The closing of a local newspaper matters more than the closing of a local shoe store for only one reason — newspapers employ journalists. I asked several reporters, editors, and scholars what journalists should do to get ready for the next wave of firings. There were three strong consensus answers: first, get good at understanding and presenting data. Second, understand how social media can work as a newsroom tool. Third, get whatever newsroom experience you can working in teams, and in launching new things.

The first piece of advice is the most widely discussed in journalism circles — get good with numbers. The old ‘story accompanied by a chart’ was merely data next to journalism; increasingly, the data is the journalism. Nate Silver has changed our sense of political prediction. ProPublica has tied databases to storytelling better than anyone in the country. Homicide Watch can report more murders (all of them, in fact), using fewer people, than the Washington Post. Learning to code is the gold standard, but even taking an online class in statistics and getting good at Google spreadsheets will help. Anything you can do to make yourself more familiar with finding, understanding, and presenting data will set you apart from people you’ll be competing with, whether to keep your current job or get a new one.

Second, learn to use social media tools to find stories and sources. Social media was first absorbed as a marketing tool, but a medium that allows direct access to the public is also a journalistic one. Examples small and large, from photos of a plane landing in the Hudson River to the Guardian’s crowd-sourced analysis of hundreds of thousands of Parliamentary expense reports, rely on a more permeable relationship between the newsroom and the outside world. Practice reading conversations on Facebook and looking at photos on Instagram to look for story ideas; understand how a respectful request for assistance on Twitter or WeChat can bring out key sources or armies of volunteers.

Third, journalism is becoming more of a team sport. Integrated text and visuals, databases the readers can query and annotate themselves, group liveblogging of breaking news — all this requires collaboration far more engaged than the old ‘one story, one byline’ model. Volunteer for (or propose) anything that involves deeper teamwork than you’re used to, and anything that involves experimenting with new tools or techniques. (The irony, of course, is that more news organizations prize teamwork, but still hire individuals. For your next job, you may need to convince your future bosses that you are valuable all by your lonesome, but that part of that value is working well on a team.)

One objection to all this advice is that it is too little, too late, and not nearly enough to save most newsroom employees. This is true. It is also irrelevant. We’re entering what Jim Brady calls the “huddling together for warmth” phase of journalistic enterprise. Some papers will survive, of course, buying time through mergers or Chapter 11, but even those papers will shrink. There will be some work in journalism startups and in non-profits; given the number of people who are going to be fired in the next few years, many newsroom employees will find their next jobs outside anything that looks like a traditional paper. Much of the advice above will be relevant to those jobs as well.

The other objection is that advice to get skilled at data, social media, and teamwork is pitifully obvious. This is also true. All of this advice is obvious, and has been obvious for some time now. What’s astonishing — and disheartening — is how long it’s taken to act on that obvious advice, in part because there are still people committed to the fiction that the future of print is unclear.

There was one other common reaction among the people I spoke with about the coming changes: almost to a person, they noted that journalists can no longer rely on their employers to provide the opportunities to learn new skills. For a long time, professional development as a journalist was a side-effect of rising through the ranks; the paper offers you a new beat, or sends you out to break a career-making story. Today, papers are fighting for survival, and most slowly losing, so there’s hardly time or resources for anything other than “Essential services are being maintained.” If you’re a journalist working inside a newspaper and you want to train for your next job, you’re largely on your own.