“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”

It all sounds so … uncomplicated, doesn’t it? Boozy lunches at Michael’s and evenings at Elaine’s, unlimited expense accounts, stories that took months to report and longer to write, maybe a ramshackle house in the Hamptons to complement the musty, book-clogged apartment on the Upper West Side. But above all, there was the sense that magazine writing was at the center of a vital intellectual universe, with New York as its capital, and vaunted writers and editors such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Willie Morris, Harold Hayes, Lillian Ross, Clay Felker, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Nora Ephron and the like as its reigning princes and princesses, with salaries and perks and moist-eyed acolytes to match. Not to mention scandals, sodden confessions and rumors that could be safely traded and tucked away among trusted friends, with no danger of being scattered like seed spores across cyberspace. Gossip was community-building, not community-busting.

What young Turk, as Esquire founding editor Arnold Gingrich called his up-and-coming editors (Mr. Hayes and Mr. Felker among them) in the late 1950s, wouldn’t want entree into this literary glam world? And until quite recently, landing an editorial assistant gig at Esquire or GQ or Elle, or the reporter-researcher job at The New Republic, or the two-year training program at Vanity Fair, or the (unpaid) internship at Harper’s, or the (nominally paid) internship at The Nation, or even, for the most well-connected and talented graduates, an assistant job at The New Yorker, was the ne plus ultra for the young, tweedy intelligentsia, those graduates of Yale and Vassar who had committed to memory the opening lines of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

Of course, there’s more than a little romanticization that goes into any characterization of days gone by; nonetheless, there is a discernible sense in the air that, as one young magazine editor put it, “Those kinds of jobs exist, but just not for our generation.” This editor, who is 24, continued, “It’s weird, because I feel like there are certain people I’ve met who are young and super into magazines still, which is always surprising to me, because I don’t know why anyone who wants to be involved with the media would want to turn their attention to magazines.”

THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN overnight. But it’s been especially in the past couple of years that a confluence of factors has resulted in some young people turning their backs on magazines. For one, there is the industry’s notorious (some might say sadistic) gate-keeping, which keeps out a majority of those who would deign to think of themselves as worthy of the industry’s blessing, and which also requires an aspiring magazine writer or editor to commit to working in magazines, preferably while still in college, when an internship at a blue-chip publication (nearly any magazine at Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst or Hachette Filipacchi, plus, depending on one’s interest, most political magazines, low-circulation-but-high-influence downtown fashion or art magazines, plus a smattering of others like New York, Spy, Harper’s, Newsweek, etc.) could potentially cement one’s place in the firmament. (It could also leave the less talented, or more charitably, less lucky writers and editors to languish. “I guess my disillusionment is partly just that it’s taken me this long,” one 37-year-old editor told The Observer.)

A generation that is starting to see barely legal bloggers become more prominent in six months than even the most talented contributing editors may not see this path as necessarily the most appealing, or expedient, one.

One 23-year-old political journalist told The Observer that the New Republic reporter-researcher job—famed for launching the careers of Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza, Atlantic editor James Bennet and author Hanna Rosin, among others—is no longer quite the coveted position it once was. “Part of the reason why the TNR internship isn’t as big as it used to be is that if you were a young sharpie on the make in 1990 or even 1995, there just weren’t that many places where you could get your start,” the political journalist said. “But the rise of the kind of whole bloggy progressive thing has, I think, really kicked off the careers of some people, or at least for smart liberal college students.”

Another related issue is influence—whether the kind of buzz generated by a magazine story is the kind that young writers still want—that is, attention from a world in which someone may get news not from CNN but from a Facebook posting about a story on CNN. Nothing seems to live for more than a day without commentary; the contemporary version of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound” is “if an article gets written and no one blogs it, does anyone care?”

“It’s not like if you have a big magazine byline everyone is talking about you,” said the 24-year-old magazine editor. “People don’t really talk about specific writers anymore, in any sense, unless they work for The New Yorker.”

“How do you know you’re doing a good job?” asked a 29-year-old national magazine writer. “You have some general internal metric that says, That paragraph was well written. But you come out of fact-checking and editing, and you have no idea. It’s hard to get a sort of accurate gauge on how you’re doing. You have to just take it on faith that there is a real market out there and an appreciation for what you’re doing.”

Even the old ways that a magazine writer could get some small sense of satisfaction—seeing his or her name on the cover, for example—are quietly disappearing. “That used to be a bargaining chip that we would use,” said Mr. Hirshey. “We’d say, ‘Look, I can’t give you X amount of money, but I can give you Y, and we’ll put your name on the cover.’ Some agents insisted that it be written into the contract.”

Perhaps more important, the rise of other writerly career paths has neatly coincided with the magazine industry’s contraction; just this week 111 editorial and business staffers took buyouts from Newsweek. Then again, at least it’s still around. Magazines that have folded since 2000 include Mademoiselle, George, Lingua Franca, Jane, Sassy, Life, ElleGirl, Teen People, Sports Illustrated Women, Business 2.0, Talk, Brill’s Content, Cargo, Premiere, House & Garden, Blueprint, Vibe Vixen and Lifetime. Radar folded twice and relaunched twice. Instead of accepting the industry’s turmoil as a given, then, some young writers and editors are just shrugging their shoulders and giving up on it before it gives up on them.

“There may not be a place to actually land when we’re 32,” said the 23-year-old political journalist. “We’ll still always have to jump around. Even 35-year-olds now have the jobs of a young person, in the sense that they’re there for two-to-three-year stints and don’t necessarily have longevity.”

Finally, there’s the money issue. An editorial assistant at a major magazine is unlikely to make more than $30,000 a year, whereas a successful blogger right out of college could pull in as much as $50,000—a big difference when it could mean getting out of a bedbug-infested Bushwick loft share. Of course, at the upper echelons of the industry, things are a bit different. A contract at a major national magazine can be worth upward of $5 a word; contract writers are generally paid a set yearly amount for a specific number of articles, or a particular word count. But freelance rates are generally much lower. For most established but not well-known writers, $2 per word at a major magazine is standard, though usually negotiable. So even if a fledgling magazine writer were to write one 1,500-word feature a month for a national magazine—which would in itself be a difficult feat to pull off—he or she would be pulling in $36,000 a year before taxes. That’s also assuming that none of the stories were killed or held and that everyone paid on time.

“I’m a features writer,” said Mikki Halpin, 43, a former deputy editor at Seventeen who is now a contributing editor at Glamour. “When the teen magazines started getting smaller and closing—even before they had closed—the features were the first things to get cut. I realized that even if I had a feature every month, I couldn’t make a living.”

Freelance rates have barely budged in over 20 years. “I don’t know if kids today can come to the big city and make a living,” said Marjorie Ingall, 41, a contributing editor at Self and columnist for The Forward. “I feel like it’s not sustainable to just be a small magazine person unless you get a staff job and insurance and marry a hedge-fund guy.”

Ms. Ingall recalled that in 1990, when she was an editorial assistant, she shared a one-bedroom at 26th and Madison (“then the epicenter of a bunch of SRO’s and just desolate at night”) for $600 a month. She moved to Chelsea the following year, paying $800 a month for her own one-bedroom apartment.

“The writers all lived in Manhattan,” said Gay Talese, reached by phone at his East 61st Street home office. “Tom Wolfe lived a few blocks away, on 63rd. Halberstam was on 61st. Four blocks up the street was Peter Maas, on 66th off Madison. Most of the people I knew lived in Manhattan.” In 1965, when Mr. Talese left The New York Times, he said he was making $315 a week (about $2,100 in 2007 dollars). Esquire editor Harold Hayes offered him a $15,000 a year contract to write six stories; he was on contract at Esquire for one year. His subsequent contributions were almost all excerpts from such books of his as Unto the Sons, The Kingdom and the Power, and Honor Thy Father. “Unto the Sons got eight excerpts in Esquire!” Mr. Talese said. “We were paid well, at least I was, but it would really come from books. If you could write a book, you could also do what I was doing. I was always excerpting a lot before the book was published, so you’re getting full benefit from your work.” That’s a privilege afforded few, if any, working writers today.

That being said, the young political journalist quoted above was nostalgic for the bygone years. “Now the model wunderkind is so predicated on personality, and it’s kind of depressing. Some of it is kind of drippy and intolerable.” There’s also the delicate question of what happens to these precocious young bloggers when they turn, say, 26. “Bending the entire idea of seniority also bends the idea of the young journalist learning and growing and the whole idea of journalism being a thing of accumulated experience,” this journalist said.

An industry formerly predicated on apprenticeship (or, less charitably, paying one’s dues), as well as an assumed glut of willing and able young writers, has suddenly found itself concerned about the cultivation of new talent.

“A couple weird things are happening that I’ve noticed,” said the writer Karl Taro Greenfeld, 42, a former editor at Sports Illustrated who now contributes to several high-profile magazines, including Details and Portfolio, and is the author of three books. “It’s anecdotal, but it’s been supported by editors I’ve talked to. They’re having a hard time finding younger magazine writers, I think in part because a lot of younger writers, instead of learning to write features, are going to the Internet and blogging. Blogging is great preparation for blogging, but not always great preparation for a career in journalism.”

Mr. Taro Greenfeld continued: “As much as I can’t stand these parochial notions of journalism school, there is something to be said for, like, reporting. There’s something to be said for hanging around with people. … Editors who are around my age say, ‘We’re just not finding those up-and-coming 20-something writers.’ Those people used to be like a bedrock of magazines! … Why aren’t we better at producing young writers?”

Mr. Talese had definite opinions on the subject. “These people don’t leave their fucking laptops,” he said. “It used to be, you would go outside. It’s leaving home, getting on a plane or a bus or a bicycle, and going somewhere. It doesn’t mean you have a fixed interview. It’s hanging around.

“The tape recorder allowed people to stay indoors and have a Q&A,” said Mr. Talese. “The Q&A ruined the magazine piece. The reason the tape recorder became a valuable ally of the budget of the publisher was because it allowed writers to go out and talk to cover story prospects and have an interview in a short time, satisfying not only the publisher, because it was less time—you know, after the Charlie Rose show they’d be in the hotel, and you’d go up there with your tape recorder and you talk to the great Winona Ryder or Tom Cruise or whoever, and it’s done in about an hour. The press agent’s right there. You’re protected from libel. I never had a lawsuit, but it was never on tape. Being outdoors doesn’t lend itself to trotting around with a tape recorder. Going out and discovering things by chance, that serendipitous way of working, is not part of the possibility with a tape recorder.”

Nicholas Lemann, who is the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, noted, however, that his school’s magazine program is the most popular major. “We still have many students who dream of being magazine writers,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation and that magazine’s editor from 1978 to 1995, is the director of the magazine program at Columbia. “It was always hard,” said Mr. Navasky. “The Internet opens up new possibilities because you can do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. One of my students wanted coaching in how to be an entrepreneur. From his perspective, the job market is shrinking. But the answer to that is to start your own magazine!”

Perhaps the only magazine field that’s been growing in the past few years is online, after years in which many magazines, particularly glossies, seemed like they were trying to pretend that the Internet might just go away if they closed their eyes and counted to 10. But the stigma of working on the “Web side” still exists. “People on the Web side of things get paid less and work harder than their print counterparts. That’s a given,” said a 35-year-old online editor at a major magazine. “And if you want to move back into print, it’s harder. People think of you as ‘Webby.’”

The way the industry has, until very recently, thought of the Internet has also led to antagonism between the print and online divisions of many magazines. “Let’s say there’s one Web editor on staff at a magazine,” said Amy Goldwasser, 37, a freelance editor who is also an editor at large at Elle. “So it kind of gets dropped on the editors that the magazine needs to bolster the Web site, and everyone needs to start doing daily blogs on the side. So then the sole Web editor is the person you don’t want to be for anything—there’s your loathed editor on staff. Their job becomes bugging print editors to do stuff.”

The magazines that understand how their online and print divisions can complement, as opposed to provoke, each other seem to be viewing their print editions almost as extensions of their Web sites—instead of the other way around. (Radar and New York seem particularly adept at this.)

But for those entrenched in the industry, print has lost little of its luster or prestige, and the Web represents little more than an amorphous, somewhat scary entity that can only require them to do more work. That could be why graduates of specialized magazine programs, like the six-week Columbia Publishing Course, are reluctant to pursue an online job. “I haven’t seen a single student come through and say, ‘I want to work on an online magazine,’” said Ms. Goldwasser, who also teaches in the publishing course.

Mr. Talese is often asked to give talks at colleges about magazines. The students, he says, “don’t know what they do not know, until you tell them in detail. It’s the research process. Before there’s the writing, there’s the research. The research is very arduous, very time-consuming. There’s a lot of wasting time.”

Of course, this model of magazine writing assumes a couple of crucial factors; namely, that money and time are virtually unlimited. “You have to pay for a hotel, motel, airplane tickets, and then when you’re on the road in a town where you don’t live, you have to feed yourself and you have to pay for it,” said Mr. Talese. “This is what’s called an expense account. There used to be something called an expense account.”