hour to move to a small city and work as a local sports correspondent. 

The work was not sexy. “I was covering high school sports exclusively,” he said. “At my first job, I wouldn’t even get to cover the big high school — that was for the guys who were senior to me in the sports department. So I was covering, like, single A and double A teams.” On most nights, he considered himself lucky if he got two minutes of air time.

But his patience seemed to pay off. After a few years in the local news trenches, he got his big break: a job as a sports anchor at CBS Interactive, which was trying to create a sort of ESPN competitor for OTT streaming. Keirnan was suddenly thrown into the deep end and felt way out of his depth. “I felt so insecure about my lack of knowledge and experience,” he said, “especially working with these people that I had watched on ESPN.” His insecurity led to him spending hours each day studying up on the topics they planned to cover in the next broadcast, but this created a “paralysis by analysis” effect in which he struggled to sound natural while on the air. “The first year was very uncomfortable.”

By his second year, Keirnan was seeing definite improvement with his confidence and on-air delivery, but by that point it was too late; at the end of his two-year contract, his bosses decided not to renew it. This proved to be a big problem for him because he still had no personal brand. “Back when I was in local news, if I was at the grocery store, people would recognize me, right? But when I got to CBS, no one knew me. There was no online activity. It's not like I gained a bunch of Twitter followers. It kind of felt anonymous.” As it turned out, very few people were actually logging in and watching the CBS OTT streaming app.

This meant that Keirnan didn’t feel like he had a lot of career prospects once he was let go from CBS. “I thought I was going to have to go back to small town, local news,” he said. By that point, the industry had grown especially bleak. “[Sports correspondents] used to get, you know, five minutes to the broadcast, now they get two minutes. They’re such an afterthought. No one cares about them. You never have anyone to produce with you and you don’t have a dedicated sports photographer. The sports department at every local news station has gotten pared down so much that it's almost a depressing culture. And the thought of going back to that was just so, so awful. And I was dreading it.”

Luckily, Keirnan’s boss at CBS had two parting pieces of advice: that he should start a podcast and niche down to a single sport. This would ensure Keirnan kept his skills sharp and make him slightly more marketable as he reentered the job market.

The rest, as they say, is history. In late 2019, Keirnan launched A.M. Hoops, a YouTube channel focused on pro basketball. Aided by his years of broadcasting and video editing experience, he began producing daily short videos offering his analysis. Prior to launching the channel, he’d watched several videos that gave advice on how to grow on YouTube, and his biggest takeaway from these lessons was that he needed to pick topics that were under-covered but likely to receive high search volume.

The strategy paid off, and within just a few months he had managed to replace his entire CBS salary. Today, the channel has over 400,000 subscribers and 264 million views.

I had three takeaways from my conversation with Keirnan:

• The traditional journalism career trajectory is changing: Keirnan graduated in 2012 and is probably of the last generation of journalists to come up through local news. With most newsrooms shrinking, it’s never been more important for aspiring journalists to just start creating content on free platforms like Substack, YouTube, and Spotify. 

• Always try to niche down: Most traditional journalism jobs teach you to be a generalist, and it’s not uncommon for you to switch beats as you move from job to job. But the content ecosystem today is incredibly crowded, meaning you’re much more likely to break through the noise if you pick a narrow niche and just stick with it.

• A personal brand matters: In traditional print and broadcast media, the individual journalist’s brand didn’t matter much because they couldn’t transfer their audience from outlet to outlet. But with so much job insecurity in the industry, personal brand can play a huge role in a job candidate’s marketability. Whatever career moves Keirnan makes going forward, he can do so with the knowledge that he’ll always have a fan base to fall back on. 

I had a lot of fun talking to Keirnan, and his success at taking control of his own career destiny was inspiring. You can watch our full conversation in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, go here.

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Quick hits

I find it pretty silly that social media influencers feel conflicted about doing sponsorships on behalf of movie studios. SAG-AFTRA is doing nothing to improve the pay or working conditions of those influencers, so they're not "scabs" for doing work that's completely unrelated to acting, just as the janitors who continue to clean the studio offices aren't scabs for showing up to work. [NYT]

A great profile of a Goldman Sachs banker who leveraged her home design hobby and successful Instagram account to land a reality TV show. [Insider]

Restaurant owners are growing increasingly frustrated by unethical social media influencers who don't adhere to agreed-upon terms. [NYT]

YouTube is quietly becoming a subscription behemoth. It now has over 80 million subscribers to YouTube Premium. [Hollywood Reporter]

35% of The Guardian's revenue comes from outside the UK. [Nieman Lab]

There's a Google employee who's thrown hundreds of successful events but hasn't made a dime in profit from them because his work visa won't allow it. [Insider]

A TikTok streamer makes $7,000 per day by giving paying members of her audience the ability to control her movements in real time. [NYT]

"It is increasingly rare for writers to be on set. As in manufacturing, the job of making television shows is being broken down into more discrete tasks." [NYT]

One of The New York Times's smartest moves it made in the last decade was the decision to diversify beyond hard news into verticals like games, sports, recipes, and product reviews. Has WashPo made a similar investment in non-news niches? I don't think so; and that's probably why it's struggling in a post-Trump world. [NYT]

ICYMI: How Roca News grew to 1.1 million Instagram subscribers

Do you live in the Washington, DC area?

About once a month I make a reservation at a local restaurant and invite five other media operators to join me. These dinners don’t cost anything to attend — you just have to pay for your own food/drinks. The gatherings have been incredible so far, and I look forward to them each month.

Want to be invited to a future dinner? Reach out to me and I’ll add you to my spreadsheet. You can find my contact info over here.