The end days of mass media are upon us

Last week, a disturbing arrival crashed onto Australia’s shores, upsetting journalists and news consumers alike: the tsunami that is the much-discussed US “extinction event” for news media. Looks like the end days are upon us.

It made landfall at one of Australia’s US-billionaire-controlled traditional media outlets, with Paramount Global announcing it was shedding 800 jobs including an unspecified number at the struggling Network Ten. 

The Paramount losses follow the January slashing of 800 journalist jobs in the US at once dominant media dinosaurs including The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and the collapse of last year’s good news story (for journalism, at least), the US$50 million start-up digital news service The Messenger. Last year had already been grim, with about 2,700 US news journalists laid off.

The chilling “extinction event” metaphor was launched by New York-based media consultant Matthew Goldstein in his January newsletter as a “potential” in “the future”. But as the shock-waves of cuts at WaPo, the LA Times and The Messenger rolled across the industry (and into Australia), “the future” quickly became: “about now”. 

Suddenly, the metaphor was everywhere. “Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?” asked The Atlantic. Meanwhile The New Yorker wanted to know: “Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event?” Politico was more declarative (if metaphorically confused): “The news business really is cratering.”

The collapse of the LA Times has been most dramatic: serving a southern California market with a population about the size of Australia, the masthead had long hoped to leverage the digital shift to become The New York Times of the Pacific. It had a similar-sized newsroom of about 1,200 at the turn of the century.

With these job cuts, the number now sits at around 400. The NYT meanwhile has grown to about 1,700 editorial staff.

Its losses also mark the collapse of a particular journalistic dream, that somewhere there’ll be a friendly billionaire happy to bail you out as a bit of a hobby. At the LA Times, that was Patrick Soon-Shiong. At WaPo, it was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. 

Turns out that while billionaires may have deep pockets, when it comes to their media sidelines their arms can be disappointingly short. (And as Crikey pointed out last week in relation to Kerry Stokes’ control of Seven West Media, the investment may well be more “strategic” than journalistically altruistic.)

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 44,500 journalists employed in the US just two years ago, about 18,000 working in newspapers and magazines. According to the not-for-profit focussed on local news, Report for America, in 1990, there were about 55,000 journalists in newspapers alone. 

Expect US journalist numbers to continue to slide, hitting 35,000 sometime this year. And, as in Australia, expect them to continue to consolidate in the global metropolitan news centres. 

We don’t have reliable figures for the number of journalists in Australia, but an internal union count back in 2000 identified about 10,000 people earning a living as journalists. With last year’s job losses, that number is now probably proportional to the US figures — about 3,500, with the ABC employing the largest number. 

For news media, it’s an “everything at once” moment: audiences are abandoning news; subscriptions are, if you’re lucky, flat-lining; advertising is, umm, “cratering”. And in Australia it looks like big tech is reluctant to renew its deals to pay off old media under the news media bargaining code.

And that’s before generative-AI-powered search keeps users sequestered in the Google search ecosystem with no need to click through to the original publisher’s page.

There are already plenty of indications that Australian news media could face its own extinction moment, like the latest financial report from our other US-billionaire-owned behemoth, News Corporation, showing a 6% slide in its Australian masthead revenues.

When it comes to news media, as analyst Brian Morrissey says in his newsletter The Rebooting, it seems we’re seeing “the scale era fading in the rearview mirror”.

Yet, in Australia at least, traditional media is doubling down on the past: consolidating, syndicating, job-shedding and focussing more tightly on a narrow, last-century definition of “news”. Instead, it should be looking at the areas that offer some hope: the experimentation and diversity of new media, which can still offer a roadmap to the future.

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