The media industry saw several waves of high-profile layoffs in 2023. We had layoffs in January, Gawker shut down in February, Buzzfeed cut 15 percent of its staff in April, Condé Nast laid off staff (including at the New Yorker), NPR cut ten percent of its workforce, and Vox Media laid off four percent of its staff on November 30, after a prior round of layoffs. Last year also closed with a bunch of media layoffs, which came on the heels of pandemic layoffs, so it’s been a brutal few years.

Because the journalism industry is so high profile relative to its economic significance, the business of journalism tends to attract a lot of bad takes.

On the one hand, people who don’t like the product for various ideological reasons want to attribute any economic struggles to their (often somewhat imagined) political beefs with writers. On the other hand, because the average person working in journalism is to the left of the average American, there’s a lot of internal disdain for the idea of taking basic business issues seriously.

[Over at Instapundit, Glenn quips, “still less brutal than it deserved.” I do think that ideological bias is a part of their financial decline, but more so the grip that “narrative journalism” has on the industry, and the concomitant degradation of their credibility. However, the political activism aimed at scaring advertisers away from conservative media ‘misinformation’ has likely had a much broader impact than expected on media advertising in all contexts. One thing is clear: whatever the media’s doing, it ain’t working.Is that just a ‘business model’ issue, or is it the product? Both, probably, but the business model isn’t the whole problem here. — Ed]