Journalists are on the move in America – and creating a new vitality

It caused a stir when the lauded statistician Nate Silver recently announced he was leaving the New York Times to join sports network ESPN, but it was not a total surprise. His political blog FiveThirtyEight.com arrived at the Times as a franchise and it left as such. In the intervening two years he introduced political punditry to the concept that data-driven analysis might beat journalistic gut.

Mark Thompson, the former BBC director general who is now the chief executive of the NYT, made the comment that no single journalist is bigger than the organisation. This might be true but a very unusual thing is happening in America. Journalists are being hired: big-name reporters and columnists are moving for very significant amounts of money to a wide variety of new and surprising places. One of the happiest hunting grounds for hires has been Thompson's paper. In recent weeks it has lost figures ranging from media reporter Brian Stelter to Hugo Lindgren, editor of its Sunday magazine. Add to that staff who took generous redundancy payments earlier in the year, and the Times's grand Renzo Piano HQ is even more spacious and quieter than before.

Journalists have of course sniffed for more signs of trouble at t' paper mill. Yet the feeling of unease is offset by the sense of a broader sea change which brings benefits as well as loss. This is not just the Times and it is not a crisis. Money is flowing towards news publishers from many directions. Not much of it is converting into profit, granted, but the new business models are directing millions into underwriting scribes. Venture capitalist dollars go into companies such as Buzzfeed, entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar are putting new wealth into old institutions like the Washington Post and fresh ventures as yet unnamed and unformed. Money is arriving in foreign currencies, pounds from the Mail or Guardian, riyals from al-Jazeera. It is sloshing into journalism finally and surprisingly from Silicon Valley, where Yahoo has started hiring again.

At local and regional level, though, the picture continues to be bleak. Closures will continue. And the health and wealth of journalism is following that of the finance and sports industries into the formulation of a superstar economy. Journalism is becoming a 1% economy.

We have intellectualised the idea of media fragmentation for quite some time, so should not be entirely surprised when it actually starts to happen. The power of money in sports has shifted from the league, to the teams and now to the players. What this means for the New York Times and other publishers (including the Guardian, which recently lost its NSA scoop-getter Glenn Greenwald to the mysterious Omidyar start-up), is that there is no longer a defined final destination for talented journalists. The New York Times is surprised to find itself a stepping stone.

But in a world where social platforms allow journalists to form their own followings, create their own cultures and cults and be far more in control of their own work, the publishing brand becomes a less significant factor. Smart journalists like the Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher, who created and runs the well respected technology blog All Things D, are using their time in bigger institutions to transport their own franchises elsewhere, for larger sums and greater equity.

News organisations, which seemed unlikely participants in the superstar economy, are now having to up their game when it comes to how that talent is developed, managed and maintained.

The Times might be regretting having a building with three large, separate exits, but the sudden movement of capital and labour around the higher echelons of journalism is a sign of vitality not decrepitude. And no one expected that.