I beg to differ. I know journalists. The local presses are dying. That means work for them is being replaced by Patch or other online pubs which take unpaid or low-paid work.

That leads to the real analogy.

The future of computing is programming open source for free and hoping someone hires you for a real job, even though the whole world is doing the same thing.

That’s kind of what’s going on for journalists, unless you are highly credentialled and scrappy.

I’m a scrappy, clever programmer who is exhausting himself learning 4 languages and absorbing as much as he can about machine learning and data science after hours, and I feel severely threatened — and I have a ton of savings to help buy me time to learn what I need to. Even still!

Most Americans don’t.

Look at our debt load numbers, and you’ll see your dream that anyone can succeed with grit and being clever is a self-congratulatory pat on the back for those with good jobs, but not much more.