From the New Yorker Weekend Essay, 2/10/24 “Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? by By Clare Malone

Sub headline: “Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience”

“A report that tracked layoffs in the industry in 2023 recorded twenty-six hundred and eighty-one in broadcast, print, and digital news media. NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast—the publisher of The New Yorker—all made significant layoffs. BuzzFeed News closed, as did Gawker. The Washington Post, which lost about a hundred million dollars last year, offered buyouts to two hundred and forty employees”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/is-the-media-prepared-for-an-extinction-level-event

“Two hundred and four counties in the U.S. now have no local news—high-poverty areas are most affected—and, by the end of this year, it’s expected that the U.S. will have lost a third of its newspapers,” the article also said.