The year 2023 was for American journalism the worst year in the full past of this profession in the United States. More newspapers have been closed than always before. Not only local media vanish – at a rate of 2 and a half a week, as the study shows The State of Local News 2023 from Northwestern University Medill School in Illinois, 1 of the best journalism schools in the country. Large newspapers and comparatively fresh national online media specified as BuzzFeed or Vox Media, which were to face a technological boom and placed on the Internet, besides neglect economically.
Was turning journalism into net technology 1 large mistake?
A fewer years ago, young wolves from Vox Media were to become an ambition to become the fresh MTV and until 2018 everything indicated that this would be the case. But in February 2018, Vox released the first 50 employees, mainly video producers, and in the spring of 2020, i.e. at the beginning of the pandemic, the company sent 9 percent of the crew on forced leave. In May 2023, Vox Media applied for bankruptcy protection and fired another 3 percent of its employees.
For the past fewer years, Vox Media has not hidden that they are looking for a buyer. In the long run, it turned out that their product has no chance of competing with free content generated by users on social media (read: videos about cats) and that Facebook and Twitter do not intend to pay for providing advanced quality video journalism to users.
In April 2023, BuzzFeed closed a 180-staffed news department that had even a fewer years earlier collected a nomination for the Pulitzer writer Prize. Instead, the message was moved to HuffPost magazine website, which BuzzFeed bought in 2021. In 2017, BuzzFeed News was the first platform to dare print Box containing, as it turned out, most likely false revelations about president Donald Trump's sexual life.
– This is the end of the matrimony between journalism and social media," commented Ben Smith, founder of BuzzFeed News, who moved to a more unchangeable "New York Times" in 2020. According to Smith, advertising and advertising of large profitable companies usage Instagram and TikTok to advance their products – the most crucial origin of income in the conventional model of journalism.
One unchangeable letter, which after respective years of turbulence so far wins the war against fresh technologies, is the fresh York Times. "NYT" survived the Renaissance during the large run of fear for the first and, hopefully, Trump's last presidency. The NYT subscription has become a symbol of the media's fight against Trump; the Sunday NYT is an integral part of the morning for many families. The "New York Times" is read across the continent and likely takes any chances of getting subscribers from local media.
So we have any titles on both coasts: "NYT" and "Washington Post" on the east and "Los Angeles Times" on the west. In the mediate it is not only cultural, but besides a media desert – there you read messages on Facebook, mixed in half with local gossip and the interior life of the inhabitants. This is the level of a hypothetical aging uncle who believes in the Protocols of the Sages of Zion and fights the wave of transgenderity. He thinks he's a journalist, too.
These are evidently not the only examples. Condé Nast, publisher of specified titles as "Vogue" (feminine press) and "Vanity Fair" (widely understood culture) and "GQ" (male magazine), released 5% of the staff this year, and G/O Media, which issue Quartz (online, with emphasis on global business), satirical writings The Onion and Gizmodo (design, technology and discipline fiction) have decided to close another flagship product – the feminist side of Jezebel. Fortunately, after the sale was announced, a buyer appeared to effort to reopen the magazine.
A full of 2,900 magazines and newspapers have been lost in the US since 2005, resulting in 43 000 journalists and journalists being released. In 2023 alone, journalists lost six times more jobs than a year earlier, as Washington's political insider writes, Axios.
The state of journalism in the planet is besides not happy. Brutal cuts appeared in the UK – “Mirror” and “Daily Express” cut 10% of their crews, 450 jobs. The cuts are besides in Germany: in June 2023 Axel Springer announced that he was firing 200 people.
Patronite and micropayment alternatively They can't save journalism., distributing them to the remainder as an institution, promoting ‘independent’, single-person journalism and sometimes low-quality journalism, where it is hard to separate reliable information from advertising means for muscle mass growth. So there is simply a full fragmentation of the media, and its price is usually disbelief that there are inactive differences between full privatised media, which was assumed as a public good.
This disbelief besides affects journalists themselves. A grim symbol of how this institution is treated present is the disproportionate number of journalists killed in Gaza since 7 November 2023 – 63 people killed during the month. This surely gives thought to another journalists in the planet who, in addition, defy almost impossible to halt brainwashing over the net and algorithms filtering our cognition of the planet – online.
During his first term, Trump portrayed the American press as enemy number one. Journalists fear the hostility of the population, and in time they themselves announcement that they have either already succumbed, or at any minute they may be disinformationed, which makes all of their journalism a laughing stock and a dissension without meaning. The stress associated with this moral – in the eyes of society – the distribution of journalism surely does not help.
Journalism has ceased to be regarded as a public good, and journalists realize that there is no real difference between working in the media and working on Facebook. The profession itself is low-paid adequate in the United States, that after a fewer years it is hard not to go to a better paying communication sector, which is now the strong arm of all organization – from schools to multi-racial NGOs and charities, which have long since taken over many functions of the state. all prison, all arms company and all police station has a spokesperson who usually doesn't work with journalists due to the fact that his occupation is PR and defence of the fortress at all costs.
Meanwhile – to show that there are exceptions to each regulation – belonging to Condé Nast Pitchfork, who began in 1995 as an independent, ocho-student music magazine, became just 1 of the most crucial music services in the world. However, it is not a coincidence that it is – or possibly it was – a planet of young people who frequently started without pay, but with passion. Despite his success and his union, Pitchfork is waiting in suspense for his staff to join the Condé Nast empire.
American journalists are in a worse financial position than ever. Media format with owner-billionaire at the head leads to further demoralisation, which follows Journalism report developed by a service for journalists Mukkrack. Journalists do not trust their bosses who are not and have never been journalists, and above all, businessmen. And so far there's no effective way to fight misinformation in the media.
Since it has been revealed that a file published in BuzzFeed News about Trump's sexual habits is most likely a fake British intelligence, journalists see that they themselves become agents of disinformation, which even the best editors release to print.
