It has never been necessarily easy to land a lucrative, stable job in the media industry, but as of last week, the prognosis for careers in digital journalism looks to be getting worse.
Journalism is a tricky industry. It relies on unbiased, accurate, and ethical reporting but is often funded by companies and investors that prevent that from happening. It is not funded by the government, but is very often tasked with acting as a fourth “check” on how the government is doing and what the public needs to know. It has evolved from print, to radio, to TV and finally digital — in a world where each of these coexist, journalism would be abundant and thriving. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
In just the first month of 2019, 2,100 media workers have been laid off — writers and reporters at well-known sites like Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, and Vice. HuffPost, Yahoo, and AOL are all owned by Verizon, which laid off 7% of its workforce, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, while Buzzfeed laid off 15% of its entire workforce, many of which were entire teams of reporters, as well as, their National and Mental Health desks. Buzzfeed’s choice to lay off employees in an effort to increase revenue became even more questionable when it was revealed that an unpaid community contributor had created a majority of the popular quizzes that drove so much of Buzzfeed’s online traffic. It’s not entirely clear if the layoffs that occurred throughout the board necessarily happened for the exact same reasons. What is clear, however, is that the business model currently being used to prop up journalism has become unsustainable, and unless it is restructured, the industry as a whole will continue to fail.
The news of the massive layoffs surely comes as a disappointment to many of us, myself included, who wish to find a job in the industry after graduation. Perhaps what is the most discomforting is not the fact that there is no demand for these kinds of jobs — when in fact this is certainly not the case — but the fact that the business model has not evolved with us, and future generations of writers and reporters might have to suffer because of it.
Rather than succumb to the unfortunate reality presented by the disappointing layoffs, we should focus our efforts on becoming stronger writers, engaging in critical analysis of news like this, and wondering how we can make both ourselves, and the industry as a whole, stronger.