Journalists are notorious drama queens when it comes to their own industry. Still, this has been an undeniably bleak start to the year. So far in 2024 there have been lay-offs at The Wall Street Journal, Time, Business Insider, LA Times and Sports Illustrated, plus the abrupt closure of media start-up The Messenger. On Thursday, Vice News announced hundreds of lay-offs and said that it would stop publishing on its website. As fear permeates the sector, the lure of a more independent career is growing brighter. Who wants to labour in an unstable newsroom job when you can become a content creator and post your work yourself?
There is a theory that the future of media will consist of a handful of global organisations and many thousands of individual newsletters, video channels and podcasts. This is likely to mean less news and more commentary. Reporting is expensive and difficult. Without the infrastructure of media companies it could dwindle.
Still, it is better than some of the other imagined futures being touted. Here in the US, there is a line of thought that says the era of media is on the way out altogether. Cheap generative artificial intelligence could gut the sector. Perhaps, says Politico, journalism will become a hobby “like scrapbooking”.