Journalism is Dying. No, Like, For Real This Time.

Had to get it off my chest.

Jan 29, 2024

Also: this week will be another two-post week. The passage of time has felt nonexistent to me lately. Whatever. The posts must be written.

Anyways, about this media industry crisis:

The Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times. TIME. Condé Nast. Sports Illustrated. Business Insider. The New York Daily News. National Geographic. The Baltimore Sun. What do these media outlets have in common other than being (mostly) kickass? They’ve all had bunches and bunches of staff laid off in the last month.

Part of me thinks I shouldn’t be worried about this stuff, given that I’m not pursuing a career in journalism. But I am a writer. And I know for a fact that I wouldn’t the writer I am without the various journalists from those outlets. By that logic, who are we as a society without journalism? Sure seems like we’re about to find out.

I’m especially gutted by Condé Nast’s move to quite literally shove Pitchfork into GQ. I used to read Pitchfork on a daily basis. (I wish I still could mow, but I can’t seem to find the time not attention span.) Now former-EIC Puja Patel was taking significant steps to make Pitchfork more inclusive and less cishet white male dudebro, without sacrificing quality or range of coverage. Now what? Since when did trying to become more valuable mean forgoing values?

And then there’s Sports Illustrated, which, I can’t even explain it succinctly. It is wild to envision the possibility of a world without them publishing. At one point as a kid, all I wanted was to become a columnist for SI when I got older. Becoming Michael Faber, essentially (a hockey writer, not that you need to know who he is) was my end goal. Had I known about the chew-and-spit cycle of the industry, my goal posts would’ve shifted significantly. Making a steady income off of writing would become the new target. Because becoming Michael Faber requires taking a path that no longer exists.

I think about my friends pursuing careers in journalism or who are still holding onto jobs in the industry despite the predicament we’re in, and I feel for them. They paved their own paths to get to where they are now. They got here through gumption and sheer luck and prayer. They did the jobs no one else wanted to do. They get the big clicks. They get the big scoops. They say the smartest things. And still they are at risk of getting unceremoniously laid off over Zoom by Anna Wighead Wintour. She can sport those stupid sunglasses all she wants, but unlike the way she treats her employees, the truth is not expendable.

The micro transaction method of paying to read an article is a sham. Ads aren’t paying the bills anymore. Big Tech eats up all the revenue now, which is sickening. We are long past the point of thinking that their billionaire CEOs are going to swoop in, purchase these floundering outlets, and save the day.

Social media’s changed the industry and also run it to the ground. Mark Zuckerberg could, theoretically, care about news delivery or quality, but felt spreading misinformation would be best (read: more profitable). From scrolling through Twitter the last few days, it seems as if for every piece written, journalists have to spend an equal amount of time promoting the fact that said work exists. Work they were paid a laughable dollar per word for, work that the algorithm seems to deliberately suppress. They spend the day thinking about sustainable business models. They stay up at night thinking about the dickheads with potato head profile pictures who call them frauds and liars. The desire to simply tell good stories becomes outweighed by a struggle to survive and to have others see the value in good stories and fact-based journalism.

You’d think something like Substack would be the saving grace for this industry but it’s so not. How incredibly difficult it is to build an audience independently and persuade people to pay you $8 a month while in the midst of an inflation crisis. Also, freelancing doesn’t come with health insurance. And so, so many newsrooms aren’t unionized, too. I don’t think that gets talked about enough.

Oh, and local journalism—legit the backbone of our communities—is being bent completely out of shape. The local news at 6 or whatever is still a thing. But how, you ask, are newscasters fed the information they need to read through their teleprompters? Local newspaper reporting. Like, what are even we doing here? Other than causing even greater division, and sparking more anger, and just generally increasing our overall illiteracy?

I don’t know, man. It’s bleak. I wish I had more jokes and stuff in this post. Maybe later this week. But now it’s late and I’m tired and a little sad. I want to say it’s all gonna be okay but I don’t know the answers and I don’t want to lie to you. I read somewhere yesterday that Time apparently still isn’t profitable yet. Bloomberg is going monthly—how does that happen when their Wall Street readership is supposedly rich as hell?

God, I haven’t even mentioned AI yet. I think about it all the time. How to be a writer in a time where people think you can be easily replaced by an emotionless robot. How to write, just generally, under all this calamity. No one—the billionaires, the private equity people, the newsrooms, the advertisers—has figured out how to stop this crisis. Most won’t even bother to put a bandaid on it. I wish the words alone were enough to stop the bleeding.

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