Media companies have cut a record number of jobs in 2023, with almost 2000 jobs lost in broadcast, digital, and print news in just the first five months of the year.
Outlets big and small have been affected, from the Washington Post to Buzzfeed, but the layoffs are especially concerning for local newsrooms, which have already been shrinking for years.
A month ago, Los Angeles Times eliminated 13% of its newsroom staff. Now, journalists at the San Diego Union-Tribune are bracing for their own cutbacks after billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong – who also owns the L.A. Times — sold it to hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
Alden, which owns hundreds of papers nationwide and 24 other outlets in Southern California, has a reputation for cutting newsrooms to the bare bones in the pursuit of profitability. Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called it “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”
Former journalist and current USC professor Judy Muller called the decimation of local newspapers a “serious blow to democracy.”
“I don’t think any of this is a surprise,” Muller told KNX News. “Newspapers have been contracting for years now … and when that happens, that old slogan of the Washington Post comes to mind: democracy dies in darkness.”
She said that when news coverage is gutted, city politicians can “get away with stuff that they wouldn’t get away with if reporters were watching.” This is a frightening prospect for a city like Los Angeles, where four councilmembers have faced criminal charges in as many years.
Muller blames the situation partly on the transition from print journalism to digital, which has reinvented the way news is reported.
“”A lot of papers didn’t move quickly enough to digital, and didn’t use their reporters wisely in bringing in community, and serving different communities, and were locked in an old style of print journalism as advertising went away,” she said.
The future of local journalism, Muller says, is “online all the time,” with a focus on multicultural community engagement. She pointed to voiceofsandiego.com, a nonprofit digital outlet that may soon have to step up to fill the void left by the Union-Tribune.
“They can’t possibly replace the San Diego Union-Trib in terms of its size and coverage, but they’re doing it so smartly, and because it’s online, they don’t have the printing cost, they don’t have the publishing cost.” Muller said.
But many smaller cities and rural communities don’t have an online outlet to come to the rescue. Nationwide, only about 500 local or state news sites have cropped up to replace the more than 2,100 papers that have been shuttered, leaving much of the country in news deserts.
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