Reporters historically treated newspaper work as a five-year job before moving on

Evidence

In 1900, Samuel Hopkins Adams, a crime reporter at the New York Sun, was yearning to make his mark. Approaching the age of thirty he had made for himself a perfectly fine middle-class life, but after nine years at the Sun he was growing restless. “Newspaper reporting is a good job for five years,” he would later write, “but after that a man should move along.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 106