In 2006, newspapers took in $49.5 billion in advertising.   In 2008, it was about $38 billion, a 23% decline.

After losing 42% of their value between 2005 and the end of 2007, publicly traded newspaper stocks lost 83% of their remaining value during 2008.

Most surveys show that 13,000+ U.S. newspaper jobs vanished in 2008.

In 2007, 70% of college Communication and Journalism majors had jobs six months after graduation.  In 2008, 60% did.

No doubt about it, the print journalism profession as we’ve known it is fading fast, and its future is as hazy as the crystal ball of a boardwalk fortune teller.

So why put stock in university students who, in these uncertain times, choose to major in Journalism?—as opposed to, say, the point of view expressed in Sarah Lacy’s smug, self-congratulatory April 09 TechCrunch story that disses journalism schools and anyone majoring in journalism these days.

Here’s why we ought to be bullish on Journalism majors:

1.  They’re optimists.  Feeling good about the future is the first step toward making it so.

2.  They’re self-reliant.  They realize there’s no ready-made career track waiting for them at the end of the diploma.  Their career will be one they carve out for themselves.

3.  They’re creative.  They’re putting themselves in a position where they have no choice but to be creative.  Some of the most creative people I know have used this strategy throughout their careers to grow and prosper.

4.  They’re following their fear.  Garrison Keillor, the writer and radio host, once told me that he built his career by “doing the thing that scared him most.”  Majoring in Journalism is a bold move in the face of a fearsome job market.  On the other side of your fear is potential you cannot discover until you do the thing that scares you.

5.  They’re entrepreneurial.   An entrepreneur sees opportunity where others do not.  Something in these Journalism majors relishes the wave of negative news coming from the marketplace, because it means they can position themselves at the bottom of the market to ride it up.

Educators at the University level, many of them celebrated veterans of old school journalism, share their students’ appetite for the unknown:

Kevin Klose, Dean of the University of Maryland Journalism School, admits he doesn’t know where people will get their news in coming years. “It’s like the early days of radio,” he says. “There was a tremendous amount of feverish invention, trial and error that went on in the 1920s and 1930s.  The outlets or platforms are unclear now — they’re being invented.”

Klose describes himself as a “participant in an ongoing experiment” to find formats for independent journalism.

Geneva Overholser, a Pulitizer Prize-winning editor and journalist, who today is director of the School of Journalism at USC, says, “We seem to feel the only way we can work is to work the way we’ve always done it.  That’s just not true. We will ride these yearnings for the past right down the tube.”   She sees her work as an exploration that will lead to “a reinvention of journalism that is richer and better than the old.”

Raymond Roker, founder and publisher of URB, a print and online publication dedicated to hip-hop and urban culture, believes that the calling of journalism is the one constant in a changing business environment.  “The allure,” he tweeted in a 137-character response to my question, “is wht it’s always bn–regardless of the dramatic changes in the economy of media–to develop, explore & lead the conversation.”

Roker tweet #2:  “The quality of our journalism, in whatever form it takes in a post-print world, will remain a barometer of how informed we are as a society.”

Any brand would be wise to include journalism majors in its conversations about What’s Next and Whom to Hire.  There are lot of reasons why these students, in particular, will be productive players in the changing game.