The 2020s have ushered in troubling times for the media industry, and 2023 was no different. Name any publication and chances are it endured layoffs this year: BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox (twice), Washington Post (also twice, or was it three times?), Los Angeles Times, Texas Tribune, major organizations like Gannett and Hearst and yes, even Condé Nast—the parent organization of WIRED, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and more. Beloved publications have gone up for sale or shuttered. The 151-year-old stalwart Popular Science turned off its lights this week. As I write this, Paste has just pulled iconic digital news site Jezebel off a cliff. The firms that helped to put news media in this position—Facebook, Google, X—have also all suffered their own massive staff reductions. In February, The New York Times published an advice column entitled "How to Prepare for a Possible Layoff." Five months later, the Times disbanded its Sports section, relying only on coverage from its sports site, The Athletic, which itself had newsroom cuts only weeks prior.
Though post-Covid journalism is plagued by different challenges than we might have expected five years ago, a beleaguered media industry is really old news. In 2017, digital journalist Gabriel Snyder penned a feature about the uncertain future facing The New York Times. He chronicled the paper's journey through the rough waters of the early digital age and discussed the course it charted to bring it into the 2020s. In "How The New York Times Is Clawing Its Way Into the Future," Snyder, the soon-to-be publisher of the media-industry-focused newsletter, The Fine Print, follows then associate editor of newsroom strategy A. G. Sulzberger and his efforts to keep the Gray Lady afloat.
When Snyder was writing just five years ago, the Times had emerged, bruised but alive, from the onslaught of budget shortfalls that began with the advent of the World Wide Web and continued with the explosion of Facebook. The paper had figured out that digital subscriptions, not ad revenue, would allow it to continue supporting reporters in 174 countries and produce Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism. Sulzberger, who had yet to succeed his father as publisher, had penned instructions for gaining and retaining these subscriptions in the video-focused world created by the likes of BuzzFeed and Insider, and among a torrent of voice-y wellness blogs. When his internal-facing Innovation Report leaked, it was big news. BuzzFeed called it "a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture." In the three years after the leak, Times culture slowly shifted, and in 2017 its main concerns were implementing video, virtual reality, and AI, while maintaining "quality worthy of its name" and operating in a world where the president of the United States had a Twitter account.
The 2020s saw things that NYT digital leaders likely did not expect: the banning and restoration of Donald Trump's Twitter account, for one, but also the Covid-19 pandemic, a political insurrection in the US, massive social justice movements, two major wars, two presidents, and ChatGPT, to name just a few. Video journalism didn't end up being the gamechanger we thought it would be, though newsrooms are now learning how best to take advantage of Gen Z's TikTok. VR and news chatbots didn't really take off, but everyone, including the news media, is working to harness the power of generative AI. Subscriptions have grown steadily, but they still haven't offset the losses of advertising revenue. And last month, we learned that 20,000 media jobs were lost so far this year, compared with 3,000 over the same period in 2022. It seems we are facing an inflection point, so this week I want to know: What do you think are the biggest challenges, digital or otherwise, facing the news media as we make our way toward the mid-2020s? Send me your thoughts via email or post them on social media.
See you next week!
Sam
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