Another brutal week for American
journalism
JULY 2, 2019
BETWEEN JANUARY AND MAY THIS YEAR, approximately
3,000 people working in the news industry were laid off or offered a buyout.
That’s according to figures compiled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.—a
Chicago-based firm that helps workers find new employment—and reported yesterday in a depressing article by Bloomberg’s Gerry
Smith. The industry, Smith writes, is on course for its worst year
jobs-wise since 2009. Back then, the Great Recession had hammered the economy
across the board; now, with America’s unemployment rate at a 50-year low,
journalism is a notable outlier. “In most industries, employers can’t find
enough people to fill the jobs they have open,” Andrew Challenger, vice
president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tells Smith. “In news, it has
been the opposite story. And it seems to have been accelerating.”
The decline of the media job market, especially in print, is nothing new. But 2019 has been
particularly brutal. All job losses are not equal—layoffs are not buyouts are
not firings—and different publications have their own specific problems beyond
malign, industry-wide revenue trends. Nonetheless, by my rough, incomprehensive
count, this year has seen: 200 layoffs at
BuzzFeed; 250 layoffs at Vice; 800 layoffs at
properties owned by Verizon, including HuffPost and Yahoo; more than 1,000
layoffs or buyout offers at newspapers owned by Gannett, McClatchy, and GateHouse; the loss of every staff writer at
the East Bay Express, a California alt-weekly;
at least 43 layoffs at
the Dallas Morning News, 23 at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
12 at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and
45 at The Penny Hoarder, a
personal-finance publication in Florida; the loss of 16 full-time and 16
part-time/freelance positions at New York Media, owner of New York magazine;
the firing of Ebony’s seven-person digital team; 11
business-side job losses at Quartz; and at least six job cuts at Pennsylvania’s Reading Eagle,
with 81 more threatened to follow.
In January, as the mass layoffs at BuzzFeed, Verizon, and Gannett
bit at the same time, I wrote that it had been “a
brutal week for American journalism.” The week just gone
has been less brutal, by the numbers; nonetheless, we’ve seen a further flurry
of very bad media-job news. On Friday, First Look Media—which already, in
March, cut its
research team and shuttered The Intercept’s database of documents leaked
by Edward Snowden—announced that it would be closing Topic, an online magazine,
and defunding The Nib, a comics publication. The Nib will continue under the management of its editor, Matt
Bors, but six of
Topic’s nine digital-content staff will be laid off. (Three
video staffers will stay with First Look.) “It’s an understatement to say that
we’re bummed,” Anna Holmes, Topic’s editor, tweeted
yesterday. Jelani Cobb, who was working on a project with Topic, asked
Pierre Omidyar, First Look’s billionaire benefactor: “what is the standard for
success?” Topic “just won two national magazine awards,” Cobb
tweeted. “I remember Anna Holmes telling me she’s just the 3rd African
American EIC to do this. And now… this? Really?”
Also Friday, management at The Vindicator, a newspaper
in Youngstown, Ohio, told staff that the paper will close in August as it has not been
able to find a buyer. As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote yesterday, this is
even more disturbing than your average story of local-news decline.
Youngstown—in a metro area of 540,000 people—will now not have a paper at all.
And it’s scary that even private-equity-backed publishers wouldn’t touch The
Vindicator: “The tricks they’ve been using—cut staff, outsource editing,
outsource production, regionalize ad sales—apparently weren’t worth trying in
Youngstown,” Benton writes. By his count, the paper has 24 journalists who will
soon be looking for work. In all, 144 full-time jobs will be lost.
Newspaper carriers will take the hit, too.
Jobs have been lost, too, in New Orleans, where the merger between
two local papers—the Advocate and the Times-Picayune—took
effect yesterday. When the Advocate acquired the Times-Picayune,
all 161 of the latter paper’s employees were laid off. The Advocate said
some of them would land at the new, merged title. Per Poynter’s Samantha Sunne, only around 22 staffers
have transitioned over, 10 of whom are journalists. Of the Times-Picayune’s
55 remaining editorial employees, some rejected the Advocate’s
offer, citing low pay; at least 19 have yet to find a new journalism job
elsewhere; and six said they’re quitting the industry altogether to be able to
stay in New Orleans.
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The 3,000 job-loss figure is already, sadly out of date. Smith’s
Bloomberg article, nonetheless, is a shocking wake-up call. In May, two days
after the Times-Picayune was sold, The Wall Street
Journaldropped a comprehensive story zooming out on the dire state of the
news industry. I wrote
then that in “forcing us to step back and confront the bigger
picture,” stories like the Journal’s “often land more forcefully
than the daily accumulation of grim examples.” Smith’s does likewise.
Below,
more from a bad few days:
·
No news but fake news?: Will
Bunch writes, for The Philadelphia Inquirer, that the loss of papers like The Vindicatorwill
benefit Donald Trump in 2020: “It increases the likelihood [that readers will]
be getting bad information—intentionally manipulated, and sometimes out-and-out
fakery.”
·
A slow transition: Yesterday,
Nieman Lab’s Benton noticed
that links to old stories on the Times-Picayune’s
website, NOLA.com, were broken. NOLA.com, now the website of the new merged
paper, replied that
“the transition of these links will take time—but it’s like moving to a new
home. We’re carrying everything inside as fast as we can.”
·
CAP and trade: Last
month, The Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick and Sam Stein reported that
ThinkProgress, a progressive news site linked to the Center for American
Progress, was “bleeding staff” as it struggled with
declining traffic and finances. Now, Stein reports, CAP has put the site up for sale, citing
industry-wide ad-revenue pressures as well as the increasingly “divergent
missions” of ThinkProgress and CAP.
·
In better news: Smith
notes that “the job instability in online media is one reason for the wave of
unionizing across the landscape.” Yesterday, a union at Wirecutter, a
product-review site owned by The New York Times Company, was recognized; it will now bargain with
management for a contract. ICYMI, Anna Heyward explored
the broader digital-unionization trend for CJR last year.
Other notable stories:
·
Early yesterday, The New York Times reported
that the Trump administration may be prepared to offer North Korea a “nuclear
freeze”—accepting the status quo in exchange for a moratorium on further
nuclear development. John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national security adviser
(who was tellingly absent from Trump’s brief
visit to North Korea on Sunday), called the Times story “a
reprehensible attempt by someone to box in the president,” adding “there should
be consequences.” The Times stood
by its story; later, it reported, in a follow-up, that Bolton just pushed
“an internal debate into the open.” ICYMI, I weighed the coverage of Trump’s
North Korea visit in
yesterday’s newsletter.
·
CJR’s Mathew Ingram casts a
skeptical eye over the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, a bill
that would ban internet users from creating and distributing content that has
been manipulated to make it look like someone said/did something they didn’t
say/do. (Yes, “DEEPFAKES” is an acronym here.) “Rushing forward with
legislation aimed at correcting a problem before it even becomes obvious what
the scope of the problem is—especially when that legislation has some obvious
First Amendment issues—doesn’t seem wise,” Ingram writes.
·
For The Daily Beast, Alexander Heffner implores the press not to repeat the mistakes of 2016 in
its coverage of Trump’s 2020 campaign. “It wasn’t Fox News that was the sole
Trump propaganda network in 2016 fueling inflammatory anti-immigrant bigotry,”
Heffner writes. “It was the chorus of news coverage, from network broadcasts to
major newspapers, which parroted every faux Trump claim or outrage.” In recent
interviews, Chuck Todd and George
Stephanopoulos allowed Trump “to volley back and forth disinformation,”
Heffner argues.
·
Last month, Texas introduced a little-noticed new law allowing state lawmakers to claim “legislative privilege” to
conceal private communications, like emails, from the public, Lauren McGaughy
reports for the Dallas Morning News. “The bill was passed ahead of
the 2021 redistricting process, leading some to worry it was written
specifically to help state lawmakers and legislative staffers responsible for
redrawing the Texas’ political maps to hide their tracks” and thus protect the
process against future judicial review.
·
Last year, after a gunman killed 10 people in a mass shooting at
Santa Fe High School near Houston, The Wall Street Journal, Time,
CNN, and the Austin American-Statesman interviewed David
Briscoe, a substitute teacher who described his heroism during the attack. But
Briscoe was never there; his story, The Texas Tribune’s Alex Samuels
reports, was “an elaborate hoax.”All four outlets who quoted
Briscoe removed the references from their stories after the Tribune reached
out.
·
For Slate, Daniel Engber takes aim at media scaremongering about a supposed recent uptick
in tourist deaths in the Dominican Republic. “The dozen deaths
reported [last] month represent at most a tiny fraction—just a few percent—of
all the ones that would be expected to occur in any year of US travel to the
Dominican Republic,” Engber writes. “They do not compose a ‘trend,’ ‘spate,’
‘string,’ ‘cluster,’ or any ‘mystery’ to speak of. They are, strictly speaking,
from a news perspective, nothing.”
·
And for CJR’s new print issue on journalism around the world,
Laura Thorne looks
at the increased cross-pollination of reporting and comics.
“Despite the immediacy of its impact, comics journalism is a slow form,” she
writes. “It offers an antidote to the churn of the news cycle, inviting us to
take a closer look at the pressing matters of our time.”
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