American Journalists

The American Journalist Under Attack

 This survey continues the series of major national studies of U.S. journalists begun in 1971 by sociologist John Johnstone and continued in 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2013 by David Weaver, Cleve Wilhoit and their colleagues at Indiana University. Few studies of a profession as important as journalism can claim a half-century’s analytical perspective on the work, professional attitudes, and ethics from large samples of the people working in it. That’s what this study does with its contribution of important decennial measures of the pulse of American journalism. This present study, based on an online survey with 1,600 U.S. journalists conducted in early 2022, updates these findings and adds new ones concerning democracy and threats to journalism. Overall, the findings suggest that the past decade has had significant effects on U.S. journalists, some more negative than positive. Compared to 2013, the latest demographic profile reveals that U.S. journalists are now slightly more educated on average and more likely to identify as Democrats or Independents. While the gender pay gap has narrowed, there are still significantly more men than women in the profession, and fewer racial or ethnic minorities than in the general population. U.S. journalists today are slightly more satisfied with their work and more likely to say they have complete autonomy to select stories. However, about six in 10 journalists say that journalism is headed in the wrong direction, and more than four in 10 say that that their news staffs have shrunk in 2021 rather than remained the same or grown. Other findings also indicate that U.S. journalists are less likely to consider reaching the widest possible audiences and getting information to the public quickly as very important roles, and more likely to emphasize the importance of investigating government claims. U.S. journalists continue to rely heavily on social media in their daily work, despite more than half of the journalists also thinking social media have negative impacts on their profession. Most use social media to check for breaking news and to monitor what other news organizations are doing, and few use these interactive media for interviewing sources. One of the starkest findings is the gender differences in abuse now experienced by a majority of journalists. Female journalists were 7-to-14 times more likely to have experienced sexism and about 10 times more likely to have encountered threats of sexual violence, both online and offline. Additional findings are available online at www.theAmericanJournalist.org Lars Willnat, Ph.D. John Ben Snow Research Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University David H. Weaver, Ph.D. Distinguished and Roy W. Howard Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University Cleve Wilhoit, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Media School, Indiana University

 

Journalism and Illiberalism

A number of posts have discussed media bias.

James Bennet at The Economist:

In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates. They are generally also motivated by a desire for a more just world. Neither of those tendencies are new. But there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role

Losing Newspapers

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

 From the Medill School of Journalism:

The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as “news deserts” and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, researchers at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University have found.

In addition, Medill researchers for the first time used predictive modeling to estimate the number of counties at risk of becoming news deserts. Those models show that another 228 counties are at high risk of losing local news. In creating that “Watch List,” Medill researchers and data scientists applied the characteristics of current news deserts to counties with only one news source.

Medill’s annual “State of Local News Project” report also counts about 550 digital-only local news outlets, 700 ethnic media organizations and 225 public broadcasting stations producing original local news. Most of the digital-only startups are based in metro areas, exacerbating the divide in America between news-haves and have-nots.

Also new this year, the State of Local News Project, in partnership with Microsoft, generated a “Bright Spots” map showing all local news startups in the U.S. as they’ve appeared over the past five years. The map also highlights 17 local news outlets — both startups and legacy organizations — with promising new business models for the future.

“The significant loss of local news outlets in poorer and underserved communities poses a crisis for our democracy,” said Medill visiting professor Penny Abernathy, a co-author of this year’s report who has been studying local news deserts for more than a decade. “So, it is very important that we identify the places most at risk, while simultaneously understanding what is working in other communities.”

Here are some of the report’s key findings:

• There are 204 counties with no local news outlet. Of the 3,143 counties in the U.S., more than half, or 1,766, have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper.
• The loss of local newspapers ticked higher in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, up from two per week last year. There were more than 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers this past year.
• Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. The nation is on pace to lose one-third of all its newspapers by the end of next year. There are about 6,000 newspapers remaining, the vast majority of which are weeklies.
• The country has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists, or 43,000, during that same time. Most of those journalists were employed by large metro and regional newspapers.
• There are about 550 digital-only local news sites, many of which launched in the past decade, but they are mostly clustered in metro areas. In the past five years, the number of local digital startups has roughly equaled the number that shuttered.
• Based on the demographics and economics of current news desert counties, Medill’s modeling estimates that 228 counties are at an elevated risk of becoming news deserts in the next five years. Most of those “Watch List” counties are located in high-poverty areas in the South and Midwest, and many serve communities with significant African American, Hispanic and Native American populations.

The predictive modeling analysis was conducted by faculty, researchers and staff of the Medill Local News Initiative and the Spiegel Research Center using demographic, economic and local news data from every county in the U.S.

Fox Strikes Again

Many posts have discussed Fox News.

Drew F. Lawrence at Military.com:

The Marine Corps worked behind the scenes last month in an attempt to convince Fox News to retract its false story claiming a Gold Star family was forced to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of a Marine killed in Afghanistan, according to emails obtained by Military.com.

A service spokesman notified the news network that it was pushing an incorrect story and accused it of using the grief of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee's family to draw in readers, the email exchanges, released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request, show. Fox News eventually deleted the story with no correction, and it never reached out to the Gee family with an apology as the Marine Corps requested, the family said.

The Fox News story came from Republican Rep. Cory Mills, a freshman congressman from Florida, who claimed Gee's next of kin were strapped with the $60,000 charge after a meeting with the families of Abbey Gate bombing victims, a suicide attack where 13 service members were killed outside of the Kabul airport in 2021.

Gee's family never paid a dollar to transport her remains, and the Marine Corps let Fox News know -- in no uncertain terms -- that the July 25 story was false in a series of emails over the following days.

"This headline correction is still misleading and your story is still false," Maj. James Stenger, the lead spokesperson for the Marine Corps, wrote to Fox News in an email after the publication changed the headline and body of the story in an attempt to soften the accusation.

"Using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points is disgusting," Stenger wrote. The spokesman was one of several military officials frustrated with the story, according to the documents.

Oliver Darcy at CNN:

Fox News apologized Saturday to a Gold Star family for publishing a false story last month claiming that the family had to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of their fallen relative back from Afghanistan because the Pentagon refused to pay.

“The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, referencing the family of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was one of 13 service members killed in a terror attack at the Kabul airport in 2021 while assisting with US withdrawal efforts.

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Deleting an entire story is exceedingly rare in news media and is seen as a last-ditch measure if the entire premise of the article is incorrect. Deleting a story without offering readers an explanation or correction is widely considered to be unethical.

Texas Trubune Cuts

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but state and local news organizations are struggling.

Angela Fu at Poynter:

Driven by unsteady economic conditions and changes in the media industry, The Texas Tribune executed layoffs Wednesday for the first time in its 14-year history.

In an email to staff, CEO Sonal Shah wrote that 2023 has been a particularly challenging year for the outlet, which many have come to see as a model for nonprofit journalism. At a time when newsrooms across the country are shrinking, the Tribune has maintained a largely upward trajectory, growing both its staff and budget as it expands its coverage of the state.

That momentum appeared to come to a halt Wednesday when 11 journalists were laid off, some of whom had worked at the outlet for years. Tribune copy chief Emily Goldstein posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the paper’s entire copy desk was eliminated, and senior editor and writing coach David Pasztor shared that he and the paper’s demographics and criminal justice reporters were all laid off. The layoffs also included two longtime multimedia reporters, one of whom won the outlet its first national Edward R. Murrow award, according to a post by former Tribune reporter Elise Hu.

“This year has proven more challenging for us than others — changes in the industry, the unsteady economy and the need to explore new platforms and modes of storytelling are all things the Tribune must address head on. We know we must change to stay ahead,” Shah wrote in her email to staff. “There are, of course, other challenges facing the media industry: AI, uneven news readership and engagement, changing audience behaviors and the growing phenomenon of news avoidance."

...

The Tribune currently has more than 100 people listed on its staff page, and it won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards just last week, including one for its breaking news coverage of the Uvalde mass shooting.

The layoffs come at a time of turmoil within the news industry. Dozens of news outlets have initiated layoffs this year, including nonprofits and newsrooms that had previously been regarded as relatively stable. Those cuts include NPR, which laid off roughly 100 employees in March, and the Los Angeles Times, which announced 74 cuts in June, its first layoffs since billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the paper five years ago.

Global employment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimated in June there were at least 17,436 layoffs in the media industry during the first five months of 2023 — a record high.

Another Newspaper Bites the Dust

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Joshua Molina at Noozhawk:

Following a bankruptcy filing by its parent company Friday, a key executive of the Santa Barbara News-Press has informed staff that the daily newspaper has “stopped publishing,” Noozhawk has learned.

According to an email sent by managing editor Dave Mason: “I have some bad news. Wendy (owner Wendy McCaw) filed for bankruptcy on Friday. All of our jobs are eliminated, and the News-Press has stopped publishing. They ran out of money to pay us. They will issue final paychecks to us when the bankruptcy is approved in court.”

Nick Mathews at The Missourian:

In my research, I explore the de-localization of the news industry, wherein the essence of “local” is stripped away from local news organizations. Through ownership transfers, corporate mergers and -fund takeovers, these organizations too often face consolidation, dismantling and closures. In short, when local ownership is replaced by larger absentee corporations solely driven by financial gains, the vital connection between the news organization and the community is severed. Readers feel detached, amplifying the pervasive nature of the deteriorating local news segment, which continues to experience its worst year every passing year.

Many scholars, including myself, advocate for the merits of local ownership, which prevailed for generations until about the 1980s. A local owner brings invaluable benefits to a community. These owners are attuned to the social and informational needs of the community, understanding the pulse of the community firsthand. They perceive their organizations as vital local institutions, not just commercial enterprises. For the best of local owners, their primary mission is to serve and support their communities, with financial profits taking a backseat to a more noble cause.

 Today, the local news landscape has dramatically shifted, with less than one-third of the nation’s 5,000 weekly newspapers and a mere 10 of the 100 largest circulation daily newspapers maintaining their independence, according to a team of researchers at Northwestern University. The top six largest newspaper corporations in the United States have partial or full ownership by financial firms. This transition away from local ownership not only deprives communities of their stake in newspapers but also places the destiny of surviving publications in the clutches of a limited number of chains. These funds now wield disproportionate power over the local news landscape, shaping its trajectory, essence and even its very existence.

While local newspaper owners in the past prioritized their readers as customers, funds primarily cater to pension funds, mutual funds and commercial banks. funds exhibit no concern for a newspaper’s history, its employees or its ties to the community. Their focus is purely on cold, calculated financial gains. To funds, a newspaper organization is treated like any other asset. If it fails to generate sufficient returns, it becomes subject to downsizing, sale or closure. Cost-cutting tactics are evident from the moment of acquisition, as the firms swiftly slash expenses, reduce newsroom staff and strive to boost their bottom lines.

Craigslist and Local Newspaper Decline

Many posts have discussed the decline of American newspapers.

Milena Djourelova† Ruben Durante‡ Gregory J. Martin§ April 2023 

 The Impact of Online Competition on Local Newspapers: Evidence from the Introduction of Craigslist∗ 

Abstract 

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist — the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising — across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante. We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest. Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections

Local News: Green Shoots or Dead Leaves?

Could News Bloom in News Deserts?

By Howard Husock American Enterprise Institute

Key Points

• Due to the steady decline of print news in America, many Americans now live in news deserts, where there is no newspaper covering local issues. The absence of information on local news and local politics weakens our communities and our political process.
• Despite this trend, over 100 new papers or online local news sites have opened within the past several years. To stay in business, they have experimented with new approaches to staffing and funding.
• It may be time to expand the role of government or philanthropy in supporting local news, which produces countless benefits for communities but is rapidly disappearing.

Read the PDF.

REALITY CHECK.  Three years ago, Simon Owens looked into Patch, the most prominent effort to remedy the problem.

But as I read article after article about the company’s health, one number kept jumping out at me: its editorial headcount. Back during its AOL days, it employed around 500 journalists, with roughly one editor assigned to each hyperlocal site. Now, it has an editorial staff of 120, even though it’s more than doubled the number of local verticals. That means it employs one journalist for every 10 locations.

So what type of coverage does Patch actually offer? Out of all the journalists who wrote about its profitability, only Recode’s Peter Kafka touched upon the issue. “If your idea of a local news operation involves a team of reporters and editors that can exhaustively cover your hometown, you will be disappointed with Patch, which usually assigns a single journalist to cover multiple towns,” he wrote in 2019. “Those reporters then generate five to 10 stories a day, which means those stories are almost always generated quickly.” Patch president Warren St. John admitted to Kafka that “we’re not as deep as we aspire to be. We’re acutely aware of what we’re capable of and what we’re not capable of.”

...

Next, I went back to Patch’s homepage and then navigated to a cluster of sites around Tampa, Florida. Again, I opened 10 articles at random and then went through them one by one. Out of those 10 articles, only one article seemed to contain some original reporting, though it was sometimes hard to tell. An article about how Tampa doctors were utilizing telemedicine had several quotes from doctors in it, but when I Googled the quotes, I found that some came from press releases, while others may have come from an actual interview.

In fact, I noticed suspect sourcing on a few articles. Here’s a quote from my notes I made while reading an article about a local politician distributing unemployment applications: “At first I thought this maybe had some original quotes in it, but after Googling some of them I found them on other websites, which seems fishy. The reporter certainly isn’t going out of their way to say where the quotes are coming from.”

Bad Signs for Newspapers

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis, the Voice of San Diego

San Diego’s daily paper of record, the Union-Tribune, was sold by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and his family to MediaNews Group, owned by Alden Global Capital – a company that has come to be feared across the ever-dwindling newspaper landscape. Just 10 minutes after U-T staffers learned of the sale, they received an email notifying them of staff reductions to come, one staffer tweeted. Alden would offer buyouts “in an effort for staff reductions to be voluntary,” the email read. Alden was referred to as a ruthless corporate strip-miner “seemingly intent on destroying local journalism,” by one prominent media critic in 2018. But in a struggling local newspaper environment, it’s hard to tell the difference between strip mining and regular mining.

,,,

The veteran courts and criminal justice reporter Greg Moran captured the feeling of many that the paper was an afterthought to the Los Angeles billionaire who owned it. “All we did at the [Union-Tribune] since [Soon-Shiong] bought us is be profitable, executeon a plan to transition to a digital op. Didn’t hemorrhage money like the LAT, didn’t get a boatload of hires. And for that, the richest guy in LA sells us to the biggest chop shop in journalism,” Moran wrote on Twitter.

Outfits such as Alden buy the paper, flip the real estate, and literally sell the hardware for scrap. 

Michael McCarthy at Front Office Sports:

Less than six years ago, the New York Times asked whether the upstart sports site The Athletic would “pillage” newspapers of their best talent.

After today’s stunning announcement that the Times is shuttering its Sports section in favor of The Athletic, some wonder if that divide-and-conquer strategy is still in effect. But now it will be implemented by the august Times – not the money-losing Athletic.

On Monday, the Times announced it would dissolve its storied Sports section in favor of daily coverage from The Athletic, which it purchased for $550 million last year.

...

Sounds nice. Think of one big, national sports section in the future for the Gray Lady of journalism.

But what’s to stop the Times from doing what The Athletic threatened years ago?

Namely, stealing all the good, young sportswriters from around the country and putting their local papers, those are that are left, out of business?

Myths, Misinformation, and RFK Jr.

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Julia Shapero at The Hill:

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested Wednesday that Russia has been “acting in good faith” in various efforts to end the war in Ukraine and placed blame on the U.S. for the 16-monthlong conflict.

Kennedy said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “repeatedly said yes” to negotiations.

Joan Walsh at The Nation:

I’ve been doing my best to ignore the farcical presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His noxious views on vaccines, the origin of AIDS, the alleged dangers of wi-fi and other forms of junk science deserve no wide hearing. Polls showing he’s favored by 20 percent of likely Democratic voters over President Biden are almost as laughable as Kennedy’s views. It’s early; he’s got iconic American name recognition; and there’s almost always an appetite, among Democrats anyway, for anybody but the incumbent. His lies have been thoroughly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Info, Michael Scherer in The Washington Post, Naomi Klein in The Guardian, and Brandy Zadrozny on NBC News.

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

///
But as subsequent articles and books continued to debunk Kennedy’s conspiracy theory, it felt irresponsible to leave it up. Six years later, in 2011, my successor as editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, in consultation with me and others, decided we should take it down. Rolling Stone later did the same. (In the interests of transparency, we preserved the corrections page.)

Jake Tapper at CNN:

Go back to 2005. I was a reporter with ABC News and Salon.com reached out to see if we were interested in doing a TV spot tied to the publication of the Kennedy Jr. piece. I interviewed him via phone, with a TV crew in his office, and prepared a spot for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.”

In Kennedy’s bizarre retelling a few days ago (the relevant part starts at 27:55 into the interview), I worked with him “for three weeks doing this incredible documentary” (no and no) about his Rolling Stone story – please note he makes zero mention of the article having since been retracted and disappeared – and then “the night before the piece was supposed to run, he called me up and said, ‘The piece just got killed by corporate.’” (I didn’t say that in any way and the piece wasn’t killed.) “All my career, I have never had a piece killed by corporate and I’m so mad,” he said I said. (I hadn’t. I had been at ABC News for two years. I had had plenty of pieces killed. Not once did “corporate” play a role in killing any of them.)

 

 

The Collapse of Local News

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

  Jan-Werner Mueller at LAT:

By some estimates, one-third of the newspapers that existed in the U.S. in 2005 will be gone by 2025. Some 70 million Americans already live in “news deserts,” or will soon. In the United Kingdom, 320 local newspapers closed between 2009 and 2019. The private equity firms that have been buying up news organizations tend to make things worse. Rather than investing in journalism, their focus is on ruthlessly reducing the size of newsrooms and selling off newspaper buildings (many of which are in lucrative downtown locations).

 The implications for democracy are beyond debate. Social scientists who study the issue have demonstrated clearly that less local journalism results in higher levels of corruption, undermines political competition and reduces citizen engagement.

From the Society of Professional Journalists:

The Society of Professional Journalists is concerned about the increased number of layoffs to journalists in 2023. This year has seen a record number of media job cuts with the most recent being LAist, run by Southern California Public Radio, and dot.LA, which focuses on tech and startup news. LAist announced Tuesday that it is eliminating 21 positions, 10% of staff, as part of a restructuring due to a revenue shortfall. Dot.LA laid off its entire editorial staff of seven journalists on Monday as it shifts focus to newsletters.

Thursday, SPJ expressed concern over the Los Angeles Times elimination of 74 positions, about 13% of staff. At the time, SPJ Vice President Ashanti Blaize-Hopkins said, “This is yet another sign of a disturbing trend across our industry. When newsroom management makes these kinds of cuts, the public becomes less informed, which puts our very Democracy at risk.” A new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, found at least 17,436 jobs have been cut as of May 31, a 315% increase from this time last year. This is the highest amount of job cuts on record, including surpassing cuts made during the beginning of the pandemic.

Gannett's News Deserts

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Some national outlets are doing fine, but local newspapers are struggling.

Katie Robertson at NYT:

Hundreds of journalists for the country’s largest newspaper chain walked off the job on Monday, accusing the company’s chief executive of decimating its local newsrooms, and demanding a change at the top. The walkout was the biggest labor action in Gannett’s history, said the union representing the journalists. It included workers from about two dozen newsrooms, including The Palm Beach Post, The Arizona Republic and The Austin American-Statesman. The demonstrations are expected to continue on Tuesday for some newsrooms. The collective action is timed to coincide with Gannett’s annual shareholder meeting, which is being held on Monday. The NewsGuild, which represents more than 1,000 journalists from Gannett, sent a letter to Gannett shareholders in May urging a vote of no-confidence against Mike Reed, the chief executive and chairman. In the letter, the NewsGuild criticized the company’s merger with GateHouse Media in 2019, saying it “mortgaged the future of our company” by loading it up with debt.

...

“Gannett has created news deserts everywhere you look,” said Peter D. Kramer, a reporter for the USA Today Network. “That’s Mike Reed’s Gannett.”

...

The NewsGuild said The Austin American-Statesman’s newsroom had 41 employees this year, down from 110 in 2018. In that same period, The Arizona Republic’s newsroom in Phoenix had shrunk to 89 workers from 140, while The Milwaukee Sentinel had been cut to 82 from 104. “You have communities that go uncovered, and when things go uncovered it allows people to abuse their positions,” said Kaitlyn Kanzler, a reporter for NorthJersey.com and The Record in Northern New Jersey.

Digital News in Trouble

Margaret Sullivan at The Guardian:

In a seminal 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, the brilliant New York University professor Clay Shirky made the point that journalism as we had known it for decades was finished – and for good reason.

The reason, in a mere two words: the internet.

And he certainly proved right. With a few notable exceptions, newspapers – once the core of American journalism – have been dying right and left.

Now, big digital media-news companies, once the great hope of post-print news, seem to be going in the same direction. Down, down, down.

In recent weeks and months, digital newsrooms have taken huge hits. BuzzFeed News suddenly shuttered, leaving scores of extremely talented journalists without employment (and lest you think of BuzzFeed as strictly a place for viral videos about cats, recall that its news division did plenty of prize-winning journalism over the years). Vox Media recently laid off 7% of its staff and raised money based on a valuation about half of what it was worth in 2015.


Then, on Monday, another major blow: Vice was filing for bankruptcy. A New York Times report was unsparing, calling Vice a “decayed digital colossus”, and noting that at one point it was thought to be worth a now-unfathomable $5.7bn.

...

The problem in digital news? The audience, in many cases, was there. But the profits didn’t follow, or at least not in a sustainable way. Digital advertising revenue, once thought to be based on audience size, was going instead to social-media platforms, particularly Facebook.

World Press Freedom

 A number of posts have dealt with press freedom.

From Reporters Without Borders:

According to the 2023 World Press Freedom Index – which evaluates the environment for journalism in 180 countries and territories and is published on World Press Freedom Day (3 May) – the situation is “very serious” in 31 countries, “difficult” in 42, “problematic” in 55, and “good” or “satisfactory” in 52 countries. In other words, the environment for journalism is “bad” in seven out of ten countries, and satisfactory in only three out of ten.

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The United States (45th) has fallen three places. The Index questionnaire’s US respondents were negative about the environment for journalists (especially the legal framework at the local level, and widespread violence) despite the Biden administration’s efforts. The murders of two journalists (the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Jeff German in September 2022, and Spectrum News 13’s Dylan Lyons in February  2023) had a negative impact on the country’s ranking. Brazil (92nd) rose 18 places as result of the departure of Jair Bolsonaro, whose presidential term was marked by extreme hostility towards journalists, and Lula da Silva’s election, heralding an improvement. In Asia, changes in governments also improved the environment for the media and accounted for such significant rises in the Index as Australia’s (up 12 at 27th) and Malaysia’s (up 40 at 73rd).

Danger in Shasta County

Many posts have discussed the problems and dangers facing journalists.

 Dani Anguiano at The Guardian:

In a seemingly long gone era – before the Trump presidency, and Covid, and the 2020 election – Doni Chamberlain would get the occasional call from a displeased reader who had taken issue with one of her columns. They would sometimes call her stupid and use profanities. Today, when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged. Chamberlain, 66, has worked as a journalist in Shasta county, California, for nearly 30 years. Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press. She has learned to take precautions. No meeting sources in public. She livestreams rowdy events where the crowd is less than friendly and doesn’t walk to her car without scanning the street. Sometimes, restraining orders can be necessary tools.

 These practices have become crucial in the last three years, she said, as she’s documented the county’s shift to the far right and the rise of an ultraconservative coalition into the area’s highest office. Shasta, Chamberlain said, is in the midst of a “perfect storm” as different hard-right factions have joined together to form a powerful political force with outside funding and publicity from fringe figures. The new majority, backed by militia members, anti-vaxxers, election deniers and residents who have long felt forgotten by governments in Sacramento and Washington, has fired the county health officer and done away with the region’s voting system. Politically moderate public officials have faced bullying, intimidation and threats of violence. County meetings have turned into hours-long shouting matches. Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all. Her writing has made her a public enemy of the conservative crowd intent on remaking the county. Far-right leaders have confronted her at rallies and public meetings, mocking and berating her. At a militia-organized protest in 2021, the crowd screamed insults.

Buzzfeed News to Close

 Many posts have dealt with news media Newspapers are struggling and online publications also have problems.

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson at NYT:

In a move that brings to a close a pioneering era of online journalism, BuzzFeed is shutting down its namesake news division. After beginning as a quirky digital upstart and rising to a Pulitzer Prize-winning operation, it ultimately fell prey to the punishing economics of digital publishing that has laid low many of its peers.

It’s a sobering end for a publication once seen as a serious challenger to legacy media outlets that had been slow to adapt to the internet. It was also the final chapter of a venture capital-fueled digital period that left an indelible mark on how journalism is produced and consumed.

When BuzzFeed News was founded in 2011, in the run-up to the next year’s presidential election, it explored stories both slight and serious through listicles and click-bait-style headlines designed to go viral on social media. That mirrored the practice of its parent company, an internet laboratory of sorts that Jonah Peretti started in 2006.

The news operation soon drew attention for its ambitious, sharp reporting, however, and went on to open overseas bureaus and invest in investigative journalism. A number of alumni work for the more established news organizations it sought to disrupt, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, and those newsrooms have embraced many of the practices that BuzzFeed pioneered in search of readers online.

But for all its accomplishments, the news division failed to make money, unable to square the reliance on digital advertising and the whims of social media traffic with the considerable costs of employing journalists around the world.

Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, who left in 2020 to be a media columnist at The Times, said in an interview that he was “really sad” about the closing.

“I’m proud of the work that BuzzFeed News did, but I think this moment is part of the end of a whole era of media,” said Mr. Smith, who now runs the media outlet Semafor. “It’s the end of the marriage between social media and news.”

Beats and Journalist Demographics

 Many posts have dealt with news media

Emily Tomasik and Jeffrey Gottfried at Pew:

Journalists’ beats also vary by their employment status – that is, whether they are freelance or self-employed journalists, or full- or part-time journalists at a news organization.

The Press and the Cold War

 Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

What is the track record of the press since Lippmann’s day? In “City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington” (Chicago), Kathryn J. McGarr weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War. She shows, by examining archived correspondence, that reporters in Washington knew perfectly well that Administrations were misleading them about national-security matters—about whether the United States was flying spy planes over the Soviet Union, for example, or training exiles to invade Cuba and depose Fidel Castro. To the extent that there was an agenda concealed by official claims of “containing Communist expansion”—to the extent that Middle East policy was designed to preserve Western access to oil fields, or that Central American policy was designed to make the region safe for United Fruit—reporters were not fooled.

So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology. They were liberal internationalists. Until the United States intervened militarily in Vietnam—the Marines waded ashore there in 1965—that was the ideology of American élites. Like the government, and like the leaders of philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, newspaper people believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. They supported policies that protected and promoted the liberal values in the name of which the United States had gone to war against Hitler.

Many members of the Washington press, including editors and publishers, had served in the government during the Second World War—in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), in the Office of War Information, and in other capacities in Washington and London. They had been part of the war effort, and their sense of duty persisted after the war ended. Defending democracy was not just the government’s job. It was the press’s job, too.
...

There was another reason for caution: fear of nuclear war. After the Soviets developed an atomic weapon, in 1949, and until the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, end-of-the-world nuclear anxiety was widespread, and newsmen shared it. The Cold War was a balance-of-power war. That’s what the unofficial doctrine of the American government, “containment,” meant: keep things as they are. Whatever tipped the scale in the wrong direction might unleash the bomb, and so newspapers were careful about what they published.

REMINDER: DREIER ROUNDTABLE OP-ED CONTEST

 

CMC’s Dreier Roundtable is pleased to announce the Fall 2022 op-ed writing contest.  Entries should be in the form of an op-ed article, of the kinds that appear in newspapers and news sites. The op-ed may concern any issue in public affairs, broadly defined, domestic or international.  This site offers useful advice on how to write an op-ed: https://www.theopedproject.org/oped-basics

 

Eligibility

 

The competition is open to Claremont McKenna College students and 5C undergraduates currently taking courses at CMC.

 

Length

 

Op-eds should be no longer than 750 words.

 

Awards:

First Prize – $300

Second Prize – $ 200

Third Prize – $ 100

Honorable Mentions – $50

Submission and deadline

 

Students should submit entries by email as attached Word files (please, no Google docs) to Professor Pitney (jpitney@cmc.edu) by 11:59 PM on November 14

 

About the Dreier Roundtable

 

The Dreier Roundtable (DRt) at Claremont McKenna College is an innovative, multidisciplinary public policy program to attract, educate and promote future leaders in public policy. David Dreier `75 is a CMC trustee.  He represented the Claremont area in the US House of Representatives from 1981 to 2013, and chaired the House Rules Committee.

 

Pre-Written Stories

It's common practice to pre-write certain parts of some stories in order to publish faster when the data is released— or the ball game is concluded. In this case, the job market numbers surprised analysts and journalists. Makes for an interesting read. https://t.co/IIuiUs7NWO 2/

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 5, 2022