Another brutal week for American journalism

Between January and May this year, approximately 3,000 people working in the news industry were laid off or offered a buyout. That’s according to figures compiled by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.—a Chicago-based firm that helps workers find new employment—and reported yesterday in a depressing article by Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith. The industry, Smith writes, is on course for its worst year jobs-wise since 2009. Back then, the Great Recession had hammered the economy across the board; now, with America’s unemployment rate at a 50-year low, journalism is a notable outlier. “In most industries, employers can’t find enough people to fill the jobs they have open,” Andrew Challenger, vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tells Smith. “In news, it has been the opposite story. And it seems to have been accelerating.” The decline of the media job market, especially in print, is nothing new. But 2019 has been particularly brutal. All job losses are not equal—layoffs are not buyouts are not firings—and different publications have their own specific problems beyond malign, industry-wide revenue trends. Nonetheless, by my rough, incomprehensive count, this year has seen: 200 layoffs at BuzzFeed; 250 layoffs at Vice; 800 layoffs at properties owned by Verizon, including HuffPost and Yahoo; more than 1,000 layoffs or buyout offers at newspapers owned by Gannett, McClatchy, and GateHouse; the loss of every staff writer at the East Bay Express, a California alt-weekly;... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2019-07-02 12:07:17 UTC ]
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[ The Bookseller | 2012-11-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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