News industry off to brutal 2024 start as mass layoffs devastate publishers, raising questions about the future of journalism

The news industry is enduring a brutal start to the new year, with outlets large and small across the country hemorrhaging reporting staff as legacy business models that kept much of the industry afloat for decades collapse in plain sight.

The news industry is enduring a brutal start to the new year, with outlets large and small across the country hemorrhaging reporting staff as legacy business models that kept much of the industry afloat for decades collapse in plain sight. The rapid contraction, coming even as the presidential election cycle heats up and public attention and revenues historically mount, has been on full display this month, with the first few weeks of 2024 ushering in a spate of painful layoffs at news organizations from coast-to-coast. The Los Angeles Times slashed its newsroom by more than 20% earlier this week; TIME cut dozens of staffers; and Business Insider said it would trim its workforce by 8%. Meanwhile, hundreds of staffers at Condé Nast, Forbes, The New York Daily News, and others staged historic walkouts to protest planned cuts at the outlets. The recent round of layoffs, while pronounced, are part of a much larger and unrelenting storm battering the journalism industry. Over the past 18 months, most news organizations have been forced to make difficult decisions to reduce their workforces. At the national level, CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, Vice Media, Sports Illustrated, Vox Media, NBC News, CNBC, and other organizations have cut swaths of their reporting staff. At the local level, layoffs have been nearly constant, with newspaper giant Gannett cutting hundreds of employees, and small outlets carving out already lean operations. The latest round of layoffs come after 2023 marked the worst year for job cuts in the journalism sector since Covid-19 upended the world in 2020, with roughly 2,700 jobs eliminated.