'Journalism isn't going away': Columbia Dean

Nicholas Lemann is Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, so one could be forgiven for considering his opinion self-interested.

However, in a substantive interview with Germany's Spiegel magazine, Lemann shows that he's also an accomplished journalist. The contributor to the New Yorker and working journalist for the likes of the Atlantic, Washington Monthly and the Washington Post, Lemann demonstrates that he tempers optimism and a love of the trade with skepticism and a built-in BS detector.

"From the standpoint of a student who wants to be a full-time employed reporter and find an entry-level job, things aren't so bad," he comments.

Read the whole interview here -- http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,657957,00.html

Elsewhere, Bill Steigerwald in The American Conservative magazine writes, "despite all the headlines and hysteria, exactly 10 of the country's 1,437 daily newspapers have stopped publishing since 2007.

"To put the newspaper industry's losses in perspective [down some 47,000 last year], in September alone, the construction industry shed 64,000 jobs."