Though there are economic strains on the journalism industry, Paul Myners, chairman of Guardian Media Group, remarked that journalists are not driven out of the industry, but instead are working on other mediums, such as blogs, radio, and local television, which reinforces a previous statement by Mediashift.

"The type of people doing work which might broadly be described as journalistic, may not have necessarily decreased to the extent of the proportion who are working in the newspaper industry," said Myner.  "Someone who was previously described as a journalist who sat at a typewriter, now podcasts, now speaks to video, now blogs online. It is a more challenging and appealing job.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said otherwise: "The plight of staff in the newspaper industry should not be overshadowed by increased new media opportunities for journalists."

He argued that staff "are spread ever more thinly across more media" and that there are "a lack of resources and understaffing." with a smaller number of journalists trying to deliver more content in more platforms.

Concurrently, the U.S. has suffered the biggest staff drop this year. Our colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors has captured the hard times through images here and here.

However, Myners noted that in the last 12 months, the Guardian Media Group appointed 60 new journalists to its national titles in order to further their digital content, since their readership is moving online. According to Myners, more people read the Guardian's US website than read the print versions in the UK, Guardian.co.uk  was the most popular UK newspaper website in February with 19,519,923 unique users, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

"We have gone from being a provincial newspaper... to an international, liberal voice on the web," he said.

He added that "the proportion of journalists at the Observer and Guardian covering international news has increased."

But Myners cautioned that the declining economy will lead to more regional newspaper mergers and more free sheets, which does not rule out the Manchester Evening News from being completely free in the city center yet being sold on the outskirts.

"It is an economic model which accurately reflects the cost of distribution," Myners said.

However, the freesheet model does not seem to be doing significantly better than traditional newspapers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk ,Press Gazette