My profession is going up in flames

Reading the New York Times headlines today was definitely an interesting experience. There it was in the Media and Advertising section: "Editor Fires Parting Shot at His Chain," speaking of the Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea who got fired because he refused to make job cuts the parent company,the Tribune Company, was demanding.

This has been a startlingly growing trend in the business in the past few years, especially since circulation, readership and advertising have taken a dip and profit margins have gone from 20% to 15% or less. The thing is, a 3% profit margin is amazing, but with huge parent companies investing stock who know nothing but the concept of more, it's too much of a deficit and they've started cutting jobs to make up the loss.

The ironic thing is, the more you cut jobs, the harder it is to make lots of good content for people to read, and the less people read it, which brings advertising revenue down even further. I don't know what the solution is, but I know that large amounts of job cuts will probably come back to haunt big conglomerates in the end.

This is the field I have chosen to go into. I'm sure I'll be fine, but sometimes it's a bit daunting to see what I'm up against: lots of big companies who only know numbers and profit margins, rather than content, ruling the newsroom.