The number of people in the NY media establishment getting paid a reasonable wage to write stuff that people aren't reading is a few orders of magnitude smaller than it was even five years ago, and in another five years it will be zero.
Uh no. While revenues and thus hiring have certainly dropped, it is by no means on a few orders of magnitude. I'd be surprised if it were even on a single order of magnitude. Even the newspaper I worked at that is in much more dire straights compared to 10 years ago is about a third its size.
Besides new online outlets, legacy companies are still chugging along. Starting wage for a reporter at the New York Times is around $70K last I heard (too lazy to look up the union site)
I think you misread my comment. I wasn't saying that the entire NY media establishment is approaching zero employees. I was strictly speaking of the classic "guy who gets paid to write stuff that nobody reads because it's good for the community/country/brand/whatever, while people on some other beat bring in the eyeballs and pay the bills." That's the population that's shrinking really fast.