OLD AND BUSTED: “Food Deserts.”
The New Hotness? “News Deserts!” As More Media Layoffs Ring in the New Year, Americans Face Prospect of ‘News Deserts.’
The media industry has been rocked this holiday season by news of newsroom layoffs as outlets downsize to combat volatility in advertising, after an already-brutal year of job cuts.
In the last month alone, Condé Nast, G/O Media, Vice Media and Vox Media have all cut staff, most of whom already had layoffs earlier this year. (Vice filed for bankruptcy in June.)
Broadcast, print and digital outlets collectively saw 2,681 journalism job cuts in 2023, up 48% from 1,808 in 2022 and 77% from 1,511 in 2021, according to a report from employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
With a collapsing advertising-revenue model and more media companies experimenting with artificial intelligence to create content, the outlook for journalism is dimming, media analysts told TheWrap. The decline underscores the need for the public and even governments to fund news gathering if it is to survive in its current form and avoid widespread “news deserts,” they said.
“All available evidence suggests that the commercial future for journalism is especially dire,” Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, told TheWrap. “We cannot simply let the market drive local journalism into the ground. I expect to see more legislative efforts, especially at state government levels, aimed at shoring up and even expanding local journalism.”
The staffers of China’s Xinhua News Agency, North Korea’s KCNA, and the ghosts of Pravda smile; because governments funding journalism has always ended so well for all concerned in the past.
There is a bit of good news, though. Presumably, “news deserts” will work out as well as the original “food deserts” have, as Glenn blogged in 2017:
“Food deserts” claim is bogus. “This is a good paper with a credible research design and impressive data from some 35,000 supermarkets covering 40% of the United States. Moreover, because of the widespread attention given to ‘food deserts’ this paper probably had to be written. But color me un-surprised. The results are obvious.”
Also, when you ground-truth the government’s food-desert map, you find things like this: “Knoxville’s Federally-Designated “Food Deserts” Include Super Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger. Plus a couple of tasty oriental supermarkets.” And a Trader Joe’s.
Related: “If food deserts actually exist, why can’t both the USDA and the local bureaucrats make an accurate map of them?” And if they can’t make an accurate map, what’s the chance that they’ll accomplish anything no matter how well-funded?
Of course, with this being Obama’s third term, the DNC-MSM have reverted to their groveling tone from the start of his original administration, along the lines of The Hill post from September of 2009: Obama open to newspaper bailout bill.