As Clarence Darrow so famously said, there are some obituaries I read with great pleasure.
Corporate media is on life support. Driven to cut costs by sagging ad revenues and waning appetite for propaganda, layoffs and ‘restructurings’ are happening all over.
There isn’t a violin tiny enough for this story.
Earlier this week the LA Times laid off 120 employees, around 20% of its newsroom.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed and Vice Media – two former darlings of digital media, are looking to siphon off assets. BuzzFeed, which has lost over 97% of its value since going public in 2021, is looking to sell its food sites, Tasty and WeFeast. While Fortress Investment Group, which took over Vice in bankruptcy last year, is looking to sell its Refinery29 women’s lifestyle site, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The chuckles just keep on coming.
Fortress is in talks to sell Refinery29 after a failed attempt to find a buyer for Vice in its entirety, which includes its namesake news brand, production studio and creative agency, among other assets.
Maybe they should have flogged it off for a buck, eh, Stuff?
The outlets join Jezebel (“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”), which was shuttered in November by G/O Media amid corporate layoffs, and Business Insider, which is now cutting 8% of its staff, per Semafor.
Time Magazine also laid off 30 people this week.
Please. My sides.
Just when you thought this story have delivered enough knee-slappers, along comes this rib-tickler:
Opining on the sad state of journalism is Jeff Bezos‘s vocal-fry champion,Taylor Lorenz, who said this week that “The entire journalism industry is basically in a free-fall,” and that the LA Times‘ woes follow “months and months of layoffs in the media industry.”
“And it’s not just digital media sites,” she continues. “Local news has been obliterated, the newspaper industry is cratering, radio is essentially dead – aside from NPR which has been gutted. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Conde Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to the New Yorker to Vanity Fair are on strike.”
Yes: that Taylor Lorenz.
She became somewhat famous after her exposé on Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik in what many argued was an attempt to dox and intimidate a person critical of woke activists (the initial story published by Lorenz contained a link to the woman’s work address and other work details. A later version of the story had the link removed).
And when Lorenz was doxxed in her turn, she wept and wailed about how threatened she felt. Meanwhile, her fellow msm hacks smugly wrote that, “the ‘doxxing’ of ‘Libs of TikTok’ creator is justified”.
These people really are incapable of hearing themselves.
She was also accused of lying in an article about coverage of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial when she claimed she had contacted certain YouTuber’s for comment before publishing her attack on them (they say she did not and she had no evidence to support her assertions). The Washington Post was forced to quietly stealth-edit her article in embarrassment […]
It is this kind of behavior from corporate journalists like her that has led directly to the death of her industry. It is this kind of biased behavior that has compelled the public to seek out the alternative media and abandon legacy platforms.
Oh, but that’s just one journalist? No — it’s the entire mainstream industry.
In a 2022 Pew Research poll of US mainstream journalists of all ages, over 55% said that they don’t believe all sides of any given story deserve equal coverage. The youngest journalists (ages 18-29) were the worst, with 63% saying they did not agree with equal coverage […]
In a similar poll, over 76% of the general public said they want equal coverage of all sides by the media. The disconnect between establishment news sources and what their audience wants is immense.
ZeroHedge
And the audience is voting with their feet — or their clicks.
This is why independent media The BFD is surviving, even in this tough economic time, without a cent of government money, unlike the NZ mainstream media — just the support of its loyal subscribers.
