Jeff Bercovici ponders the surprising job-finding success of recent journalism grads:

My guess is at least some of it is a direct result of the massive staff cutbacks just about every media organization has enacted in the past couple years. It's a corporate cliche to lay people off and euphemize it as "restructuring," but you can be sure that some of the companies that are letting go well-paid editors and writers in their 40s and 50s are quietly stocking up on fresh j-school grads whose lack of real-word experience is at least partly made up for by their effortless fluency in the ways of the web -- and their willingness to work for $35,000 a year.

Callous, no doubt, but there's a natural ebb and flow to every industry -- journalism's most recent ebb is just more violent than past shifts.

Something I've been considering lately: Journalism's new guard may also expedite the industry's necessary transformation from stodgy top-down editorial delivered through antiquated containers (newspapers, 22-minute broadcasts) to reliable information sources that contribute to and engage with the audience via multiple formats. New journalists -- unencumbered by inefficient past methods -- could energize (not "save" ... energize) the content industries.

Block out the cacophony of whines and moans and you can see something big is about to happen to journalism.

Via Editor & Publisher and Tom Oates' Twitter stream.