News media: An accelerating decline

Is American journalism heading for “an extinctionlevel event?” asked Paul Farhi in The Atlantic. With revenues dropping and losses mounting, outlets such as The Washington Post, Time, Vox, Business Insider, NPR, ESPN, NBC, CNN, and ABC “have shed hundreds of journalists” over the past year. The iconic Sports Illustrated and music website Pitchfork were gutted, and BuzzFeed eliminated its news division. Last week, the once mighty Los Angeles Times “laid off more than 20 percent of its newsroom.” There are many factors driving the acceleration of the news media’s two-decadeslong decline, including a massive loss of advertising to the internet and a glut of free online content. The big recent blow is that Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) keep tweaking their algorithms to display fewer news links, causing web traffic and advertising revenue to plummet. At the same time, many Americans are suffering from “news fatigue,” and are just tuning it all out.

Another 130 local newspapers closed last year, said Cameron Joseph in the Columbia Journalism Review. Since 2005, two-thirds of U.S. journalism jobs have vanished. That has left more than half of U.S. counties with essentially no local news coverage. The disappearance of reporters covering city halls, statehouses, and Congress is “corrosive to democracy,” enabling corruption and other political mischief to go undetected. Some of my fellow conservatives may gloat over the troubles of the “liberal media,” said Matt Lewis in The Daily Beast. But most news outlets also do “solid straight reporting” that discomforts Democrats. As newspapers and magazines fold, we’re “losing one of the last vestiges of a common culture—and one of the final arbiters of objective reality.”

Don’t expect beneficent billionaires like Jeff Bezos to save the industry, said Margaret Sullivan in

The Guardian. Even the superrich get tired of losing money, which is why wealthy entrepreneur Jimmy Finkelstein abruptly shut the Messenger news website last week after burning through

$50 million in a year. Not all news organizations are dying, said Jack Schafer in Politico. A few prestigious national outlets, like The New York Times and The New Yorker, continue to do fine journalism and make money. “Cable, network, and local TV news still toss off profits.” But in coming years, most of journalism’s survivors, “like the animals that persisted after the great comet struck the earth,” will be “tiny and eke out an existence in the shadows.”