By JOE GRIMM
A few trends are coming together in ways that have implications for journalism job-seekers. These are five trends I saw in the past week:

• Rick Edmonds reported for Poynter Online, where I write the Ask the Recruiter column, that, in the UBS media conference, E.W. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne said, “In the longer run, we will need to add (newsroom) jobs, add content and raise (circulation) rates.” So there is a thaw out there.
• A top executive of a major metro contacted me in search of an investigative business reporter. Yahoo! also reached out for help. Remember that I have been out of newsrooms for 16 months. Hiring pipelines have not been maintained. I had leads for both of them.)
  
• One of the New York Times’ recruiters, Nancy Sharkey, took a buyout. In just a few years, the industry has lost just about everyone who recruited for a living.
• Colleen Eddy, who tends PoynterCareers, told me that the post-Thanksgiving slump she usually experiences in job postings has not been as deep as last year’s and that the total is being buoyed by some jobs and employers she hasn’t seen before.
• James Kristie, editor and associate publisher of Directors & Boards, used the occasion of Editor & Publisher’s death to declare that newspapers have basically hit bottom.

Put all those trends together and this is what you get:

The news industry will be hiring again, but it will do so without a recruiting apparatus and with new competitors for talent.

For employers, this spells trouble. For job-seekers, it can spell opportunity.

With no one to tend the gates, hiring managers cannot hire strategically, they have to hire spontaneously. Over-the-transom applications have been piling up with little attention and the slush pile is not likely to get a sort. Hiring managers will rely on the fresh material that comes in — or on calls they make to the remnants of the broken talent pipeline.

This tells us that the winners will not be people who have been quietly biding their time, nurturing relationships, but the people who strike quickly and often and who maintain contacts with the hiring managers themselves, rather than designated recruiters.

This situation is likely to be with us for some time. In fact, we are ahead of the curve. The hiring has not resumed and, in recent weeks, we have seen hundreds cut the Associated Press, Gannett, the New York Times and, quietly, McClatchy. But elective hiring is happening even now and, if Scripps’ Boehne is right, there will be more.

So, retool your strategy to send out periodic applications — don’t count on anyone keeping files. Start analyzing organizations to determine who is responsible for the departments you want to work in, and make yourself known through online and in-person contacts. I will give you one exception here and that is the case where companies have held onto corporate recruiters such as Virgil Smith at Gannett or Reginald A. Stuart at McClatchy.

These strategies can help you leapfrog those relying on the now defunct system of recruiter-based hiring.

Call me self-serving after 18 years as a recruiter, but I think the system serves companies well. It does not necessarily serve all candidates well. I had to eliminate far more candidates than I could ever pass along. But if no one is minding the door, people who previously were getting stopped by recruiters have a fresh chance to break in.