With the public increasingly abandoning the left-wing propaganda rags known as “newspapers” and using the internet for their news instead, the “derived demand” for “journalists” (derived from the consumer demand for newspapers) has fallen off a cliff. It reminds me a lot of the fate of all those legions of communist propagandists after the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s. Even Barbara Eherenreich, co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America, hater of all private-sector employers, and darling of the university lecture circuit, recognizes this. The June 14 NY Times excerpted part of her commencement speech at the University of California-Berkeley graduate school of journalism where she told the graduates that “You have abundant skills and talents; it’s just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them.”
Exactly. That’s the great virtue of the free market. Universities will continue to do their best to con students into majoring in dying fields like newspaper journalism, but market reality will guide the next generation of students in more productive directions — ones that consumers actually value.
