Think the news industry was struggling already? The dawn of 2024 is offering few good tidings
NEW YORK — On Friday, the National Press Club is offering solace — and a free meal — by giving recently fired journalists tacos in recognition of a brutal period that seems to bring bad news to an already struggling industry on a daily basis.
For anyone who works in the news media, the list is intimidating – and unrelenting.
The news website The Messenger shut down on Wednesday after only being in operation since last May, abruptly putting some 300 journalists out of work. The Los Angeles Times has laid off more than a hundred journalists in recent weeks, Business Insider and Time Magazine announced staff cuts, Sports Illustrated is struggling to survive, and the Washington Post is in the process of buying out more than two hundred employees. The Post reported Thursday that The Wall Street Journal laid off about 20 people in its Washington bureau; there was no immediate comment from a Journal representative. Pitchfork announced that it is no longer a free-standing music site after digital publications BuzzFeed News and Jezebel disappeared last year.
And journalists from the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, New York Daily News and Conde Nast magazine all staged strikes to protest management’s handling of business issues.
Seeing all the damage has led the Washington-based National Press Club to open its weekly Taco Night to laid-off colleagues and offer a free one-month membership to people in need of a networking opportunity.
“It’s very important when people have lost their jobs to know that they have some support behind them,” said Didier Saugy, the club’s executive director.
The news industry has been in freefall over the past two decades, starting when much of the advertising moved online to opportunistic tech companies. Advertising is still a big part of the problem, although there are more complex reasons and circumstances unique to individual outlets that also play a role.
The situation is dire in larger, more national organizations and in smaller communities. A Northwestern University study published in November found that the United States has lost a third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalism jobs since 2005.
The country is losing 2.5 newspapers a week – a rate that is accelerating, the study found. At the end of November, the employment agency Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimated that 2,681 journalism jobs would be lost by 2023, and that number has increased by hundreds since then.
One industry observer, Jeff Jarvis, wondered on his Buzzmachine website this week, “Is it time to give up old news?”
“There’s an inevitability to what’s happening,” Jarvis, author of “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet,” said in an interview. “Publications have tried to maintain their old ways and their old models, and it’s time for them to realize that it’s not working and it’s too late now.”
While there have been some successes among news outlets that have shifted their operations to paid digital subscriptions — most spectacularly at The New York Times — the failures are far more numerous. Even The Washington Post, whose subscriptions boomed during the Trump administration, has seen a decline, prompting management to acknowledge that it was too optimistic about its expansion plans and had to make cuts.
The optimism created by billionaire owners at the Post, with Jeff Bezos, and the Los Angeles Times, with Patrick Soon-Shiong, has faded as it became clear they had no magical solutions. With COVID and the Hollywood strike limiting the advertising market, the Los Angeles Times estimated it was losing between $30 million and $40 million a year.
Philanthropy has given a boost to some news organizations, including The Associated Press. The MacArthur Foundation and Knight Foundation committed $500 million last year to drive solutions in the news industry, but such efforts cannot match the scale of the problem, Jarvis said.
“The industry,” he said, “is jumping from false messiah to false messiah.”
Tech companies are also retreating from news, said Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University. The AI-powered search generative experience means Google is much less likely to direct users to individual news sites, she said.
Publishers have also complained that they are losing significant sales because Facebook is far less likely to feature news articles that drive people to news sites. Twitter, now X, was once a second home for journalists, but that has become much less the case since Elon Musk purchased the site.
“What the news companies may have finally realized is that nothing good will come from accepting the leftovers that social platforms and search platforms will give the news industry,” Gallagher said.
The 2020 election has proven to be a boon for many news outlets, but there are questions about whether the public will be as interested in following political news this year.
Some of the struggling outlets also have unique issues that have contributed to their troubles. Sports Illustrated sent layoff notices to employees after the company that publishes the content lost the license to do so. The Messenger’s failure angered observers because its business plan — a centrist website that tried to appeal to the many rather than a tightly defined audience — was an uphill battle to begin with.
“It was corporate malpractice and human atrocities on an epic scale,” Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Axios and Politico, told the Puck Newsletter. “Anyone who knew anything about the economics of the media knew that it would die out quickly, spectacularly and sadly.”
That sadness is evident in messages left on social media by fired journalists from The Messenger and elsewhere.
“I was fired from my job as a political writer in August and haven’t been able to find another job since,” Tara Dublin, author of “The Sound of Settling: A Rock and Roll Love Story,” wrote on X. “I’m terrified for the future of journalism and how anyone can trust any news source.”
Steve Reilly, an investigative journalist at The Messenger who saw his job cut this week, wrote: “If you’ve been affected by recent layoffs in journalism at The Messenger or elsewhere, please know that it’s not your fault. It has nothing to do with you or your work.”
Jarvis, who also teaches journalism, said he doesn’t pretend to know the answers. He said there needs to be a change in mindset from looking for a way to monetize content to seeing journalism as a service to the community.
“We need journalists in society, and we will find a way to meet that need,” he said. “I am optimistic in the long term. But in the short term, it gets ugly.”
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David Bauder covers media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder