Venture capitalist wants to know where biz journalists will come from

Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky, who has also done his fair share of writing in business publications, has an interesting post on his “Infectious Greed” blog.

Kedrosky wrote, “Business news is newly hot in 2006/2007. Consider that last year CNBC was the only cable news network that grew its audience significantly, with, according to MediaWeek, its prime time audience increasing by 32 percent. At the same time, in 2007 we will have Fox apparently launching its new business channel, as well as Condenast bringing out the long-awaited (ed: really?) Portfolio, a business-ish magazine.

“Of course, all of this begs one of the more bizarre questions out there: With all this growth in business journalism, where are the business journalists going to come from? As this piece points out, and as I discovered in a long-ago j-school lecture, most journalism students continue to looking sniffingly at the idea of being a business journalist. It involves, you know … numbers.”

Read more here. Obviously, Kedrosky’s knowledge of the current business journalism field seems limited. By numbers that I’ve seen, the number of business journalists in this country, which stood at between 3,000 and 4,000 in the 1980s, increased to about 11,000 by 2000 but has since been stable. With many newspapers downsizing their editorial staffs, the supply of business journalists seems to be plenty.

Kedrosky also doesn’t seem to understand that there are more universities teaching business journalism than ever before, and that number is likely to increase if this program is any indication. My impression from teaching business journalism from the past five years is that students do want to be in the field because they understand that there are jobs available.

So, I agree with him that business journalism is hot. But his “long-ago” lecture was too long ago.