The Incredible, Shrinking Legacy Media
The legacy media is worthless to a majority of the population who will simply no longer pay to be lied to.
How do you make a small fortune in journalism today? You start with a large fortune…
Late January of this year saw a remarkable reduction in the ranks of print and online journalists. My local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, announced the slashing of 20 percent of its news staff, eliminating 115 jobs. This is the second round of recent layoffs to hit the Times, which saw the paper cut 13 percent of its staff in 2023.
The Times’ owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, lamented that the job cuts were necessary because the paper was not “making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization.”
What would motivate a 143-year-old media institution such as the Los Angeles Times to implement “one of the largest workforce reductions” in its history? The paper is the defining daily publication in the nation’s second-largest media market, yet its daily print circulation has dropped from nearly a million just a couple of decades ago to 125,000 – and we don’t know how many of those papers are actually read.
The Times lost 17 percent of its subscriber base in just the last year, with a 4 percent drop in its paid digital subscriptions, an area of expected growth. Because of the serious decline in subscription revenue and a corresponding drop in classified advertising, the Times is losing upwards of $40 million per year.
These layoffs are a clear acknowledgement that the Times no longer has much of a value proposition for subscribers. It hardly reports any news at all, only one-sided stories and opinions that follow predictable narratives. Times readers can access similar content through hundreds of other outlets, most of them for free.
Consumers are tired of being lied to and have moved away from the Times and toward other, more reliable, and credible sources of news. Without a paying audience and fewer advertisers, and without a wealthy family willing to keep writing $1 million weekly checks to keep the paper afloat, the Times is putting hundreds of its journalists and support staff out of work. And the Times is not alone.
“An estimated 2,681 news industry jobs were lost through the end of November” 2023, reports the Associated Press. The Washington Post, NPR, Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, Vice, National Geographic, CNN, and Vox Media are among those media companies cutting staff due to lower subscription and advertising revenue.
Among readers, a recent Gallop poll shows that 39 percent of polling participants “have no confidence at all” in the media’s news reporting, up from 27 percent in 2016. That decline in consumer confidence has been steady for decades but is reaching the point where a turnaround will be necessary for much of the industry to survive. That turnaround will require more objective reporting, ceasing the repeating of obvious propaganda, and keeping opinions contained in the Opinion section.
That turnaround is not going to happen.
When the Internet made it possible for alternative news outlets to compete against the legacy media, the legacy media had a choice: Perform your jobs honorably with authentic and truthful reporting - or continue being shamelessly deceitful, regardless of what your customers wanted. Well, you turned off your customers and you are losing them in droves.
For example, throughout the pandemic, the legacy media outlets hysterically scolded Americans that they must absolutely accept their kids being locked out of their schools, and they swore that Zoom lessons would be just as good as in-person learning. Now that there is irrefutable evidence proving the school shutdowns resulted in kids falling a year or more behind, the legacy media bravely admits that… mistakes were made. But no apology from the very media organs that were responsible for supporting this disaster, no attempt to make amends or even try to rebuild trust and credibility by taking responsibility for the lockdown hysteria and the damage it caused to our kids.
The legacy media would like to avoid being reminded of the sheer amount of propaganda it spread all through the pandemic, hoping that we would forgive and forget, that we should “learn from our mistakes” and simply move on. The massive layoffs in multiple media sectors makes it clear that the obvious lack of integrity, humility, or honesty has made the legacy media worthless to a majority of us and we will simply not pay to be lied to.
I don’t believe the legacy media in its current form contributes anything of value to our society anymore. In a free country, there is no market for lies, cultural bigotry, and propaganda. Consumers of news, one by one, are seeing the legacy media for what it has become: A fraudulent, gaslighting institution that peddles lies and propaganda that works against the interests of its customers.