What I learned from talking to 40 people about their 2019 media layoffs
This week, I published a 3,000-word feature story about the human toll of the 2019 media layoff apocalypse over at Medium’s GEN publication. In total, depending on your count, there were somewhere between 3,000-ish and 7,000-ish layoffs this year. (I suspect the real answer is on the higher end of counts/estimates). The story was the result of several weeks of interviews with about 40 people across North America who were either laid off from their media jobs this year or bought out of their jobs (which, let’s be honest, is just a nicer kind of layoff).
If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing (I don’t blame you), here are some things about the media landscape of the late 2010s I learned/realized/were further cemented into my brain while working on this piece. It’s grim reading! I apologize in advance.
Making severance conditional on signing an NDA or agreeing to a non-disparagement agreement is a common practice in media that shouldn’t be legal. So many laid-off reporters and editors who spent their entire careers working for newspapers now owned by places like Gannett/GateHouse were too scared of violating these agreements to speak to me even on background because they feared their former employer revoking their severance pay or threatening legal action.
Nowhere and nothing is safe. Layoffs this year spared no outlet or kind of reporting. They hit TV, newspaper, magazine, and digital operations. Sports reporters, finance reporters, and entertainment reporters all got laid off. It didn’t matter if you’d worked at an outlet like Youngstown, Ohio’s Vindicator, which shut down this summer after 150 years in print, for one year out of college or 24—you were vulnerable regardless.
Job-hopping in media today feels like jumping from one lifeboat to another lifeboat while both are simultaneously sinking and on fire. When I connect writer friends with editor friends in hopes of getting writers full-time jobs, I feel a sense of responsibility for making sure my job-seeing friends know and understand the instability of the outlets in which they’re hoping to find gainful employment. This is sort of a #2 redux but when you see nearly every news outlet shed employees in the span of a year, the alternative to seeking full-time media employment—freelancing—becomes a lot more attractive, especially when you figure that after six months of employment at [literally any publication] your job could be on the chopping block and you’ll end up freelancing again anyway.
Local and regional news should be centered in this conversation. The way private equity firms and hedge funds are destroying local news outlets is often a footnote in our conversations about the woes and perils of late 2010s media, but they are the perfect example of what’s happening to many publications.
The disproportionate focus on coastal/digital outlets creates a power and social capital imbalance. The solidarity that exists among New York and Dc based media should be extended to smaller pubs. It tends to be easier for a former Vice staffer who gets laid off and has a big national platform, for example, to find a new job than it is for a reporter from the Corpus Christi Caller Times to do the same thing.
Newsroom layoffs affect newsroom diversity, and newsroom leadership diversity. I wish I’d done more with this element of the story in my own reporting, but frankly, it could and should be its own 3,000-word feature.
Newsroom layoffs, especially newspaper layoffs, affect more than just the journalists—there are entire teams of people involved with the making, printing, and distribution of newspapers who these cuts affect. I wish I’d spoken to some of these folks for my story, too. Again, this could and should be its own story.
Layoffs affect freelancers too. If your editor contact disappears after layoffs at a publication, that could mean losing one of the ways you make money. After layoffs, publications sometimes try to change their rates up on freelancers, which almost always results in being able to make less per piece, as a writer.
People who work in media need to understand how their publications make money, and more broadly need to understand the economic realities of the industry. It should be mandatory for journalism schools to teach a class that’s just a Media Economics 101 course. You should come into this industry knowing that eventually, more than half of your friends will get laid off. It feels like malpractice to not tell younger, newer journalists entering this industry how things work. SMI said it best: “The contrast of media layoffs twitter and ‘this is what I made writing this year’ freelance twitter vs the reality of how desperately we need even more robust, informed, thoughtful journalism is a grim indictment of the economics of this industry.”
The adults in the room are the worst people we could have running journalistic institutions. This is hardly hyperbolic. In so many cases, at newspapers and in digital, soulless moneyed private-equity goons come in, think they know best how to run a website or a paper, fire, lay off, or force out the people who actually do know best, and try to maximally profit off of the husk of a service that, in a more just world, would be a public good.
It’s not over yet. It’s not going to stop. It’s probably going to get worse. I’d love to be wrong about this one, tbh.
If you’ve made it this far, congrats! This is probably going to be my last newsletter of the year. I’m going to turn off my brain for a week or two now. Did you like Pithy Outcomes this year? Would you like more consistent newsletters next year? Did you like reading me babble about the media? My inbox is open and I’d love your feedback, as I look toward 2020 and consider the likelihood that I’ll probably be freelancing like this for a while longer.