Before I start this rant I want to head some counter-arguments off at the pass. Yes, I am fully aware that 30+ million people have had to file for unemployment since the start of the pandemic, and that has had an effect on the media industry as it has on literally every other industry. Advertisers have had to pull their ads from numerous publications, causing some to shut down, in many cases permanently. It is a rough time for everyone at the moment, but that’s why I felt the need to write this:
Hey the media industry fucking sucks and every executive at every company should be fired, rather than the estimated 36,000 media employees who have been fired, furloughed or seen their hours cut in the pandemic months alone.
Here these motherfuckers are, continuing to accept their massive salaries or enormous golden parachutes, and putting a labor force that could actually do some good right now in communities big and small, online and off, completely in the fucking ground.
The media industry is garbage and this was true before the pandemic ever got going. Poynter has a daily-updated tally of which media groups are either dying or dead, and the length of the list is frankly staggering, but this is an industry that had already been experiencing massive cuts and layoff waves. Anyone who spends any amount of time on Twitter has likely seen these waves crash to shore for years, as suddenly the timeline will be flooded with “hey, just got laid off, anyway if you’re looking for a good x reporter or critic or analyst, let me know! Portfolio/resumé in biooooo…” Meanwhile, how many executives have taken pay cuts? How many have resigned? How many have made the sacrifice necessary to make sure their teams of writers continue to be able to afford places to live? To have insurance? To be able to eat?
Truth is, this has been a problem for over a decade, if not longer. According to Pew Research, US newspapers have reduced their newsroom staff by 50 percent since 2008. Between January 2017 and April 2018, a third of major US newspapers suffered major layoffs. A quarter of all US newspapers underwent further layoffs in 2018. Digital media outlets helped keep the industry from straight-up tanking, but not by much and not for long. Media organizations are now being unionized right and left but it might be too little, too late – as we saw with VICE’s recent layoffs of over 55 writers despite efforts by the VICE Media Union to find alternative solutions.
With the media world hemorrhaging everywhere except where it matters – at the top, where executives would actually face real consequences for the games they’ve been playing with media workers’ lives – it’s clear that the industry is going to have to evolve if it’s going to survive into the next decade. And when I say evolve I don’t mean weak shit like “going digital” or “pivoting to video,” schemes that didn’t really do fuck all to address the industry’s problems in the first place. I mean radical organizational shifts that rethink the economic models the media has used in the past.
If we’re going to pivot, pivot away from advertising. Media organizations like ProPublica and an org from my own state, the Frontier, are reader-supported nonprofit organizations. And while there are likely drawbacks to that approach it has allowed them to focus on in-depth reporting efforts that other media outlets couldn’t bear the weight of.
Speaking of organizations like ProPublica, they offer a great reason why the media industry should be collaborating, rather than competing. ProPublica has been working with journalists and news organizations all over the country on its Documenting Hate project, a systemic accounting of hate crimes and bias incidents from across the US from early 2017 to late 2019. The idea behind Documenting Hate is that hate crimes as a national story just simply can’t be relegated to a single outlet, nor could a single outlet carry the weight of reporting it by itself. By calling on reporters from all over to work with them, ProPublica was able to create a database of raw materials that other journalists could then use to craft their own stories. If media markets saw that kind of cooperation anywhere else, where outlets shared resources and reported on complementary stories rather than trying to outscoop each other all the time, maybe they wouldn’t need to shy away from the difficult or less-appealing stories.
Before anyone calls me a dirty commie for suggesting that media orgs should work together, here’s probably my hottest take: break up the conglomerates and media groups on a national and local level. And while I could certainly spend time here talking about a certain herb-run media group, instead I’m going to call out my, uh, ex-local newspaper’s holding company, CNHI. CNHI’s image for the future of journalism is a boot stamping on a human face, forever. They have ruthlessly killed off local papers in my neck of the woods for not being profitable to their liking, including my hometown’s newspaper, The Edmond Sun. To add insult to injury, all Edmond Sun subscribers would instead be receiving Norman Transcript copies. Norman, for reference, is about 40 miles south of Edmond. The entirety of Oklahoma City stands between the two towns. But, you know – same difference, I guess. To quote a former instructor of mine, “Thus shutting down The Edmond Sun is more than just a historic, cultural and economic loss for Edmond. It harms an essential organ of the community’s life and well being.”
Also, loosen the restrictions on hiring: As we’re seeing with the pandemic, there’s literally no reason why media workers can’t work from their homes, and to take things a step further, there’s no reason why media workers should have to move to New York or San Francisco to get these jobs, either. Also, while vocational aptitude is important, restricting applicants to folks with BAs or higher – and then further “self-selecting” by biasing toward one higher ed institution over another, based on prestige – only serves to shut out the diverse talent pool you then use as massively underpaid freelancers and stringers.
Finally: pay your fucking freelancers. Pay them on time, and pay them better. I shouldn’t even have to, and will not, elaborate on this. Just do it.
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