No One Knows How to Save the Press

By Becket Adams

Sunday, March 24, 2024

 

The one thing that people in the news business seem to know for sure is that no one knows how to save the news business.

 

It’s a depressing state of affairs.

 

The Los Angeles Times laid off 20 percent of its newsroom in January. At around the same time, NBC News and MSNBC fired a combined 75 employees. Time magazine fired 15 percent of its staff. The Messenger, which launched less than a year ago and quickly built up a staff of nearly 300, shuttered entirely. Sports Illustrated likewise laid off its entire staff. Though it appears to have avoided total extinction by signing a publishing deal this month with Minute Media, the sports magazine’s long-term outlook remains uncertain, to put it gently. Elsewhere, Vice announced plans to lay off hundreds of staffers while also ceasing publishing on Vice.com.

 

These staggering figures are for 2024 alone, and it’s not even April yet.

 

Something is broken. Unfortunately, no one has a clue as to the fix.

 

The so-called business visionaries of Silicon Valley have tried their hand at “disrupting” the news industry, adapting it to the digital age. They’ve introduced automated news-writing algorithms and blockchain-based news-verification systems, among other gimmicks. But these attempts have not been successful, highlighting the difficulty of selling news in the digitized era.

 

As I’ve written before, some of the press’s current woes are of its own making. The era of mass-media production has, for example, trained audiences to expect the news for “free.” The era of instantaneous information, 24-hour cable news, etc., has led to a permanent shift in consumer expectations. Who is going to pay for a newspaper subscription with so many other quicker, more readily available ways to read or hear the headlines?

 

But the real problem lies in the product itself. To put it plainly, it stinks, both in terms of content and credibility. On the first score, traditional media produce an awful lot of journalism that is as lazy as it is uninteresting. Then, there’s the matter of public trust. Traditional media have lost the confidence of news consumers, ranking below even Big Pharma and Wall Street, hence the general exodus toward alternative news sources, including paid, subscriber-only newsletters and podcasts. The move from newspaper subscriptions to, say, Joe Rogan’s podcast does not represent a larger business-model problem for legacy media. It represents a product problem.

 

And as troubling as the difficulties dogging the news industry are, it’s equally troubling that nobody seems to know how to stanch the bleeding.

 

The dean at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism did float one idea. She suggests that journalism schools should be free of charge.

 

“To continue to have journalists, we need to make their journalism education free,” Graciela Mochkofsky wrote last week in the New York Times. “We need journalists whose only obligations are to the facts and the society they serve, not to lenders; who are concerned with the public interest, not with interest rates; who can make risky decisions and take the difficult path if that’s what the mission requires, free of financial burden. Journalism schools can help achieve that. In tough times, it is natural to mourn the past or lament the present, but what we really need is bold action.”

 

In an era of mass layoffs and newsroom closures, creating an artificial glut of journalists hardly seems like a realistic solution. Indeed, it seems destined only to exacerbate the problem, like a Great Depression–era job line where 50 men battle brutally over a single dockworker gig.

 

Other recommendations for how to save the industry have been even more unhelpful.

 

“Mass layoffs are tearing through US media,” warned the socialist magazine Jacobin. “To preserve a functioning media ecosystem, we need 3 things: immediate aid to struggling journalists, public subsidies to smaller news outlets, and eventually industry transformation into a publicly funded system.”

 

Surprise, surprise. The socialists believe the state should fund journalism.

 

If you think the news media’s crisis of credibility is bad now — a crisis that has contributed to the public’s general unwillingness to pay for the news — just wait until major media are beholden to lawmakers. The only thing Americans trust less than the news media is the U.S. Congress.

 

No, the socialist model won’t do.

 

Is there a model that will work, one that will stop the slide and restore the news model as we have come to know it?

 

The answer is most likely no. Times have changed. The type of newsroom romanticized by Hollywood — everything from the culture to the aesthetic portrayed in films such as All the President’s Men — will almost certainly go the way of the dodo. We live now in the digital era, where information flies faster than we can type, and where public trust in institutions is at historic lows.

 

The best way forward is to focus on one of the problems mentioned above: the product.

 

For major media to have any hope of maintaining the traditional role of the press in American life, they would have to return to the basics of producing a quality product, the type of thing for which people will happily pay. This would mean moving away from the 24-hour model of clogging newsfeeds and airwaves with “content” to protect against the horrors of “dead air.” This would also mean moving away from partisan hackery, as reflected in headlines such as “Republicans fixate on messy Afghanistan withdrawal”; that political framing is trash in terms of providing the public with thought-provoking and worthwhile news. Once the matter of the product is addressed, it will then just be a question of the method of delivery. This is where you will see serious, physical changes. In order to adapt to the modern era, and to move toward a more financially sustainable and efficient newsroom model, you will have to see a move away from the 20th-century physical newsroom, the large fluorescent-lit caverns lined with hundreds of cubicles and fishbowl offices set aside for editors and management. Massive corporate newsrooms will have to be scaled to size, cutting the fat to what is needed versus what is desired.

 

In order to survive, the product needs to improve. It needs to be as exciting as it is credible. The industry must reestablish trust with audiences. Fail at this, fail at everything else. Meanwhile, the newsroom itself needs to shrink in size. Apologies to all the overpaid anchors and editors, but those multimillion-dollar contracts are now as unsustainable as they’ve been unreasonable.

 

Whether the corporate press, much of which has grown fat and lazy in its old age, will accept the necessary changes is yet to be seen. Time and necessity may force adjustments. Either that or the owners cash out, and the organization is put down, creating hundreds more unemployed journalists.

 

There’s no doubt that journalism is changing to fit our times. Those who accept and adapt to the new model will survive. For those who want to cling to the way things were — the best they can hope for is a future where Congress subsidizes journalism.

 

And that’s hardly a future worth hoping for.