There’s a really interesting story in Ad Age this week about the sales side of the communications business. Basically, it says that publishers and top salespeople in the print media who haven’t already made the move to digital are going to have trouble making it in the future.

A couple of the key points:

• There’s enough depth and bench strength in the digital sales world now that they don’t need print veterans to fill out their rosters.
• If you haven’t made the move already, given how your industry has imploded in recent years, maybe you’re not all that bright.

It’s a thought-provoking piece that illustrates how vulnerable we all are in a rapidly changing world. I spend a lot of time thinking about the creative/editorial side of media, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the suits were facing the same kind of battle against career obsolescence.

Another interesting tidbit from this article: according to Ad Age’s analysis, which tracks pretty closely with what I’ve read elsewhere, newspapers and magazines shed about 130,000 jobs in the past five years. During those same five years, new media added about 18,000 jobs.

So, even those who made the jump early had no guarantee of landing a gig, as the old media were sloughing off jobs about seven times as fast as the new media were creating them.