> Print journalism is interesting in the same way college teaching jobs are interesting: a great deal of the work is done by an underclass of marginally employed people (freelancers with no contract in journalism, adjuncts with no tenure in academia). The "fully employed" level (staff reporter, tenured professor) is extraordinarily difficult to obtain.

This is no different to becoming an actor, a novelist, a rapper or "making it" in any profession that is a tournament game. Perhaps there was a time when journalism was not a tournament game, but with the decreasing importance of local distributions and the aggregating effects of the internet, it is one now.