ACE OF SPADES: The New Yorker: Is The Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
Note that this is a different article from the similarly titled “Is the Media Heading Towards an Extinction-Level Event?” that appeared in The Atlantic February 2nd.
The media basically just copies from each other and writes the same ten pieces over and over again.
Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.
It would be nice if you stopped lying to that audience all the time.
And as far as an audience being “burned out:” maybe you could stop the endless Cycles of Crisis where one Outrage is only displaced by the next Cause for Alarm and then that is replaced by the next Moral Panic.
Maybe your liberal readers — who are highly neurotic, as every survey shows — wouldn’t be so burned out if you weren’t constantly lighting their nervous systems on fire with your panic pornography.
A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast–the publisher of The New Yorker–all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees. In just the first month of 2024, Condé Nast laid off a significant number of Pitchfork’s staff and folded the outlet into GQ; the Los Angeles Times laid off at least a hundred and fifteen workers (their union called it “the big one”); Time cut fifteen per cent of its union-represented editorial staff; the Wall Street Journal slashed positions at its D.C. bureau; and Sports Illustrated, which had been weathering a scandal for publishing A.I.-generated stories, laid off much of its staff as well. One journalist recently cancelled a networking phone call with me, writing, “I’ve decided to officially take my career in a different direction.” There wasn’t much I could say to counter that conclusion; it was perfectly logical.
Keep talking that hot, sweaty sexytalk.
If only someone could have predicted the potentially disastrous impact of being myopic coastal-oriented publications that ignored or insulted the views of millions of Americans living in the vast region it dismissed as “flyover country.” If only:
