Mass Layoffs Hit Journalism Industry

Journalists at major newspapers could face even more layoffs in the coming year. Credit: Aaron Sousa, via Unsplash

2024 started off with widespread layoffs in the journalism industry, leaving students and longtime journalists wondering what’s going on.

On Jan. 23, the Los Angeles Times announced that there would be a layoff of 115 employees, which accounts for more than 20% of its newsroom staff. This is a major increase in layoffs from last year when the New York Times let go of 74 employees. A few days later, National Geographic let go of 17 staff writers, and a significant chunk of Sports Illustrated writers were let go as well. In January alone, the news industry — including print, digital and broadcast organizations — saw over 500 layoffs. Vice Media also announced it’s expecting a massive layoff of staff.

The layoffs for 2024 are already significant, and the ones that occurred in 2023 reveal a troubling trend even before the start of the new year. Job losses for news organizations grew by almost 50% in 2023; there were 2,681 cuts as of last November, compared to 1,808 cuts in 2022. Smaller local newspapers are impacted the worst by these cuts, with 130 confirmed newspaper closings or mergers in 2023. 

The major layoffs at the LA Times also present a danger for loss of diversity at the paper. Out of the 115 who were laid off, 94 were members of the Los Angeles Times Guild. The guild is estimating a loss of 38% of the Latino Caucus, 33% of the Black Caucus and 34% of the combined Asian American & Pacific Islander, Middle East, North Africa and South Asia Caucuses, according to Poynter. 

“It’s part of the business, unfortunately.”

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a senior lecturer of sports communication at Marist College who has been involved in journalism for 20 years, and the news of the recent layoffs was not a shock to him. 

“I don’t think I know anybody in the journalism business who hasn’t been laid off at some point. It’s just part of the life,” he said. “I know excellent journalists who’ve been laid off five times. It’s part of the business, unfortunately.”

“It was always a business where people constantly moved around. But now, it’s less that they’re moving up than that one place is going out of business or has layoffs, so they move to a different place. So it’s less of an upward trajectory and more like a game of musical chairs,” Schaerlaeckens added.

According to Schaerlackens, sports journalism, in particular, faces layoffs due to the consolidation of sports news. “With sports, most of it is national, so did we need every local paper to cover every major team? No, there was a lot of redundancy there.”

In regards to Sports Illustrated, one of the media outlets that recently let go of a large portion of employees, Schaerlaeckens said that it’s been in a “death spiral for 20 years” due to it being sold repeatedly to different management. This leads to Schaerlaeckens’ belief that what’s causing these layoffs isn’t the journalists themselves but the business practices. 

“It’s never that they’re not doing good work and people don’t care, and the business fails. It’s almost always an issue of management where you’ve got companies that have completely misread the market, or you’ve got managers that just don’t have a clue,” he said. 

Citing the failure of news website The Messenger, Schaerlaeckens said certain business and news models are ineffective in maintaining a journalistic staff. According to him, the outlet proclaimed it would hire 550 reporters after raising money from venture capital and remaining committed to ‘down the middle’ coverage, no subscriptions or paywalls and a full reliance on digital advertising for profit. But after six months, The Messenger’s hired staff got all laid off, with the market for centrist news simply not appealing to most news consumers.

“It’s not that people don’t want to watch the horse race; it’s that the horses keep falling down. And that’s been the kind of unifying trend where you see the same thing with all these newspapers getting bought up by venture capitalists who just want to bleed it dry for profit and run it as thinly as possible to extract as much money as they can,” said Schaerlaeckens. “It’s a business problem, not a product problem.”

Student concerns

While professional journalists may understand the history and business practices that go into the reasons behind layoffs, students who are pursuing journalism remain anxious about their future. 

John Sileo ‘24 is a communications major with concentrations in advertising and journalism. He is passionate about video and photojournalism and believes it is the best form of journalism to express his creativity. Regarding traditional journalism, he would love to be a music journalist for a Rolling Stone-esque news organization. However, he is nervous about securing a traditional job in journalism after graduation, and his biggest concern is the influence of artificial intelligence.

“You have articles being written by robots,” he said. “The only thing I can hope is that the visual form is still there: shooting photos, shooting video.”

For Jackson Lustberg ‘24, a communication major with a concentration in journalism, the concern of getting a job in journalism after graduation is very real. 

“Just the field of journalism in general, I hear, is incredibly turbulent,” said Lustberg. “Video game journalism especially, everyone I talk to in the field who gives me career advice is like, ‘This is not a career for the faint of heart; it took me a decade to get any real paid work out of this.’”

As an aspiring video game journalist, Lustberg commented on the industry’s massive hit in both developer and journalist layoffs. 

“I think it was 7,500 plus jobs lost in game development in 2023. There’s just kind of a bubble that’s bursting right now in games journalism, so we are seeing the ramifications of that,” said Lustberg.

Since job prospects in video game journalism might be slim, Lustberg is planning on obtaining a job outside of journalism in order to support himself, but he hopes it will be in the same industry.

“I’ll probably have to find other jobs with my communication degree. I’d be fine with any kind of communication job in the video game journalism industry,” he said. “In fact, doing that would probably help me understand the ins and outs better.”

Hope for the future

Even with the bleak facts of how business practices are affecting journalistic pursuits, Schaerlaeckens is still confident in the survival of journalism and acknowledges that there are models that still work in the industry.

“I have hope for the business, because there are greenshoots, there are these new outlets like Defector in sports, or Hell Gate in New York City that are basically entirely subscriber funded and they succeed and they do well, and there are signs that there are models that can work,” he said. “You just need to stop thinking of journalism as a get-rich-quick scheme, think of it more as a service that can pay for itself.”

Schaerlaeckens is passionate about teaching students valuable journalism skills and preparing them for the realities they might face in the journalism industry after they graduate. His mantra as a professor is to best prepare students for the reality of journalism and to give them the future-proof skills they need, from reporting to storytelling.

He believes that even if journalism jobs can be hard to secure, the jobs are still there, especially if you have the right skills needed to be successful in the field. And even if you do not pursue journalism, he says that those skills will be useful for other industries. 

“They’re still hiring people. They still need entry-level people who can contribute right away,” he said. “If you have useful skills, somebody will find a place for you. The skills that you learn in journalism don’t just apply to journalism.”