IT’S LONG OVERDUE; RIGOR MORTIS SET IN DECADES AGO: An Obit for Journalism.
The year 2024 began with grim news for the news. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 staffers in January, triggering doomsday conclusions about journalism’s future. Media experts who had worked hard to save the industry seemed ready to admit that the end was near. As one longtime observer noted, “It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry. . . . The old news industry has failed at adapting to the internet and every one of their would-be saviors—from tablets to paywalls to programmatic ads to consolidation to billionaires—has failed them.”
That generalization is correct. The Los Angeles Times layoffs represent the failure of the billionaire business model, one of the media industry’s last great hopes. When billionaire and biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the West Coast newspaper in 2018, hoping to preserve it, he joined Jeff Bezos (who bought the Washington Post in 2013) and Marc Benioff (Time in 2018) as would-be benevolent stewards, happy to write off modest losses to keep the public informed. But Time also recently announced staff cuts, while the Post laid off 240 people last year. The L.A. layoffs just confirmed the failure of the model.
For the news business, it is the latest, and perhaps the last, sign of systemic collapse. Earlier strategies—paywalls, merging with e-commerce, membership models, digital platforms, foundation and philanthropic funding—all failed to rescue individual publications, much less the entire industry. Those few investors or donors who do remain tend to care more about their special agendas than about journalism per se. Hopes for maintaining the press as it once existed have vanished.
“The media is melting down, and neither billionaires nor journalists can seem to stop it,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Journalism may never again make money,” states the Washington Post. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asks The Atlantic. Indeed, an obituary for the American press is overdue. And it turns out that the death of journalistic objectivity has been both cause and effect.
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