State of the Press
At a crucial moment for America, journalism is at a crossroads. Can it be saved?
No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press.
āThomas Jefferson
It has not been a stellar year for journalism. In January, the Los Angeles Times fell into what the Daily Beast labeled a death spiral, dismissing at least 115 employees from its newsroom. That same week, Business Insider terminated 8% of its newsroom and TIME magazine laid off roughly 15% of its unionized workforce.
Even specialized fields once thought untouchable found themselves brutalized by the tide. Massive layoffs in February gutted Sports Illustrated, once the premier voice in sports journalism. This came only five years after SI dismissed 30% of its staff following the magazineās purchase by the brand-management firm Authentic Brands Group. Pitchfork, previously one of the most successful internet-native publications, halved its staff as it was folded into GQ by parent company CondĆ© Nast.
Near the end of February, Columbia Journalism Review called out the early months of 2024 as an incredibly dark time in journalismās history. It cited the loss of more than 800 reporter jobs, including 300 in one swipe with the shuttering of The Messenger. The cutbacks didnāt stop there, either. In mid-August, Axios laid off around 50 employees. At the same time, Slate cut several, including Joel Anderson, a writer and podcaster who scored a āBest Podcast of the Yearā Ambie for the outlet only five months earlier. Thatās all on the heels of āover 2,500 layoffs in broadcast, print and digital news mediaā in 2023, according to Columbia.
And yet, in the midst of an election campaign that many argue could determine the future of the American democratic experiment, the need for reliable, accurate reporting has never been greater.
At this pivotal juncture, CC Magazine asked alumni journalists and experts: Can journalism be saved?
Not Business As Usual
The advent of the internet sent a fledgling Information Age into overdrive. No longer did Americans have to wait for news to leave the printing press and ride on a truck or in the basket of a bicycle to their front porches. News was more accessible than ever before in human history.
But news organizations, which had long relied on advertising dollars, saw their business models in peril. eBay quickly killed the classified ad. Traditional advertisers were slower to make the switch, but 31 years after the launch of the World Wide Web, the impact on the industry is abundantly clear.
āAs tech behemoths like Google and Facebook have taken more and more of the advertising dollars that used to fund a robust lineup of reporting in print, television and online, many outlets have failed,ā says Joshua Green ā94, Bloomberg Businessweekās senior national correspondent and political reporter. āOr [theyāve] been acquired by rapacious private equity companies with no sense of civic obligation or responsibility, which have bled them dry or reduced them to a shell of what they once were.ā
Thatās exactly what happened to the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts, says Daniella Melo ā04, founder and board member of the independent nonprofit publication The New Bedford Light.
āIt was bought and sold several times, first by News Corp, then by a private equity firm [Fortress Investment Group]. Each time, progressively more people are fired and the paper gets smaller. The coverage lessens. Soon, there was very little investigative reporting happening,ā Melo says. āAnd that has happened to a lot of papers across the United States.ā
Freelance reporter Tara Law ā14 says the pressure on those who remain is immense.
āThereās a sense that weāre always racing. Thereās pressure to publish much faster. Junior reporters have fewer opportunities to build up a place in a field now because theyāre expected to be generalists. It makes it harder to publish truly in-depth pieces that are much more important for readers,ā she says.
Martha Joynt Kumar ā63, an emeritus professor of political science at Towson University and director of the White House Transition Project, has spent decades recording and analyzing the relationship between journalists and the White House. A scholar of the presidency and the press, sheās gravely concerned about the degradation of news at the local levelāand its impact on the national level.
āSo many newspapers have gone out of business, leaving many areas important to citizens uncovered: budgeting at the local level, actions of the citizen council that people are asked to vote for,ā she says.
āAt the same time, the Associated Press is so important to bringing national news to the local level, but with fewer and fewer papers, it makes it more difficult for them to operate. Weāre having a paucity of information thatās critical in a democratic society.ā
