Controversial Michael Wolff isn't being controversial when he declares this: Every magazine is dead or will soon be. Here are his observations in Mediaite.
That format, popular in the 20th century, can't complete with native digital fare like the Drudge Report.
Meanwhile, of course, magazine journalists keep losing their jobs. Wolff sort of portrays them as a lost generation. They still want to have their say so they are doing that, without compensation, on social media.
Those who do land other kinds of work usually find the adjustment brutal.
In "Disrupted," Dan Lyons recounts how, around age 50, he got the boot at Newsweek.
For the medical insurance for his young family (as well as the salary, of course), he grabbed a public relations kind of role at a startup. He couldn't or wouldn't wrap his head around it. Next he moved on to Gawker, which is, as we know, no longer in existence. And Gawker 2.0 can't seem to get off the ground.
When displaced editorial types contact me about transitioning into another career path, I recommend this: Be totally open. Broken down into skill sets, that background can be leveraged for myriad full-time positions, contract assignments, and side hustles.
This isn't new.
In the 1970s, when the academic market for humanities professors collapsed, we doctoral students had to also create skill inventories. Eventually, many of us found career paths in corporate executive communications, management consulting, and government.
That only happened, though, after we let go of our former identities in academia. Actually, doors swung open when we finally wised up and reconfigured our resumes to position and package ourselves as the professionals in something else (anything else that paid) we know we needed to become.
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