Journalism is in the midst of a *massive* crisis

And we aren't paying ENOUGH attention.

A former colleague reminded me the other day of a time in the early 2000s when we went on a junket — we both worked for National Journal magazine back then — to Puerto Rico.

It was amazing — great hotel, all meals paid for — and all we had to do was be on a panel the magazine was holding.

I was young and dumb — and assumed journalism was always going to be just like this.

I was thinking of that Puerto Rico trip over the last few days as I read about planned mass layoffs at the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated. Those moves come on top of more than 200 buyouts by the Washington Post. And cuts at Vox. And NPR. And a slew of other places.

All told, more than 2,500 media jobs were lost in 2023, according to one independent study. And that doesn’t even count the jobs lost in the previous year — mine included!

This is not a new trend. Since the 1980s, average employment by newspaper publishers is down 63%, according to a 2022 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

And since just 2008, the number of newsroom jobs is down 26%, according to Pew.

The long term projections are even darker. That same Georgetown study estimated that more than a third of ALL journalism jobs will be lost between 2002 and 2031. 33%!

And while we spend most of our time focused on the big boys — national media publications and cable TV station — the situation is even more dire in local news.

A 2023 Northwestern University study on the state of local news was heartbreaking. As the Associated Press wrote in a summary of the study:

The decline of local news in the United States is speeding up despite attention paid to the issue, to the point where the nation has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005.

An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023 compared to two a week the previous year, a reflection of an ever-worsening advertising climate, according to a Northwestern University study issued Thursday. Most are weekly publications, in areas with few or no other sources for news.

The simple fact is that journalism is, well, not a great business. It requires LOTS of manpower to do it well. Not every story that a reporter chases winds up panning out (which is a good thing). The shift in consumption from newspapers (and, increasingly, cable TV) to digital has outpaced companies’ ability to make money off of that consumption change. And, then there’s this reality: Less people are following the news closely today than they did even a few years ago.

This Pew chart is stark:

The decline in journalism jobs comes at a uniquely bad time in the history of America. We are now in a moment of rampant mis- and disinformation. Artificial intelligence allows the almost instantaneous creation of content that may or may not be factually accurate. Partisan players have leapt into the void left by the mass layoffs at mainstream media outlets — creating content that is aimed solely at affirming peoples’ extant beliefs in order to make a buck.

Consider this: In his four years in office, President Donald Trump said more than 30,000 things that were either false or misleading.

Know how I know that? Because the Washington Post employed a team of fact checkers to catalogue — and contextualize — all of the times Trump strayed from the truth.

Or this: We know that Donald Trump didn’t pay federal taxes for the majority of the last two decades. And that he has a $72.9 million refund that is currently under audit by the IRS.

I know that because of the New York Times — and the incredibly labor-intensive reporting the organization did to unearth Trump’s taxes.

Now imagine a world — maybe as soon as a decade in the future — in which there is no fact checker at the Washington Post. Or the New York Times doesn’t have enough staff to allow 4 people to spend months trying to get to the bottom of a candidate’s taxes

It may seem outlandish. Until, that is, you go and look at the charts in this post. And realize that, if anything, the number of layoffs (and the decline in overall journalism jobs) is speeding up, not slowing down.

And that even the meager solutions to the creeping reality that journalism is a very bad business have turned up a bust in recent days.

Remember how the billionaire class was going to save journalism? This, from the New York Times a few days ago, is a sober reality check on that hope:

As the prospects for news publishers waned in the past decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.

All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.

But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.

So, yeah. The billionaires are not going to save us.

There have been some green shoots in recent years. Axios built a business from scratch — and sold it to Cox Enterprises in 2022 for more than a half billion dollars. Semafor continues to attract significant investments. Substack has become a huge platform for writers.

But these are exceptions to the overall rule. And that rule is that the business of journalism is in free fall — even as the editorial necessity of journalism is more urgent than ever.

What’s the solution? If I knew that, I would tell you! And I would be the publisher of one of these massive media titans! (Although I am pretty sure they don’t know the answer either.

Look. I didn’t write this post as a way to pump up Substack or to try to push paid subscriptions to this newsletter. But I do think that people need to get comfortable with the idea that we all need to financially support journalism if we want it to survive.

There is simply no way around that fact. Journalism isn’t a non profit. This stuff costs money. And if you believe that we need journalism — and we do — you need to be willing to invest in it.

I love journalism. I have since the very first time I spent time in a newsroom. A lot has changed about it — and not all good — since I started in it 25 years ago. But the core of it remains the same: Societally we rely on facts, transparency and accountability. There is no other industry that provides all of those things like journalism can — and does.

The question is now not whether journalists love journalism. It’s whether you all care enough about it to invest in it. To say that, yes, it is important enough to me to have a free and independent press that I will spend my hard-earned money supporting it.

There’s really no other way. Make no mistake. We are in an absolute journalistic crisis. The only way out is to proactively invest in the journalism you care about. That doesn’t have to be a paid subscription to this newsletter. Or a subscription to the Post or the Times. But it HAS to include a few journalists or journalistic organizations.

It takes all of us. We need you. I need you.