Notebook: Bad News Day
NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly posted on Twitter/X on Tuesday: “If you care about journalism—local news, national news, international news—every warning light should be blinking red.” She was responding to the astonishing rash of bad news for journalism in the last two weeks. Working backwards: on Thursday, Business Insider, after changing its name back from the more capacious Insider, announced that it was laying off 8 percent of its staff, already down 10 percent from layoffs last year; the few dozen staff members remaining at the New York Daily News staged a twenty-four hour walkout to protest budget cuts and austerity measures by their owner, hedge fund Alden Capital; and Forbes announced layoffs just as its union embarked on a three-day walkout, the first in its 108-year history, to protest stalled negotiations. Puck’s Dylan Byers reported on Wednesday that significant layoffs were rumored in The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Bureau. Perhaps most devastatingly, on Tuesday the Los Angeles Times, after weeks of turmoil, including the first newsroom-based work stoppage in its 142-year history, laid off a full 20 percent of its news staff, including its Washington bureau chief and deputy bureau chief, its business, books, and music editors, and a bunch of beat sports reporters. Combined with layoffs last summer the paper’s newsroom has diminished by a third. Also on Tuesday Time magazine laid off 10 percent of its editorial staff, and four hundred Conde Nast staffers staged a walkout, timed to correspond with the announcement of the Oscar nominations, to protest breakdown in negotiations over a 5 percent cut of its workforce announced in November. (Conde Nast publishes The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired, Glamour, GQ, Traveler, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, and Architectural Digest, among other magazines.) Last Saturday the 186-year-old Baltimore Sun was sold to David S. Smith, the executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, operator of hundreds of television stations known for pressing ideologically scripted segments on local channels. David Smith told staff that he read the paper rarely, not at all prior to a few weeks ago, and advised that it emulate Sinclair’s Baltimore station, Fox45, in its coverage. The preceding Friday Sports Illustrated laid off much of its staff, its future existence in doubt. The New York Times observed that the magazine had let go its photographers, “the ‘illustrated’ in Sports Illustrated,” in 2015, and had already gone from weekly to monthly publication. Two days before that Conde Nast announced that the music reviewing site Pitchfork would be folded into GQ, precipitating layoffs of roughly half its staff. (Vogue editor and Conde Nast chief content officer Anna Wintour reportedly did not remove her infamous sunglasses throughout the encounter.) At the end of the year The Washington Post announced that 240 workers had accepted buyout offers, averting potential mass layoffs. On January 12 even the news aggregator Artifact, a startup launched by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, announced that it would close. The verdict was that there was not enough reliable news to aggregate.
And all this came after a pretty bad year for journalism preceding. In 2023 BuzzFeed News was shut down; National Geographic laid off its remaining staff writers and suspended newsstand sales; Vice Media filed for bankruptcy; Popular Science closed its online magazine, three years after it stopped publishing its 152-year-old print edition; The Texas Tribune, oft looked to as a model of nonprofit journalism, saw unprecedented layoffs; an attempt to revive Gawker failed; cuts from ABC’s parent company Disney “substantially impacted” the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight, to the point that founder Nate Silver envisioned his departure; much ballyhooed “centrist” news start-up The Messenger ran out of money; NPR cut 10 percent of its staff; Yahoo News and Vox Media (which also publishes New York magazine, Curbed, and The Verge) saw layoffs (Vox twice); News Corp (owner of The Wall Street Journal) cut 1,250 jobs; Bookforum and Jezebel were both shut down then resurrected, in June and November, respectively; The Dallas Morning News offered buyouts to reduce their newsroom by forty jobs; Southern California’s oldest paper went out of business. (In one bright spot, local TV appears to be in better shape than local print journalism. Here in New York we get excellent local TV news—richer and more robust than the local coverage in our vaunted national newspapers—from the cable provider Spectrum, and they frequently feature local print and online investigative journalists. I am curious about the economics here. Our local NPR station is also partnered with an online news site, Gothamist.)
According to a study by Northwestern University’s Medill Journalism School, 130 local newspapers closed and forty-three thousand, or two-thirds of all newspaper journalism jobs have disappeared since 2005: “The loss of local newspapers,” the report says, “accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than two hundred counties as ‘news deserts.’” Reportedly only one in five of over a thousand public radio stations produces local news. Observers worried that layoffs and buyouts would set back recent advances in diversity by affecting newest hires first, and undermine efforts to bring in more digital-savvy younger staff.
Television news, despite its deeper pockets, is not safe. The New York Times noted last week that “the rise of streaming and a drop-off in moviegoing have led to belt-tightening at the [entertainment] parent companies of news stations.” Disney/ABC and ESPN, NBCUniversal/NBC, Warner Bros Discovery/CNN, Paramount/CBS have either seen or anticipate layoffs. Television news (as well as newspapers) lost audiences as the “Trump Bump” subsided and the 2024 primary season declined to produce a newsworthy contest.
The explanations for this bloodbath all have deep roots in recent history, yet these don’t quite explain why we are facing this precipitous drop right at this moment, just before an election year, when we can bear it least. Cameron Joseph pointed out in the Columbia Journalism Review that current rounds of cuts have left Washington without local bureaus and reporters, meaning that only national grandstanders get coverage, skullduggery goes unexposed, and legislators who do the work they were hired to do, delivering for local constituents, get no recognition. Derek Thompson reflected on his podcast Plain English that the lack of local coverage at home and local perspectives on national news inflames partisanship by separating news stories from visible outcomes. Indeed a 2022 Gallup survey found that people trust local news more than its national counterparts.
The news decline began with the obsolescence of local and classified newspaper advertising in the face of Craigslist and online search in the early 2000s, and then the sucking up of digital advertising by Google and the social media platforms that fed online users news stories in the 2010s. Derek Thompson calculates that The New York Times’s advertising receipts declined by 66 percent between 2000 and 2023. Bryan Curtis adds that advertising budgets took a further hit in 2023 in what turned out to be unwarranted expectations of recession. Innovative sites like Buzzfeed and Gawker bloomed during a brief moment in which virality on social media fed independent ad-based free sites (the story told in former Buzzfeed news editor and New York Times media columnist Ben Smith’s book Traffic). Casey Newton and Ezra Klein, eulogizing Pitchfork, both lamented the loss of revenue sources for these “mid-sized” publications that made the internet “vital” and “strange and experimental.”
More recent shifts on the internet have also penalized news. Twitter/X no longer shows previews with outbound links, to discourage users from leaving the platform. Google and Meta have laid off news employees, and Facebook has since 2018 demoted news in its algorithm. Meta’s Threads, designed to supplant Elon Musk’s X, which has been increasingly hospitable to disinformation (see this week’s story in The New York Times about the disappearance of X’s election fact-checking unit), declared at the outset that it would not “amplify” news.
Mismanagement and greed have augmented the structural threats. Profit-focused hedge fund ownership has been devastating to the local news business. Billionaire owners Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong and Marc Beniof proved unable deliver on their promises for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times and Time. (The New York Times has been far more successful in building a news organization in the digital age than any outfit that fell under the leadership of a tech magnate, ironically.) Executives at Vice received six-figure bonuses on the eve of their bankruptcy filing. Business Insider journalists bitterly noted that their parent company Axel Springer paid out $850 million in dividends before laying them off. Tech writer Casey Newton asks whether publishers were too slow to develop new advertising models to compete with the tech giants.
The New York Times has managed to buck these trends in ways that illuminate the perils faced by everyone else. They built an international subscription powerhouse, largely on lifestyle features that, as Bryan Curtis notes, reflect some of the old recipes-puzzles-weekend fun formula that anchored local papers and underwrote their newsrooms. But as Ezra Klein and others have lamented, “A global market creates a winner-take-more dynamic. Most people will subscribe to only one news outlet … The more subscribers that market leader gets, the more money and reach it has to attract the best staff and expand its offerings,” as the presence of Ezra Klein himself, a founder of Vox, on the Times’s editorial page testifies. Dylan Byers writes in Puck, “unless you’re playing at the New York Times level, it’s become near-impossible to sustain a business with national ambitions” (and not too easy without them). The pattern is visible in book publishing and streaming also: all the incentives press toward fewer powerful players, less diversity of output, more estrangement from local experience. In a 2024 look-ahead, “reader analytics” specialist Andrew Rhomberg observes that these consolidating economies of scale, powered by international social media, especially TikTok, are even increasing the international dominance of the English language (thanks
for the reference!), extending still further the reach of The New York Times, Penguin Random House, Netflix, et al.The rising “creator” opportunities offered to non-behemoth individuals by platforms like Substack are offset by the institutional deficits: no fact-checking or copyediting or production or marketing support, no legal department, no reserves or staff to invest in long-running investigative or research projects. One side effect of the advantage that moves toward big players is that it becomes easy, among disaffected people, to foment disillusion with such dominant institutions, inviting doubters’ trust to be spread among fragmentary, incendiary, under-resourced alternatives. In a chilling installment of her podcast The Focus Group with Fox News chronicler Brian Stelter, aptly entitled “No One Is Looking Out for You,” Sarah Longwell this week describes the growing influence of fractured, small-scale, often wildly conspiratorial opinion operations as Fox News’s hold in its core audience weakens. This audience does not recognize a distinction between opinion and investigative journalism.
What really marked the devastating coda of 2023 though was the coming of age of artificial intelligence. AI was already a familiar if stealthy presence in the media environment via the algorithm: Casey Newton reminds us that Pitchfork had been made obsolete as a recommendation tool long before its recent closure by Spotify. The 2024 music listener is not looking for advice about what records to buy: buying is no longer necessary, and the Spotify algorithm serves them increasingly sophisticated musical alternatives based on their past behavior. Criticism generally, the whole “curatorial” function of editing, is eroding in the face of algorithmic surfacing of what’s already out there based on one’s monitored preferences.
On top of this, the arrival at the end of 2022 of ChatGPT and its close-following competitors unmediated users’ connection to information: search engines decreasingly send us to attributed, verified articles to answer our questions; more and more often a large-language-model AI tool answers (or attempts to answer) them for us, drawing on vast seas of information created by, yes, journalists and other “creators” like composers, writers, actors, and artists whose labors the tool has ingested. The news site 404 Media, made up of refugees from Vice, poignantly pled with readers this week to register with an email address because their stories were both being drowned out in search engines by AI-generated content and directly cloned by parasitic AI-tools to create that content. I encourage you to read the whole dispiriting post. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson opined that the future value of a subscription would be not the archive of reliable/beautiful/durable work that an outlet has produced (which they are currently trying to protect from abduction by AI companies), but their real-time delivery of trustworthy information: “To the extent the web becomes even more probabilistic and hallucinatory the greater value there will be for authoritative content creators capable of living on Internet time, showing their worth not by their archives or rigidity but by their ability to create continuously.”
This prediction reminded me of another that OpenAI CEO, then about to be fired and rehired, Sam Altman made on the podcast “Hard Fork.” (For another day: my profound disturbance at how cavalierly the nonprofit structure supposedly created to regulate artificial intelligence development at OpenAI was swept aside by this episode. We are now in the world of The Social Network Mach 10.) Asked about whether there would still be an “artisanal market” in days to come Sam Altman said: “I expect that if we look forward to the future things that we want to be cheap will be much cheaper, and things that we want to be expensive will be astronomically expensive. [Q: Like what?] Real estate, handmade goods, art. There will be a huge premium on things like that. Even when machine-made products have been much better there has always been a premium on handmade products and I expect that to intensify.”
Leaving aside for now the disturbing inclusion here of real estate, and noting the odd worldview encoded in the phrase “things we want to be expensive” and the expectation that things untouched by mechanical intervention will become beyond the reach of most people and that’s fine, I was most disturbed by the neglect here of any acknowledgment that humans are (for now?) still needed to interact with the world in order ground ideas and expression truthfully in lived experience. Large-language model AI is only as useful as its inputs, generated by human consciousness in contact with the world, proceeding from the mysterious human music of mind and heart and maturing awareness, our duty to one and other and our duty to the truth as we strive to perceive it. The language predictions made by bots like ChatGPT rest in the work of people who make the news, literature, scholarship, music, and art that train it to think like us.
So the great question we face is: what will be the supportive institutions through which people will continue to do that making, to tether the potentially limitless effluvium of machine-generated outputs we find on our screens to the world, and how within our machines’ self-referring web of suggestion will we discover anything that will surprise us and invite us to grow beyond the mobius loop of our own past impulses?
Update, 2/2/24: Since we posted our Notebook “Bad News Day” on Sunday, more than two hundred journalist and other employees at The Chicago Tribune have staged a twenty-four-hour walkout against their owner, hedge fund Alden Capital (same folks against whom The New York Daily News were striking last week) to protest wages and cuts that the union says interfere with coverage; The Wall Street Journal laid off nearly twenty reporters and editors from its Washington bureau; and news startup The Messenger closed, letting go its staff of three hundred without severence and deleting its website and all their work. Former journalists on X/Twitter disclosed that they had been compelled by the company to recyle other outlets’ stories in order to fuel the outlet’s outdated business model of seeking maximum clicks to support digital advertising. Axios reported that walkouts are planned at other Alden-owned publications, including The Orlando Sentinel and The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Observers note that Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp has seen record profits in the last three years.
Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.
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This brilliant screed is like a verbal compaction of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Oh god, I've been meaning to resubscribe to my local newspaper, not just The Guardian, and you've given the vital nudge. Thanks for this grim reminder.