Why the US PR industry is sucking up Pulitzer winners

PR jobs have increased 13 per cent in the past decade. Image: Thinkstock.

The number of news reporters in the Washington, D.C., area nearly doubled over the last decade, from 1,450 to 2,760. In Los Angeles it grew by 20 per cent.

In New York City, it basically stayed flat. Outside of those cities, in that same time-frame, one out of every four reporting jobs vanished - 12,000 jobs in total, according to the Labor Department.

Meanwhile, in the parts of the country that aren't Washington or New York or L.A., nearly 20,000 new jobs sprung up in public relations, a 13 percent increase.

These are signs of the collapse of the business model for regional news outlets and of the forces pulling on journalists outside a few insulated cities. They are the reasons why, when it came to light this week that two new winners of the Pulitzer Prize had left their medium-sized newspapers for careers in PR, no one should have been surprised.

One of them, Rob Kuznia of the (Torrence, Calif.) Daily Breeze, made his move because he was struggling to make ends meet on a reporter's salary while paying Southern California rent. The other, Natalie Caula Hauff from the The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., wanted a job more conducive to starting a family. (She still freelances for the paper, even though she works in county government now.) Anyone who has worked even a little while in a newsroom knows many, many others who have made similar decisions.

If you want a reporting job today, your best bet is to move to D.C., L.A. or New York. They were home to almost one in every five reporting jobs in 2014, up from one in eight in 2004. Anywhere else, your journalistic job options are dwindling. If you hold on to one, your wages probably aren't keeping pace with inflation. But public relations is growing, and the pay there is too.

So if you want to keep living and working in, say, Portland, the incentives are pushing hard for you to make a jump. Of the four reporters who won the public service Pulitzer for the Oregonian in 2001, two have left journalism - one for a government communications job, one to teach journalism to college students. It's hard to count how many of the other reporters who were doing high-value work back then at the paper - which gave me my first job out of college, in 2000 - have also left the business.

"I've joked that every government spokesman job in Oregon is held by a former Oregonian reporter," the paper's former editor, Peter Bhatia, who is now a professor of journalism ethics at Arizona State University, told me this week. "It's not that far off."

Those who still work at regional newspapers are under heavy pressure to write more stories, to post faster to the Web, to try to build up an audience that might help fill in for years of lost print advertising revenue.

Brent Hunsberger is one of the reporters who has left the Oregonian, though he still writes a personal finance column for them once a month. He's a financial planner now. He said the decision was easy, and largely driven by economics.

"With the focus on posting as quickly and frequently as possible," he said, "and shrinking newsrooms, the type of journalism that I think is important to do was going to get harder to do, and I didn't want to fight the fight every day." Oregonian readers, he said, tell him they lament the losses at the newspaper. "They know it means they are potentially less informed."

Interactive graphic charts the increase in public relations jobs vs. the decline in reporting jobs: