Top news outlets across the US have been forced to slash their workforces at the fastest rate in three years, leaving a larger share of Americans in so-called “news deserts”.
Collectively, media companies have shed some 2,700 positions from their respective newsrooms — the most since COVID-19 ravaged payrolls in 2020, according to CNN, citing data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Most recently, The Washington Post told its already-battered workforce that 240 layoffs were impending — an announcement that triggered a 24-hour strike over what staff called management’s failure to bargain in good faith.
The DC-based paper is just one of many news outlets struggling to devise a sustainable business model in the decades since the internet upended the economics of journalism: Earlier this month, Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports announced plans to slim down its workforce by 20% — or 1,600 employees — before year’s end.
The impact has been so severe that even late Berkshire Hathaway icon Charlie Munger said, “We have suffered a huge loss here,” and called the media landscape’s shift away from traditional newspapers “a terrible thing that’s happened to our country.”
“Now about 95% of [US newspapers] are going to disappear and go away forever,” lamented Munger, who died last month at 99. “And what do we get in substitute? We get a bunch of people who attract an audience because they’re crazy.”
Vogue owner Condé Nast trimmed about 5% of its staff last month. CEO Roger Lynch said at the time that the publisher was implementing the job cuts in an effort to cut costs and grow in a highly competitive digital media landscape.
In the weeks since, about 270 of Condé Nast’s roughly 5,400 full-time employees globally have been handed pink slips.
Though many outlets have implemented painful reductions amid the holiday season, Vox Media kicked off the year by saying goodbye to 7% of its workforce.
Most of the 130 affected workers were sportswriters as the company continues to deemphasize its sports ambitions.
These newsroom depletions have fueled a formidable “news desert” as a greater number of American communities are left without enough reporters to feed a daily — or even weekly — news cycle.
In the US, 200 counties do not have a local newspaper, according to US News Deserts — leaving residents in “desert” areas in the dark on “critical information on topics such as education, health, politics, governance, and infrastructure.”
US News Deserts also pointed out how regions can become increasingly misinformed without “the critical role that a local news outlet can play” just by dailies being swallowed up by weeklies, or weeklies by monthlies.
These types of reductions are already happening. Bloomberg Businessweek announced late last month that the 94-year-old weekly publication would become a monthly print publication, with longer-form stories and a “heavier paper stock for a more high-end look and feel,” per a memo obtained by The New York Times, in hopes of drawing more eyes — and dollars.
The company said the shift was prompted by a “challenging” market.
In another sign of a decline, the 151-year-old Popular Science also revealed in November that it has stopped publishing its quarterly online periodical — three years after putting out its final print edition, according to The Times.
Shortly thereafter, progressive magazine The Nation said it would be ditching the 48-page weekly publishing schedule it’s had since 1865 for a monthly offering with a more robust 84 pages.
Margaret Sullivan, a columnist at The Guardian with previous experience at the Washington Post and The Times’ newsrooms, told CNN that deep cuts in the media industry pose a real danger to society.
“The loss of journalists contributes to the exponential growth of news deserts in large swaths of the nation — and that’s disastrous when misinformation is rampant,” Sullivan said. “Democracy needs an informed electorate in order to function and that is tragically dwindling in many regions.”
