The journalism business is under siege. Should Congress step in to turn the tide?
By Michael Jones
I was at a professional networking event a few weeks ago when I ran into a buddy with whom I covered the congressional beat on Capitol Hill. It’d been a few weeks since I’d seen them in a scrum jostling with reporters to get a soundbite from a senator or staking out a meeting to receive instant updates on the latest House drama.
They had been laid off in the highly publicized folding of a much-hyped digital publication that failed to reach the one-year mark.
I told them they were missed—not just by me but also by the broader media landscape where journalists find themselves under economic siege amid mass layoffs and technological upheaval.
What’s especially gruesome is this particular reporter resigned from their other job at one of the top-10 circulated newspapers in the country to join the startup. Before the site’s closure, the newspaper they left endured its own terrible public layoff cycle.
“Either way, I would have ended up here,” they said. “At least I got a raise out of it before it happened.”
I can somewhat relate: Before launching my own independent congressional newsletter, I worked in corporate media as a fashion magazine journalist who was laid off multiple times in one year. Talk about a surreal experience to be one of the last eight employees at the magazine you dreamt of working at as a kid. I don’t recommend it at all.
The state of journalism as a business and democratic institution is one of the reasons I pivoted to political reporting. America is the result of a series of policy choices. And, although we certainly haven’t helped our cause, our elected officials have applied a hands-off approach to addressing a crisis decades in the making.
And our democracy is worse off for it.
“A lot of times, at a local level, it could contribute to [the erosion of democracy],” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told me this week outside the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor. “You look at candidates at a local level not being vetted when they run—The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal can’t cover everything. So when you’re looking at a robust for a Congress race or a state Senate race, a House race, a mayor’s race, all of that is eroded.”
For perspective on the dire situation, just look at the first month of this year: Over 500 journalists were laid off in January alone, including print, broadcast and digital media. 2023 saw 3,087 cuts in news jobs in the same areas. Three years before that was especially brutal when 16,000-plus journalists lost their jobs.
Several factors have converged to create a perfect storm too fierce for the industry to handle.
Business executives have mismanaged news organizations in service of profit motives that conflict with the role of the free press to hold truth to power while equipping the public with the information they need to make informed decisions and hear diverse opinions.
Big tech companies and their social apps devalued quality original journalism by pairing it with user-generated digital junk food like cat videos and constant personal updates with little to no distinction between the wheat and chaff. (The clickbait you hate is a consequence of American capitalism’s acquiescence to unscrutinized innovation.)
This incentivized editorial decision-makers to deprioritize expensive newsgathering for cheap aggregation and an over-reliance on opinion writers who trafficked in outrage and cynicism. Too many journalists adopted these practices. Artificial intelligence is turbocharging this shift.
As Khanna mentioned, social apps also accelerated the nationalization of news at the expense of local outlets. Journalists became the target of online extremists who no longer critiqued the work but dehumanized its authors because it didn’t align with their beliefs. And American media literacy has been in decline for years.
“Not everyone’s gonna get their op-ed published in The New York Times or letter to the editor, so you’re eroding the civic space for conversation and communities,” Khanna said.
But for all the peril technology has brought to media, it has its promise too.
“Everyone is, in some sense, an author and has a voice today. You can have a much bigger voice than a member of Congress if you create a video that goes viral on TikTok or Instagram today,” Khanna told me. “Young people can speak out and be heard in important ways, so it’s much easier to have protests and citizen gatherings. But what we have to do is create the digital institutions of the future to start to make sure that we’re harnessing this energy in ways that are constructive that have dialogue and not ones that are dysfunctional.”
Journalism has always been an elitist institution. Reporters of color have often been excluded from plum positions and greeted with skepticism when pitching stories that give voice to historically overlooked and underserved groups.
Congressional Black Caucus Chair Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) told me this is top of mind for the CBC’s 60 members.
“We understand the problem. We’re concerned like others about the dislocation and the layoffs that have happened throughout a number of media outlets,” he added. “It’s why we have issued some of these accountability letters to the private sector, including media, because there needs to be an accounting for who’s being affected.”
The crisis is also top of mind for Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat.
“We should all be concerned about the decline in the ability of the American people to receive information in a clear, comprehensive and a transparent fashion from the American media, which is central to our democracy,” he said earlier this month. “And I think there are some efforts to figure out how we might be able to better support local news all across the country. And those are efforts that I hope continue to lead to something fruitful.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
