Again, I’m open to being corrected if I misread, but I don’t see anything in this article supporting a flight from journalism to PR except for the comparison of the median salaries.
Natalie Caula Hauff, one of the journalists cited, says on her LI page that she works in PR. https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-caula-hauff-243b3a10/
I would qualify any job that "raises awareness" about something as a PR job, as in the case of the reporter who now raises awareness about the Shoah. Reasonable people can disagree about how to define PR. If you're dealing with external communications, how to raise awareness with the public, that is often PR, even if you work in-house rather than for an agency.
In the case of Ryan Kelly, the photographer, he did not exit to PR. Newsweek says he got a digital marketing job in a Brewery. Which for a photographer probably makes more sense.
http://www.newsweek.com/pulitzer-prize-ryan-kelly-charlottes...
Or is this another 'all news is fake' talking point?
"There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press"! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
We're definitely living that. One of the great lessons of 2016 for me was how much power is held by those who set the editorial policy of the most-read websites. The people who own the press...
For what it's worth, looking at those catchy quotes from the past tells us how we got to today and why we are in the place we are. It's a very American conceit to dismiss the past as irrelevant.