Newspaper Employment Fell Much Faster Than It Rose

An NPR colleague pointed out the following chart to me from the BusinessInsider.com. It's called, somewhat hyperbolically, "The End of Newspapers."

As a former newspaper reporter, I resemble this chart, at least part of it. I was hired to my first newspaper job in 1981 at about the time the industry was enjoying a growth spurt, according to the chart.

I exited the industry earlier this year amid an ongoing nosedive in newspaper employment.

What's really fascinating about this chart is how much more quickly the fall of the newspaper industry was than its rise. It took the industry about 40 years from the late 1940s to the late 1980s to go from about 270,000 workers to peak slightly above 450,000. But it only took half the time to decline to the late 1940s level. Wow. That's a lot of "creative destruction" to use economist Joseph Schumpeter's famous term.