Not good:
In "WTF is Happening in Journalism This Week?" (Jan 26, 2024), Parker Molloy lists the massive layoffs: Pitchfork, Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Business Insider, Forbes.
Similarly, Marisa Kabas says:
"After layoffs last week at the LA Times and Business Insider, and the complete annihilation of Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork, it started to feel like the dog days of the Trump administration when you weren’t sure how your brain could possibly absorb any new, bad information. It left me wondering, in the immortal words of Vincent Laguardia Gambini, 'Is there any more shit we could pile on?'
Every day in media is like the end of an episode of America’s Next Top Model where the image of the person who was voted off disappears from the group photo — except the group photo originally had like, a million people in it and now it’s down to approximately five."
— Today is the most depressing day to work in media since yesterday: On mass layoffs and massive ennui, Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket email, February 2, 2024
However, a HEATED email today (January 26) tells us:
"The Guardian is the U.K.’s leading progressive newspaper, and one of the world’s most trusted news outlets. The paper also has a massive U.S. bureau with more than 150 staffers, and it’s the only major newspaper to ban fossil fuel advertising.
Co-publishing an investigation with The Guardian is a huge win for our mission to increase the visibility of climate accountability reporting. While HEATED’s website gets, on average, about a half million views per month, The Guardian’s website gets more than 370 million visits per month."
Read the HEATED / Guardian story: The propane industry is trying to dupe you: Documents and recordings obtained by HEATED detail a multi-million dollar plan to spin the fossil fuel as 'clean' and 'renewable'." Arielle Samuelson, January 25, 2024.
If you're a journalist, what do you do?
Don't self-reject. Ask if you can write and get paid for it. Advice from Tim Herrera, interviewed by Parker Molloy and Mark Yarm:
“I’ve found myself kind of drawing a blank when I work with freelancers and they ask me who’s taking pitches, or how to frame a pitch for the current time or strategies for working through this, because I honestly don’t know,” Herrera says. “Freelancing is a tough business, but right now I feel like it’s the toughest I’ve seen as long as I’ve been working directly with freelancers.”
So what does an independent journalist do? “The advice I kind of fall back on is: No one has any idea what any newsroom’s freelance budget looks like right now, or what any given newsroom is going through internally, so you might as well cast a wide net and just pitch everyone,” he says. “Swing for the fences and pretend things are fine, because it’s either that or just give up entirely. At this point we really have nothing to lose by going after everything, so have at it, you never know. I always say the only way to get bylines is to get bylines, so just keep pitching like everything is fine.”
— Keep calm and query on: "Just keep pitching like everything is fine”: Freelancing guru Tim Herrera on how independent journalists can survive these dark days. Plus, Pitchfork’s Amy Phillips picks its most "magic" longform. Parker Molloy and Mark Yarm. Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception (Substack). January 30, 2024.
And from Marisa Kabas: "So what comes next? More collectives of independent writers, like Flaming Hydra? More worker-owned sites like Hell Gate and Defector? We’ll see!"
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