The Atlantic. The Left Wing rag...documenting how journalism is dead...without saying many of the obvious reasons why.
Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?
The news industry has been in decline for decades, but the latest round of layoffs is especially ominous.
For a few hours last Tuesday, the entire news business seemed to be collapsing all at once. Journalists at
Time magazine and
National Geographic announced that they had been laid off. Unionized employees at magazines owned by Condé Nast staged a one-day strike to protest imminent cuts. By far the grimmest news was from the
Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper west of the Washington, D.C., area. After weeks of rumors, the paper announced that it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom.
The
Times was once a pillar of the American media establishment, celebrated in David Halberstam’s classic media study,
The Powers That Be. Now it has become a national exemplar of what the journalist Margaret Sullivan
calls the “ghosting” of the news—the gradual withering of news-gathering muscle as once-proud publications become shadows of their old selves. The biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong looked like a savior when he bought the
Times from its cost-cutting corporate parent in 2018. For a few years, he was; Soon-Shiong invested about $1 billion, by his count, to build up the depleted organization. But he turned out to have his limits. Facing mounting losses, in June last year the
Times dropped
74 people from its newsroom. Last week’s even bigger blow was foreshadowed by managerial turmoil: Three top editors, including the executive editor Kevin Merida, resigned just before the news came down. “I won’t fault him for being unwilling to write checks,” Matt Pearce, a
Times reporter who is head of the newspaper’s union, told me, referring to Soon-Shiong. But, he added, “we don’t seem to have a clear theory of the case as a business. We need to execute on a strategy. And we don’t have one.” (Soon-Shiong declined to comment for this article.)
The decline of the legacy news media has been playing out for decades, exacerbated most recently by the advent of the internet and the explosion of digital platforms, especially the ad-revenue-gobbling tech giants Google and Meta. Even when when the ad-supported model of journalism still worked, the history of American media was punctuated by periods of dramatic expansion and contraction, often coinciding with the arrival of new technologies. The latest round of cuts, however, represents a grim new milestone.
The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, NPR,
Vice,
Vox, and
BuzzFeed, among others, have shed hundreds of journalists over the past year. (Disclosure: I’m one of them. In December, I took a buyout from
The Washington Post.) No corner of national media seems unaffected. Even Condé Nast’s
The New Yorker magazine, heretofore seemingly impervious, announced a numerically insignificant but symbolically freighted staff cut in December. All told, job losses among print-, digital-, and broadcast-news organizations grew by nearly 50 percent during 2023,
according to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
What makes this so unnerving is the fact that the meltdown has come amid—and in seeming defiance of—a generally booming economy. The ranks of professional journalists keep declining even as overall unemployment stays low, incomes rise, and the stock market reaches new heights. What’s more, a presidential-election cycle tends to produce a surge of readers, viewers, and advertisers as people pay closer attention to the news. Not this time, at least so far: Traffic to leading news sites and Nielsen ratings of national cable news trended down throughout 2023.
It’s the same old story, only worse. Since the 2020 presidential election, Facebook has
steadily reduced the amount of news that users see in their feed, wiping out a major source of traffic and, as a result, ad revenue. Meanwhile, the 2024 cycle has yet to deliver the expected “Trump bump”—the surge of public interest and subscription revenue generated by fascination with, or alarm over, the previous president—and it may never come. To the contrary, some studies
suggest that “news fatigue” has reduced audience demand for journalism in the post-pandemic era.
By far the greatest damage to the news ecosystem over the past 20 years has been at the local level. Nearly all of the 2,900 newspapers that have closed or merged since 2005 have been small weeklies,
according to researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. This has left broad swaths of the country lacking professional reporting of any kind. The death rate among daily papers has been less extreme, if only because many continue to exist in greatly diminished form. One example: Denver’s two primary dailies, the
Rocky Mountain News and
The Denver Post, employed more than 600 journalists before the
Rocky went under in 2009. Ever since, the
Post has been peeled like an onion by its owner, the
hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Today, its newsroom directory
lists just 59 journalists, who are tasked with covering a region that is home to nearly 3 million people.
“As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked,” observed PEN America in a 2019 white
paper. “With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Not all citizens, though. A weakened local press corps is a gift to someone like George Santos, whose
serial fabrications went mostly (if
not entirely) unreported during his campaign for Congress.
The outlook for 2024 seems especially cloudy to Sewell Chan, the editor in chief of
The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit publication that has been held up as a sustainable news-business model. Chan told me that the past year has been as gloomy for the news industry as 2008–09, the start of the Great Recession, when a number of titles went under. “I fear 2023–24 could be another extinction-level event,” he said.
To be continued...