A bleak start to the year for the journalism industry

I feel like every day my timeline on X, formerly Twitter (just in case you didn't know by now), is filled with journalists announcing they’ve lost their job.

Over in the US, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment company that tracks labour market trends, reported that there were over 500 journalists axed at news outlets in January alone. Sigh. This follows the loss of 3,087 digital, broadcast and print news jobs in the US in 2023 — the highest annual total since 2020, when 16,060 cuts were recorded. Press Gazette tracked UK, US and Canadian outlets and found that more than 7,900 journalism industry jobs were cut in 2023. These include jobs at Vogue, Wired, the BBC and Reach.

Now in the past month, we’ve seen the likes of Business Insider make 8% of its global staff redundant, Channel 4 reveal it's to make its biggest level of redundancies in 15 years, while the Los Angeles Times has laid off 20% of its workforce.

Others are trying to find ways to bring in much-needed additional income. You might have spotted recently that Mail Online is now putting a number of its stories behind a paywall for £4.99 a month. “It’s a tough time in the industry, of course, but I think people here recognise that being able to invest and to launch new products and to diversify is our way of future-proofing,” editor and publisher Danny Groom told Press Gazette.

Perhaps we’ll see further paywalls. More innovation. And although I’d love to be all optimistic, having covered the industry for so many years, I just can’t see a turnaround (and while Substack is helping some journalists, I don't think it's the saviour for local, national and global news and investigative journalism that we desperately need to hold the powerful to account). Instead, it's going to be rocky road in 2024, with our Twitter/X feeds consisting of further rounds of job cuts.