Journalists Are More Important Than Ever. Why Do We Keep Losing Jobs?
With the world in such a constantly dangerous state of affairs, journalists around the world are needed to shine a light on our community’s most troubling or even happiest moments.
Informing the public about events around them, going in depth about complex situations and speaking to new audiences have helped make America and any other healthy democratic country what it is today. However, journalists are losing their jobs at record highs, and the rate does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
From 1990 to 2016, newspapers have lost over 60 percent of its jobs in the United States. While many believe that being in a digital age would help benefit these companies, there is unfortunately not enough ad revenue to help sustain profitability for the online model either. Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, Vice Media, and several others have all been hit with layoffs earlier this year. Over 2,100 media jobs were lost in the first few weeks of 2019.
While all outlets get the benefit of unpaid interns and other free content generators, online media can drive traffic through free articles much more so than traditional media. Before being bought out by Time Warner, Bleacher Report was merely a sports blog post where anyone could create content. It now it rivals ESPN in the digital sports world.
Buzzfeed’s most widely recognized content, quizzes, are primarily made for free as well. Rachel McMahon, a 19-year-old college student from Michigan, was cranking out as many as 50 quizzes a month for the website and generated over 130 million views total.
While social media can help these companies spread their articles further in the hopes they go viral, social media ends up killing their revenue despite bringing them a larger platform. Google and Facebook eat up a disproportionate amount of ad revenue; Google and Facebook control more than 60 percent of the internet’s ad revenue overall.
The Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) decision to repeal net neutrality may also negatively impact the industry as well.
According to the Associated Press, the loss of local news outlets makes people more reliant on national news coverage to inform them, leading to more polarization as well as lack of engagement in local news.
Many news outlets have had to join bigger conglomerates or end up being bought by wealthy patrons such as the Washington Post (Jeff Bezos) or the Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sheldon Adelson).
Journalists fear that with more corporate oversight into their companies and the staff’s reporting that it could compromise their content overall.
As such, more established newspapers have had to turn to old fashioned subscriptions to meet revenue goals, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
UNLV professor and Channel 8 political contributor Stephen Sebelius made note of this when trying to look through the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which has been running a subscription for its content since 2017.
“Incognito mode and deleting your cookies helps when a person doesn’t wanna pay,” Sebelius jokingly said. “But as old a model as it is, it works.”
Google is also stepping up to try and help news media with the Google News Initiative to help cut down the proliferation of fake news as well as generate a bigger portion of ad revenue.
But it is not nearly enough.
A big way they hope that others subscribe to these outlets is by signing up for Subscribe with Google, which opens a portal to news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and others. It feels like the company is still trying to profit off of the problem it created in the first place.
Although the future looks much bleaker for reporters, the newsroom will not die anytime soon. And if we want to have a well-informed society it will have to stay intact. There will always be a need for quality journalism that gives a voice to the voiceless and new ways to connect with others.
Journalists must be objective but we have families and livelihoods that we fight hard to keep as well as skills and knowledge that are valuable to a variety of fields. We do not have writing jobs to break the bank, but because we love reporting on things around us to help inform the public.
It is a fortunate thought that this is a job that will not see automation taking over for us.
It is probable that a new model will arrive in the future, but readers must understand that our work is not free.
Believe it or not, journalism can still change the world. We just hope we are still around long enough to keep doing it.