A Tough Season, But Not a News Apocalypse

Charting the trends, problems, a blip and some caveats.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Four years ago, in the pandemic Spring of 2020, I was privileged to be a member of a Zoom support group of about eight nonprofit news CEOs we called “Apocalypse Now.” We helped each other get through a very difficult moment by swapping tales and tips, commiserating about unplanned expenses and newsroom anxiety, hashing out issues around the PPP and remote work, the challenges of a lethal virus and a racial reckoning. In all, we groped our way through the emergency, coming away with closer friendships and more than a few good ideas.

The use of “Apocalypse” in the name of the group came with the sort of jaunty dark humor to which newsrooms, in my experience, often default, but the word was also thrown around in press coverage of the news business at that time, from the New York Times to the Columbia Journalism Review. Yet, we knew, or at least I think we knew, that the events of 2020 were not the end of the world, or even the end of the world as we knew it. Rather, we understood that it was probably the most dramatic year of our lives, the closest we were likely to come to what older generations experienced in 1968.

This week I want to take a closer look at what I hear being discussed again, just four years later, in a growing rather than shrinking economy, with unemployment historically low instead of high, with the virus normalized: a new news apocalypse. Is that really what we are experiencing?

Are we living through a news apocalypse?

I began with 2020, because the first thing to observe is that if you detect the incipient end of the world every four years, your detector may be a bit overwrought.

Having said that, these are very tough times for many in the journalism business. The would-be leaders of earlier eras, from Vice to BuzzFeed, and Sports Illustrated to the Center for Public Integrity, are failing. Most newspapers continue to shrink as they have trouble creating offerings that will facilitate the transition to dependence on subscribers, the TV network news divisions are accelerating what seems likely to be a long slide, public radio continues to struggle not only with the advertising collapse everyone is seeing, but also with adapting its model beyond pledge drives for which listeners have decreased patience, and the culling and pruning of digital start-ups continues. The Messenger performed like an experimental rocket, rising fast and then blowing up, although that seemed sui generis to almost all observers.

I think the best way to get a handle on this is to look more widely and broadly at the factors driving these losses, and to break them down into secular developments (trends), one-off problems and at least one important difficulty that seems to me likely to be temporary, ultimately a blip. Before wrapping up, we should also consider a number of countervailing factors or caveats. Ready? Steady, go…

Secular declines in advertising and search

The most important, and most depressing, factors bedeviling the business of news are the problems that bode likely both to continue, and indeed to only get worse. The most significant of these remains advertising, both print and digital, where prices remain under pressure and market share for news erodes. Frankly, I am surprised that anyone in our industry still believes these trends can reverse—or even plateau for an extended period. I do not.

Two other trends are also the source of important difficulties: the transformation of search through the increasing use of AI, which will inexorably eliminate certain kinds of referral traffic (although mostly traffic of the drive-by sort), and the declining preference of digital users, particularly younger ones, for consuming news in text form.

Facebook, Twitter and one-shot losses

Beyond these secular issues, a number of what I would describe as one-time factors are also hurting the news business right now. Perhaps the largest of these is Facebook’s relentless abandonment of news, including both the end of its financial support for the industry (which was always self-serving, and destined to be, at best, occasional and opportunistic) and, much more importantly, its systematic throttling of sharing of news on its core platform.

Facebook seems determined to avoid a repeat of 2016 and the blame it received for the rise of Trump. It seems reasonable to expect that it will pursue this objective in 2024 by shunning news altogether, and it has already taken important strides in this direction. At the same time, Elon Musk’s hollowing out of Twitter, and the failure of any meaningful alternative for news to emerge, exacerbate the impact.

News avoidance won’t last

One factor that is hurting news right now seems temporary—which is to say the effect will reverse at some point, and in retrospect be seen as a painful blip. That is news avoidance, which strikes me as having its roots in a reaction to the extended coverage of the pandemic (beyond the initial emergency phase) and now, especially, in a presidential campaign rematch most voters clearly do not want. At some point, likely no later than next year, the news cycle will fundamentally shift, and I believe readers will re-engage. For now, however, if we are being honest, who can blame them for wanting to hear a little less?

The rest of the story

If you’ve read this far, your own despair may leave you wondering whether to read on to the rest of column. Bear with me, we have come now to what radio personality Paul Harvey would have called “the rest of the story.”

If we’re being as candid with ourselves about promising trends as about problems, I think we need to acknowledge some important things that are going right (or could be) in the business of news. Here’s my short list of caveats:

• Readers continue to show an increased willingness to pay for news where they find value. The New York Times is Exhibit A, but it is hardly alone, with others ranging from The Information to Free Press to Puck (although all three of those are private, so firm numbers are hard to come by);

• Philanthropic support for nonprofit news is growing, both at the institutional level (Press Forward, and through the American Journalism Project), but also, and ultimately more importantly and potentially enduringly, in smaller individual contributions (ProPublica alone took in almost $10 million in such gifts last year), as consumer awareness of the need for nonprofit news increases;

• More news organizations are doing more and better work beyond text, including short-form video and in podcasting (even if supply in the latter may have, for a time, outstripped demand). And some of the “creators” we often posit as crafting alternatives to traditional news may actually turn out to be developing new news forms and even the beginnings of new organizations;

• The prospects for a meaningful stream of payments from providers of generative AI to news publishers, while admittedly uncertain, are already much greater than they ever were for search. At the same time, we have hardly begun to see the ways in which AI can augment news, and I, for one, believe the potential is enormous;

• Government support for the news industry also seems more likely, particularly at the state government and local news levels, than it has in the past.

I don’t mean by noting these developments to be pollyannaish; I am not suggesting that the good news outweighs the bad right this moment. But I do hope we can see the picture whole, glimpse the paths forward where they are being forged, and not succumb to an apocalyptic despair that I think this tough season simply doesn’t merit. We have lots of work to do. Let’s get to it.