When the Wisconsin Newspaper Association announced its annual Better Newspaper Contest winners last week, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. On one hand, I located numerous former students who received honors for their work in newsrooms of all sizes across the state. On the other hand, I found myself in a crisis of confidence, wondering how many of them would make next year’s list.

At the core of this conundrum was one of the best students I’d ever taught, who racked up two fistfuls of awards, grabbing everything from first place to honorable mentions across a swath of writing and visual categories. It was an achievement she is unlikely to duplicate, as she left her full-time newspaper gig in favor of a position with a marketing firm. She noted an intent to continue freelancing, which is great for her and helpful to the paper. However, her decision to go elsewhere had me once again pondering the future of journalism.

She was one of the toughest and smartest kids I’d taught in my time at UWO. She had the ability to tell feature stories with a deft touch of narrative and dig deep into investigative pieces that required significant persistence. She also had the “nosy gene,” which tends to separate the good ones from the great ones in journalism.

She paired her passion as a student athlete with her interest in journalism to find important stories that no one else was telling. She did an amazing in-depth piece on the gender inequity present in protective gear for NCAA athletes and also used open-records requests to answer the question of why an extremely successful coach suddenly resigned for a job driving for Domino’s pizza. Upon graduation, she took a sports journalism gig out of state, before returning to her hometown to help improve her local paper.

This pairing seemed ideal, as she could speak the language of the athletes she covered while also knowing the bigger issues the city grappled with on a daily basis. She had an eye for detail, an ear for gossip and the skills to tell readers important stories in a way they could understand and appreciate them.

When she announced she’d be leaving the paper after two years, I was somewhat stunned.

What she revealed to me was exactly what I had feared: The paper was undergoing a “series of transformations,” which basically means things are getting worse, managers are demanding more for less and the publication’s corporate overlords were abdicating any sense of responsibility they had toward quality journalism. Thus, she did what we had trained her to do at UWO, taking her “transferable skills” to a place that valued them and was willing to treat her better.

The idea that news outlets in general, and newspapers in particular, are going down the drain is not a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention to the industry for the last 30 years. With corporate mergers, conglomerate consolidations and hedge-fund asset-stripping of media outlets, it’s often a miracle that these institutions still exist at all.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that more and more places in the United States now have either no credible local media outlets in the area, or have extremely weak local media outlets that can’t provide quality content. These scholars have deemed these places “news deserts” and “ghost newspapers,” and the numbers are scary. More than 200 counties in the country have no newspaper while an additional 1,500 counties have only one local newspaper, which is usually a weekly.

It’s also no secret that news jobs tend to have a lot of problems associated with them. The pay is terrible, the hours are worse and the public harassment is becoming almost unmanageable. Reporting gigs for entry-level and early career reporters can pay somewhere between $16 and $21 per hour, depending on the location and size of the publication, and that’s assuming a standard 40-hour work week. (If you’ve ever worked in a newsroom, feel free to laugh at that concept…)

A study by the Poynter Institute found that more than half of the journalists surveyed in 2024 had experienced a level of burnout so bad, they considered leaving the field altogether.  It also found that about three-fourths of the journalists did not have access to adequate mental health support to deal with the crushing weight of constantly being on the look out for news and the pile unpaid overtime they worked.

And don’t even get me started on the abuse and violence they have to endure…

So, the question becomes, “What makes this particular resignation worth discussing?”

The underlying concerns for me are two-fold:

First, it’s not that I haven’t had former colleagues or former students leave news to go into another field. I’m also not offended by their decision to ply their skills in public relations, advertising, marketing and promotions. This isn’t about “going to the dark side” of the field, which is a total cheap shot at people who are trying to put their talents to use.

What is concerning is the speed at which they are making these moves away from news. The students I taught during the first third of my career who went into news tended to stay there for an appreciable time period. They might bounce from reporter to editor or from one news outlet to another, but they tended to hang around until they either found a “forever job” or they found they had advanced as far as they could or wanted to in news. At that point, they either settled in or moved out, but it wasn’t until their mid-30s or even early 40s before that came to pass.

This student’s move is more indicative of what I’ve seen in the current third of my career, with many really good newsies deciding that the news business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and leaving it behind much sooner.

One student who spent a number of years with me at the student newspaper was a dogged investigative journalist. It once took him 18 months worth of legal support from the Student Press Law Center, coupled with a court case that was one step away from the state’s Supreme Court, to break loose open records that explained why a professor was escorted out of his class at the beginning of the term and not heard from again for almost six months.

The kid ended up taking a job at a small local newspaper outside of Milwaukee and consistently bloodying the nose of the state’s largest newspaper when it came to important coverage in his zone. A little more than three years after taking that job, he left to become a marketing specialist at a private university.

Another student of mine ran the Advance-Titan newsroom for almost two years, overseeing some of our most important and award-winning coverage. She landed a job at a respectable newspaper in the state, serving as a reporter and then the entertainment editor, where she continued the trend of putting out great content. Again, about three years into the gig, she left and took a job as a marketing content specialist. She now works for another company as an inbound marketing strategist.

These are just a few of the students I’ve seen over the past decade who had news in their blood, but left the field nonetheless for greener pastures. These weren’t kids who couldn’t hack it as reporters and had to limp away to an “easier” media gig. If all things were equal, they easily could have built extensive careers in news, providing us with outstanding journalism that helped us understand the world around us. Unfortunately, all things weren’t equal and the only way for them to survive was to give up on the news industry.

This leads to the second concern: The loss of quality news workers and the content they could have created for us. Don’t get me wrong, I remain ridiculously proud of my former students and the good work they do as media professionals. I also don’t begrudge them the desire to out-earn the kid running the hostess stand at Olive Garden. What worries me is the way in which newsrooms have become the slums of the media ecosystem and how that affects what we get as citizens.

Most of what the UNC folks look at has to do with journalism operations that have either been killed off or had their resources stripped to the bone. What has happened here is that the reporters who were once able to weather the onslaught of lousy pay, long hours and difficult tasks are just calling it a day. They either feel they can’t do the work that they want to do, thus making news unappealing, or they feel there isn’t a point to banging their heads into the wall as they attempt to do quality journalism.

They’re figuring out that once college is over, it’s no longer cool to be broke, eat dinner out of a vending machine every night and grind out piece after piece after piece for a disinterested audience. They wanted a decent life in return for the six-figures worth of tuition they ponied up and discovered it’s not in a newsroom that smells of old newsprint and burnt coffee. Their decision not to suffer for their art has limited what we will learn as the audience for their work.

I know that in the small-town newspapers I get in my area, I’m not seeing a lot of deep dives on what the city council is doing or how tariffs are impacting local farmers. I can’t remember the last time I saw a story based on an open-records request or a decent discussion of a ballot initiative. The content would barely be good enough to get through a sophomore reporting class.

When I would pick up a copy of the Omro Herald at the gas station each week, I’d see about 75% of the content written by one fresh-faced kid who apparently never heard of active voice or bothered to learn where the return key was on his keyboard. The stories usually ended up being week-old meeting pieces that lacked a “so what” or “now what” and any weird crime news that happened in the area. The remainder of the paper had local ads, hyperbolic game coverage of the local high school’s sports and a column from a guy who was older than dirt who would just rant about liberals.

I’m sure that was the best that the Herald could get in terms of staff, but that’s really the point. With more and more people taking the skills we give them in media to places that pay better and treat them better, what’s left are the people who either lack the skills or talent to make news valuable to a given audience. I also know that what is happening to these smaller papers is just the canary in the coal mine for news outlets, and that medium and large media operations are likely to see similar losses sooner rather than later.

As that continues to spiral toward its natural conclusion, we’re all going to be worse off.