NEWS SLASH FLASH
Media layoffs spike
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 “news deserts.”
Collectively, media companies have shed some 2,700 newsroom jobs — 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 announced 240 pending layoffs — triggering 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 slash its workforce by 20% — or 1,600 employees — before year’s end.
The impact has been so severe that, before his death last month at age 99, Berkshire Hathaway icon Charlie Munger said, “We have suffered a huge loss here,” calling 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. “And what do we get in substitute? We get a bunch of people who attract an audience because they’re crazy.”
‘News deserts’
Vogue owner Condé Nast trimmed about 5% of its staff last month. CEO Roger Lynch said its aim was to survive in a highly competitive digital media landscape.
In the weeks since, about 270 of Condé Nast’s roughly 5,400 full-time employees globally were 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 — 130 workers who were mainly sportswriters.
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 the dark on “critical information on topics such as education, health, politics, governance, and infrastructure.”