The media world is flatter with many more outlets and entry points.
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(In this JobsPage series, I describe seven emerging job trends and strategies for using them to your advantage. This is Part 2.)

Things used to be so simple for journalists as they pursued their careers.

For television journalists, you could follow your progress by the number of your market. You started way down the list, climbed several dozen places each time, wound up in a top 10 market and then reached for the networks at the top of the mountain.

Newspaper journalists followed the same kind of ladder, paying attention to circulation numbers from small to medium to large, and then landing someplace like the New York Times. I have interviewed many journalists who had just that plan and, for a long time, I helped them do that.

Then, the Mt. Olympus model broke.

The once-mountainous metros are no longer so tall and mighty. Their newsrooms are much smaller. They have lost their swagger. Some of the safer bets are lower peaks. And people everywhere are building new outlets that didn’t exist before. Although a big newspaper makes a lot of noise when it collapses, the little news outlets that spring up around it — or that undermined it — go largely unnoticed.

There are more places putting out news than ever before — and it is easy for anyone to start something. The barriers to entry have been shattered.

You might want to read Thomas Freidman’s book, “The Word is Flat.”

Strategies

• With so many new, small entry points opening up — and the ability to make our own starts, don’t wait. Get started now with something and be ready to move up as opportunities present themselves.
  
• Avoid long-term plans that limit you to one or two final destinations. Keep options open and develop content specialties that work on many platforms.
  
• Be alert to moves that may seem lateral or sideways but that really advance you into new channels.
  
• Like never before, journalists or small teams of journalists, technologists and business specialists have a chance to create their own media companies.
  
• Collaboration, not competition, is the way to succeed in a flatter job market.

7 job trends in this JobsPage series

1. 40/40 is over. Forty years with the same employer will be highly unusual and the 40-hour workweek with set daily hours will be increasingly rare.
2. The job market has a new topography. 
3. The number of career paths and players available to you has grown — and grown more complicated.
4. Journalists must become entrepreneurial. Don’t expect someone else to take care of you.
5. Boomers will retire in huge numbers, though the 2008 market meltdown has smoothed out the impact of that by keeping some of them in the job market.
6. Recruiting pipelines are gone forever.
7. You need to have a brand.