The pool of working media professionals continues to shrink wth the loss of 1,300 newsroom jobs in 2013, reports the American Society of News Editors.

Rick Edmonds at Poynter, writes:

That was better than the 2,600 net job loss in 2012 but brings total newsroom employment at newspaper organizations to roughly 36,700, a decline of 3.2 percent from the 38,000 counted in last year's census.

Newsroom employment has fallen 33 percent from a pre-recession peak of 55,000 in 2006 and is down 35 percent from its all-time high of 56,900 in 1989.

Newspaper industry lost another 1,300 full-time editorial professionals in 2013 | Poynter.

The numbers do not count journalism jobs at "digital-only sites." Edmonds says that Pew Research estimates a total of 5,000 such jobs.  Any increase or decrease in those jobs would be a small number compared with all newsroom jobs: 36,700.

 Foremski's Take: Media disruption still continues. And the move to mobile will trigger another large round of layoffs because mobile ad revenues are one-tenth of desktop, which was one-tenth of print ads.

We still do not have a stable media business model that can support newsroom professionals. The longer it takes, the more professionals we lose, and the more we lose in knowledge of best practices and ethics.

Society will pay a high cost for not having a viable media business model because it will enable special interest groups to promote agendas through the media that will profit a minority at the expense of the majority.

People won't pay to read the news they should be reading but special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want them to read. (Native advertising is a good example.)