<
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/>
"For a few hours last Tuesday, the entire news business seemed to be collapsing
all at once. Journalists at
Time magazine and
National Geographic announced
that they had been laid off. Unionized employees at magazines owned by Condé
Nast staged a one-day strike to protest imminent cuts. By far the grimmest news
was from the
Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper west of the Washington,
D.C., area. After weeks of rumors, the paper announced that it was cutting 115
people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom.
The
Times was once a pillar of the American media establishment, celebrated
in David Halberstam’s classic media study,
The Powers That Be. Now it has
become a national exemplar of what the journalist Margaret Sullivan calls the
“ghosting” of the news—the gradual withering of news-gathering muscle as
once-proud publications become shadows of their old selves. The biotech
billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong looked like a savior when he bought the
Times
from its cost-cutting corporate parent in 2018. For a few years, he was;
Soon-Shiong invested about $1 billion, by his count, to build up the depleted
organization. But he turned out to have his limits. Facing mounting losses, in
June last year the
Times dropped 74 people from its newsroom. Last week’s
even bigger blow was foreshadowed by managerial turmoil: Three top editors,
including the executive editor Kevin Merida, resigned just before the news came
down. “I won’t fault him for being unwilling to write checks,” Matt Pearce, a
Times reporter who is head of the newspaper’s union, told me, referring to
Soon-Shiong. But, he added, “we don’t seem to have a clear theory of the case
as a business. We need to execute on a strategy. And we don’t have one.”
(Soon-Shiong declined to comment for this article.)"
Via Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who wrote "Welcome to my world. While this story is
about mainstream journalism, my niche of technology journalism is also seeing
layoffs and facing the same problems. This is not just bad news for
journalists, it’s bad for anyone who wants to know what’s what in the world,
whether it’s your local high school’s football results, who won the election,
or what smartphone gives you the most bang for the buck."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
