This just in from a young photo editor:

If I were you I would strongly discourage your students from going into photojournalism and/or photo editing.

So I was chatting with my current boss last week—I work at Time Magazine, mind you—and he told me my job was a “dead end”.  The last magazine I worked at closed down and we were all laid off.  And TIME is going to have layoffs in December.

Both my current boss and my last boss have told me to pursue other careers.  You can read a note to me from my former boss below if you like.  I get paid $17 an hour and get no benefits.  I imagine my next job will be similar if not worse.

And that’s just speaking of editing, the more lucrative and stable of the two sectors.  I know a wonderful, middle-aged photographer whose classic B+W book on post-Soviet Eastern Europe places him, I think, in the top rank of the world’s documentary photographers.  His day job is as a guard at the Met.  He’s the guy who tells you not to take pictures.  He lives in a crummy part of Brooklyn with two roommates, one of whom is half his age.

And here’s that note from his former boss:

At this point, I’d say if there were anything else you were capable of doing, I’d advise doing that.

Salaries and opportunities in photojournalism are collapsing, and things are still getting worse.

I’ve had a couple of decent freelance gigs, but it’s been 11 months and I have yet to find anything, and any company it would be appropriate for me to work for is still shedding jobs (Times, Time Inc, Forbes, Fortune…).

I sincerely believe that, in this industry, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better and things may never be the same again. Budgets are gone and people are re-thinking their relationship to photography.

Video seems like a growth industry, but I’ve been looking there, too, and it’s highly competitive and the budgets are very meager.

I’m looking outside the editorial world, too. I’m not sure what’s going to happen…