Last week, a disturbing arrival crashed onto Australia’s shores, upsetting journalists and news consumers alike: the tsunami that is the much-discussed US “extinction event” for news media. Looks like the end days are upon us.
It made landfall at one of Australia’s US-billionaire-controlled traditional media outlets, with Paramount Global announcing it was shedding 800 jobs including an unspecified number at the struggling Network Ten.
The Paramount losses follow the January slashing of 800 journalist jobs in the US at once dominant media dinosaurs including The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and the collapse of last year’s good news story (for journalism, at least), the US$50 million start-up digital news service The Messenger. Last year had already been grim, with about 2,700 US news journalists laid off.
The chilling “extinction event” metaphor was launched by New York-based media consultant Matthew Goldstein in his January newsletter as a “potential” in “the future”. But as the shock-waves of cuts at WaPo, the LA Times and The Messenger rolled across the industry (and into Australia), “the future” quickly became: “about now”.
Suddenly, the metaphor was everywhere. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asked The Atlantic. Meanwhile The New Yorker wanted to know: “Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?” Politico was more declarative (if metaphorically confused): “The news business really is cratering.”
The collapse of the LA Times has been most dramatic: serving a southern California market with a population about the size of Australia, the masthead had long hoped to leverage the digital shift to become The New York Times of the Pacific. It had a similar-sized newsroom of about 1,200 at the turn of the century.
With these job cuts, the number now sits at around 400. The NYT meanwhile has grown to about 1,700 editorial staff.
Its losses also mark the collapse of a particular journalistic dream, that somewhere there’ll be a friendly billionaire happy to bail you out as a bit of a hobby. At the LA Times, that was Patrick Soon-Shiong. At WaPo, it was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Turns out that while billionaires may have deep pockets, when it comes to their media sidelines their arms can be disappointingly short. (And as Crikey pointed out last week in relation to Kerry Stokes’ control of Seven West Media, the investment may well be more “strategic” than journalistically altruistic.)
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 44,500 journalists employed in the US just two years ago, about 18,000 working in newspapers and magazines. According to the not-for-profit focussed on local news, Report for America, in 1990, there were about 55,000 journalists in newspapers alone.
Expect US journalist numbers to continue to slide, hitting 35,000 sometime this year. And, as in Australia, expect them to continue to consolidate in the global metropolitan news centres.
We don’t have reliable figures for the number of journalists in Australia, but an internal union count back in 2000 identified about 10,000 people earning a living as journalists. With last year’s job losses, that number is now probably proportional to the US figures — about 3,500, with the ABC employing the largest number.
For news media, it’s an “everything at once” moment: audiences are abandoning news; subscriptions are, if you’re lucky, flat-lining; advertising is, umm, “cratering”. And in Australia it looks like big tech is reluctant to renew its deals to pay off old media under the news media bargaining code.
And that’s before generative-AI-powered search keeps users sequestered in the Google search ecosystem with no need to click through to the original publisher’s page.
There are already plenty of indications that Australian news media could face its own extinction moment, like the latest financial report from our other US-billionaire-owned behemoth, News Corporation, showing a 6% slide in its Australian masthead revenues.
When it comes to news media, as analyst Brian Morrissey says in his newsletter The Rebooting, it seems we’re seeing “the scale era fading in the rearview mirror”.
Yet, in Australia at least, traditional media is doubling down on the past: consolidating, syndicating, job-shedding and focussing more tightly on a narrow, last-century definition of “news”. Instead, it should be looking at the areas that offer some hope: the experimentation and diversity of new media, which can still offer a roadmap to the future.
Pearls & Irritations has also published an article on this topic today: https://johnmenadue.com/the-craft-of-journalism-is-dying-can-independent-consortiums-save-it/
I presently buy only two print papers each week. One is The Saturday Paper which maintains high levels of journalism with several excellent regular journos plus some articles from regular and occasional contributors. The other is The Canberra Times which I buy only because of its TV guide – the one available on my tv set is deplorably clunky.
There are many problems, not the least of which is the unwillingness, or inability, of writers to hold or express a view contrary to that of the editor and/or proprietor. There is also a reliance on stereotypes which are inaccurate (there is an interesting article out today about the real attributes of smokers) or not based on evidence. There is the question of ethical behaviour (273 interactions between a journalist and a person conducting an inquiry commissioned by a government with the journo receiving a copy of the report before the government received theirs.) Then there is the matter of advertisers (I know I am not the only person who would never again consider shopping at Harvey Norman stores after their $30 million Covid Jobkeeper payment but their ads fill, even wrap-around, TCT).
I am even older than the much-maligned boomers. I can afford to choose what I want to read and subscribe accordingly. I do not choose the news networks familiar to older Australians. It’s not rocket science.
But you also reveal why ‘Journalism’ as you would like it to be is dying.
“I can afford to choose what I want to read and subscribe accordingly.” “I do not choose the news networks familiar to older Australians.”
So essentially – like almost everyone else – you’re retreating into a gated info-community of the defacto like-minded. You’ve already made clear where your political biases lie, which is fine – we all have them – but you inadvertently out your biases on (what you regard as) desirable ‘Journalism’, too, when you cite Albrechtsen’s interactions with Sofronnoff on ‘ethics’. You could equally (and far more credibly) attack David Sharaz’s and Brittany Higgins’s sustained cynical interactions with many, many more journalists across the entire sweep of that story, if what you are trying to do is argue against the dangers of journalists compromising their ethics for inside access. You don’t, because your definition of ‘good journalism’ is, of course, definitively informed by your politics. I’ll hazard that you’d similarly see it as ‘good and fair public interest journalism’ when the ABC goes hard on elected representative Barnaby Joyce’s public drunken boorishness; but it’s ‘bad, unethical, bullying anti-journalism’ when Rupert Murdoch’s outlets go after Lidia Thorpe’s drunken public boorishness.
You ‘think’ you support ‘good journalism’, MJM, but what you really support is ‘journalism that flatters and legitimises your politics’. And everyone else – me included – thinks the same way. None of us, of course, will admit that. I say I admit it, but of course I don’t really think I’m biased, in the way that I know you are. But, of course, I am. I mean, I know I’m not biased, and you are…but I also know that of course I am as biased as you. Except that I’m not – although I am. Biased. Not.
And so on. This is the fundamental problem with this entire argument about ‘good journalism’ and ‘objectivity’ and how to get it back. The mistake capital J ‘Journalism’ made was to buy into any of it, at all. This occurred as the tertiary-educated middle classes took over the craft and the platforms, and poshed ‘Journalism’ up into something it was never epistemically supposed to be (nor could ever be, sustainably). Hitherto ‘reporters’ – who were traditionally reactive, unreflexive, lumpen-thick, slightly grubby but ruthlessly-inquisitive and nothing-civic-to-lose creatures of the five ‘interrogative pronouns’ (What happened, when, where, to whom, and how? BUT NEVER ‘why?) – embraced delusions of civic hero-hood, and gradually became
frustrated novelists, posturing cod-intellectuals and wannabe celebritiesahem Democracy’s Self-appointed ‘Storytellers’ instead. (‘Democracy’s Story-tellers’…vomit, vomit, spew, chuck, hurl, ick…). Thus, rather than just perform the useful but fairly unglamorous civic job of passing on what they can empirically observe and ascertain on our behalf, as our eyes and ears, and then step back and let us load up that scant hard information with whatever our pre-prepared biases may be (as we will anyway)…they instead felt entitled (indeed, vocationally obliged, as a professional virtue!) to ‘put things in narrative context’ for us, too, blah blah blah. To ‘tell us a story’ about what they observed. That, right there, was when journalism decide to commit vocational suicide. I always think Watergate is a useful pivot for when the centre-of-gravity of the daily news trade shifted – there have I suppose always been charlatans posing as ‘reporters’ and ‘journalists’ – but that’s probably a bit arbitrary. It’s been a slow but inevitable transition into today’s All-Information-Is-Equally-Uo-For-Grabs paralysed morass, and a good half a century for technology and the…erm…democratisation of ‘democratic story-telling’ – 0, vomit, spew, blargh, hurl, upchuck – to deliver the inevitable, but here we now are. We are all ‘journalists’ now, and all public information is ‘journalism’. Which means, obviously, that none of us are, and none of it is. It’s all just opinions and biases and blah and noise, a mass of frantically oscillating 1’s and 0’s, bombarding us all in over-written ‘story’ form.Alas, poor tragicke ‘Journalism’: you just can’t put hard information – objective information (That jumper is red; that human is a woman; that Israeli soldier shot that unarmed Palestinian boy dead; that Hamas member raped that unarmed Israeli girl) – into a ‘story-telling narrative’ without surrendering to one or another set of ‘biases’. It’s impossible to do (unless you are God. Like Me.). MJM’s post above is just a ‘narrative’; his. As is my post in response; mine. You tell me which biased narrative gets closer to God-like truth on ‘Journalism’… and then you’ll be God, too.
Reporters should never have stepped into this vocational minefield at all. Ah, but that’s the aspiring, social-climbing middle classes for you, innit: always getting above their station. Soooo…HOT TIP for journos, for free, if you want to help throw your vocation a lifeline? If what you really want to be is a novelist…effing quit journalism and get a job as a care worker while you try to write one. If you secretly want to be an ‘intellectual’, go back to university and chase academic tenure. And if – as I suspect is mostly the case, nowadays – what your thumping little middle class wannabe heart truly desires is…just to ‘be famous’…then go on MAFS.
That was good writing among thanks jack other things it reminds me of the importance of free to air television, which in its current state unsurprisingly find very destructive on many levels , it still has some virtues but they’re the exception .
It’s hard to be sympathetic, given how Australian and U.S. journalists over the past 10-15 years have neglected the investigation and reporting of news, and instead just copied politicians’ press releases, accepted everything at face value, portrayed political theatre is if it is important, and engaged in the wholesale writing (or rewriting) of made-up news for ideological purposes.
Much of Australia’s media ecosystem could be replaced by AI, right now.
No-one respects a stooge, not even Putin.
Why pay stooges when they can be programmed almost for free?
Looking forward to the final copy of The Australian.
Look forward more to Davros popping its clogs. I hope it’s interred here so I can shower my respect.
The youngsters at Honi Soit put out an interesting cover some years ago!
https://mumbrella.com.au/the-students-are-revolting-404823
Yes, it’s hard to see any way to halt the decline. All the cost-cutting is killing the ability of the media to deliver the journalism that it should depend on. Some time ago it could have been described as trimming the fat, but now it is cutting the last bits of vital flesh.
For another example to add to those in the article, there’s a report in a recent Private Eye about the latest moves at Reach plc, which owns a significant swathe of UK newspapers, mostly local such as the Liverpool Echo and Manchester Evening News, but also the Mirror and Express. The CEO Jim Mullen recently announced yet more job cuts and told the few remaining journalists that print will be completely dead in a few years and the company’s only target is to get eyeballs on its websites by any means necessary. He said,
‘I need to get page views — that is the way we sell advertising blocks and advertising blocks deliver revenue. I know it is not ideal. We don’t talk about engagement and quality… Page views are not a measure of quality but we live in the real world where there are bills for millions of pounds ands we need the page views because that’s how we sell the ads’
There was more in an equally depressing vein. The basic message is clear enough. Where there used to be newspapers that, among other things, reported news, there will now be clickbait factories & tr—ll farms doing whatever it takes to grab eyeballs.
AI will wipe out the entire industry to where only the executives and shareholders will be making money from wordsmithing. We’re almost there now.