A letter posted on Jim Romenesko's fine media news blog explains why a newspaper reporter decided to jump from journalism to PR.

It's not pretty.

Over my 17 years in newspapers, I changed papers or chains four times and I'd say each move was due to the company making changes due to economics. My first paper folded. My second paper had a newsroom revolt after the third publisher in two years started demanding more unpaid hours from the staff. My third stop had a series of layoffs. In my fourth stop, I was laid off even though that same week I won a national award (a first for the paper).

The writer, Charles Bingham, goes on to describe his online search for a job within journalism:

For example, I found a couple of jobs in northern California that wanted someone with a degree and experience, and then only pay $15,000-$20,000 a year. Let me do the math, $15,000 a year works out to $7.21 an hour. The state of California has a minimum wage of $6.75, and the city of San Francisco (within 100 miles of these jobs) has a city minimum wage of $8.50. For this we went to college? The fry guy makes more money.

And here's his summation, which is pretty ominous.

I miss journalism, but the time came to move on. For the most part I didn't mind the low wages because I was doing something I loved, but nowadays there's no corporate loyalty and the suits don't respect the tradeoff made by many journalists to be in the field. As much as I love the job, I don't know that I can recommend it to anyone these days. I worry that the low wages, shrinking pages and corporate suits are scaring away too many of the brightest stars in journalism and in a few years I seriously worry there will be much worth reading in newspapers. I already know I'm getting most of my news off the Web.

Personally, when I left journalism for PR, my colleagues half-joked that I was going to "The Dark Side," which is how we'd always described the profession of public relations in the newsroom.

I wonder what they'd say today?