Sports Illustrated. The Los Angeles Times. Pitchfork. Time. National Geographic. The Washington Post. It has not been a good few weeks to be employed in the media. It has not been a good few decades to be employed in the media.
Just this week, a huge number of journalists joined, um, me, among the ranks of experienced reporters and support personnel bounced from their jobs in mass layoffs. This is nothing new, of course, and the employment market for people who report and write for a living is not getting any better with time.
We can look at how the advertising-supported business model can’t support the workforce necessary to do the job. We can look at subscription-based operations, and how consumers have limits on how much they can spend on news and entertainment. Or we can point fingers at management and private equity investment, and how even the most civic-minded multi-millionaires have little patience when they buy the local paper to “save” it and discover just how bad the business has become.
It has to be the peak of discouragement to feel the high of working at a news organization sold to a local civic leader rather than one of the notorious slash-and-burn private equity consolidators, only to get canned anyway when the owner decides to cut losses and pare the operation down to a minimum (which is what just happened to the L.A. Times).
Or… we can ask ourselves why the public doesn’t want to spend anything on what we’re offering. What — we need to ask ourselves — does the audience want that they don’t want to get from us? How did we get to the point where a headline from a questionable “source” on Facebook is good enough for most people? Will they even notice when those “sources” become AI, and the information contained therein is even less reliable than it is today?
I once thought public media would be the answer, the bulwark against the flood of bad information flooding social media, but there aren’t enough Pro Publicas or public radio news consortia to do the job, and their good work is getting lost in the noise. Living in what might be the largest public media desert in the nation – the West Palm Beach market has no NPR affiliate of its own, relying on a translator of Miami’s fine WLRN, and its PBS affiliate was swallowed up by its larger Miami competitor and its antenna moved down there – we are at the mercy of newspapers owned by Gannett and Alden Global Capital and a handful of local news sites.
Maybe that’s the answer, and maybe that’s where we’re headed. People do like their Nextdoor and their Facebook groups, and maybe more truly local reporting published not through traditional means but through social media would cut through. Maybe the way to fight the trash news sources is to do what they do, just with the truth. But monetizing that… I dunno.
So many unemployed or underemployed journalists are doing Substack newsletters that I can’t imagine too many of them making any money on it. Patreon is basically a tin cup. Email newsletters with ads? Maybe. Podcasts with local news? There’s opportunity there, but it sends us back to the advertising model, which hasn’t been as robust as it needs to be.
Then there’s this: It’s not like all media is unprofitable. In fact, take corporate debt out of the equation and even radio is economically viable; it’s just not growing, which is an issue for the investors, and AM is rapidly becoming unviable. Some newspapers and magazines have been able to maintain economic viability in the transition to digital. Some new content companies have found a receptive audience for what they do.
And the common denominator is that they offer content that enough people want, for which they are willing to pay. I subscribe to a bunch of newspapers in digital form, but I also pay for Defector. I listen to radio and podcasts, but I also pay for Spotify so I can hear the music I want on demand. Content I want in a form I prefer. That works.
What doesn’t work is cutting out the content people want. The L.A. Times just laid off the beat reporters covering several local sports teams, including firing their Dodgers reporter weeks before Shohei Ohtani makes his Spring Training debut. Someone decided that the primary newspaper in Los Angeles doesn’t need a local reporter covering the Dodgers in a season fans can’t wait to get started. Entertainment coverage also got the ax. If you want to fast-track a news organization’s demise, that’ll do it.
The opportunity is to fill the void being left by overleveraged or poorly run news media. The monetization is the head-scratching part. Whoever figures that out will be a hero. Anybody out there got a cape in their closet?
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
