Journalism students: there are plenty of jobs for you. Maybe

Could it possibly be true that there are plenty of journalism jobs to go around?

I’d understand if you dismissed that question out of hand. Having been told just how tough it is to get into journalism – tougher than ever what with the recession and the slump in advertising – how could it be easy to get a job?

Actually, I’m not saying it will be easy. It won’t. But that’s not the same as the doom-mongers’ assertion that there are far too many students studying journalism.

I’ve tried to calculate the number of journalism jobs available each year for new recruits, and the numbers of journalism graduates there are, to see what the supply-demand equation looks like.

It’s by no means straightforward.

• No-one seems to keep figures of how many jobs are available each year.
• Even the numbers studying journalism are contested.
• It’s not even possible to say with complete confidence how many journalists there are in total.

So I’ve done my best. You can see my figures, and how I arrived at them, by reading on here.