Now that we get Fortune magazine in the household, I'm been trying to keep abreast of the market trends and such with that sort of superficial knowledge that say, Time magazine might shed on the Irsaeli-Palestinian conflict. Anyway, what have I discovered? That the end is near. If tech jobs will disappear by 20% in the year 2007, what does that say about my job as a freelance copyeditor?

I knew, while still working in the industry, that words were a dying breed. STM (science-technical-medical) publishing companies cared less and less about grammar and spelling and wanted us to focus more on verifying code (SGML, HTML, etc) so that their authors' articles could go up on their journal web sites as quickly as possible. At the time some publishers were considering publishing a newly accepted article straight from the author's disk, spelling errors and all. That or which, indeed.

In fact, I expect my job (which is more a code verifier than copyeditor) to go to India in a few years. It's been going for the last five. I've watched my last company lose jobs to India well before it was hip. However, I figured that I could milk the freelancing business for a few years and do some things I've always dreamt of (like keeping this self-important blog). This year I've seen my first round of pay cuts--some copyediting jobs I've done for the past few years will now pay less. Although it hasn't hit me in the wallet yet, if all the companies I freelance for follow suit, I don't know if I can work much faster to absorb the difference. I mean "whether," not "if."

So what am I to do? Go back to the working world, if the jobs aren't gone already? Take my piddly HTML experience I've gained running my own journal and get laughed at of every interview I have the luck to get? Go back to school and get an information systems degree so that my job as a programmer, web designer, or IT professional can get outsourced? What will be our new economy? Fortune didn't tell me that, dammit.