In Australia and beyond, journalism is reportedly an industry in crisis, a crisis exacerbated by COVID-19. However, the evidence revealing the crisis is often anecdotal or limited in scope. In this unprecedented longitudinal research, we draw on data from the Australian journalism jobs market from January 2012 until March 2020. Using Data Science and Machine Learning techniques, we analyse two distinct data sets: job advertisements (ads) data comprising 3698 journalist job ads from a corpus of over 8 million Australian job ads; and official employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Having matched and analysed both sources, we address both the demand for and supply of journalists in Australia over this critical period. The data show that the crisis is real, but there are also surprises. Counter-intuitively, the number of journalism job ads in Australia rose from 2012 until 2016, before falling into decline. Less surprisingly, for the entire period studied the figures reveal extreme volatility, characterised by large and erratic fluctuations. The data also clearly show that COVID-19 has significantly worsened the crisis. We then tease out more granular findings, including: that there are now more women than men journalists in Australia, but that gender inequity is worsening, with women journalists getting younger and worse-paid just as men journalists are, on average, getting older and better-paid; that, despite the crisis besetting the industry, the demand for journalism skills has increased; and that, perhaps concerningly, the skills sought by journalism job ads increasingly include ‘social media’ and ‘generalist communications’ skills.

据报道，在澳大利亚及其他地区，新闻业正处于危机之中，COVID-19加剧了这一危机。但是，揭示危机的证据通常是轶事或范围有限。在这项史无前例的纵向研究中，我们利用了2012年1月至2020年3月澳大利亚新闻业就业市场的数据。我们使用数据科学和机器学习技术，分析了两个截然不同的数据集：包括3698个新闻工作者的招聘广告的招聘广告（ads）数据。超过800万个澳大利亚招聘广告的语料库；以及来自澳大利亚统计局的官方就业数据。在对两个来源进行了匹配和分析之后，我们在此关键时期解决了澳大利亚新闻工作者的供求关系。数据显示危机是真实的，但也有意外。违反直觉，从2012年到2016年，澳大利亚的新闻职业广告数量有所增加，然后又下降了。毫不奇怪，在整个研究期间，这些数字显示出极大的波动性，其特征是波动大且不稳定。数据还清楚地表明，COVID-19已严重恶化了危机。然后，我们从更细致的调查结果中得出结论，其中包括：澳大利亚现在的女性人数多于男性新闻工作者，但性别不平等现象正在加剧，女性新闻工作者的年龄越来越小，薪水也越来越低，而男性新闻工作者的平均年龄却越来越大，高薪 尽管危机困扰着整个行业，但对新闻技能的需求却在增加；而且，也许令人担忧的是，新闻工作广告所寻求的技能越来越多地包括“社交媒体”和“平民通讯”技能。