Look who’s hiring journalists at ONA 2009

By Zachary M. Seward @zseward Oct. 2, 2009, 9 a.m.

As the digerati arrived in San Francisco yesterday for the Online News Association’s annual conference, I stopped by the job fair to see who was looking for recruits in this awful journalism job market. Oh, there were some old standbys — among them, Gannett Co. and The New York Times — but the busiest and most-striking tables were staffed by recruiters you wouldn’t have expected to see at a journalism conference just a few years ago…

AOL is betting its future on niche content and has hired 2,000 writers (500 full-timers and 1,500 freelancers) to pursue that strategy on sites like Daily Finance and Politics Daily. The company also owns Patch, a network of hyperlocal news sites in New Jersey and Connecticut.

Yahoo News is the most popular news site on the Internet, with more than 43 million unique visitors in August, according to Nielsen Online.

POSTED Oct. 2, 2009, 9 a.m.

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