Early last year, Associated Press warned that 2024 would be tough, based on recent experience:

The news website The Messenger folded on Wednesday after being in operation since only last May, abruptly putting some 300 journalists out of work. The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 100 journalists in recent weeks, Business Insider and Time magazine announced staff cuts, Sports Illustrated is struggling to survive, the Washington Post is completing buyouts to more than 200 staffers. The Post reported Thursday that The Wall Street Journal was laying off roughly 20 people in its Washington bureau; there was no immediate comment from a Journal representative. Pitchfork announced it was no longer a freestanding music site, after digital publications BuzzFeed News and Jezebel disappeared last year.

David Bauder, “Think the news industry was struggling already? The dawn of 2024 is offering few good tidings,” AP News, February 2, 2024

They weren’t wrong. In December, The Wrap summed up: “The good news: Losses declined in 2024. The bad news: There’s no sign things will turn around soon”

In 2024, nearly 15,000 jobs were eliminated across broadcast, television, film, news and streaming — extending a two-year run in which the news and entertainment businesses were dealt body blows.

The numbers, courtesy of Chicago-based firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which tracks the employment market, are sobering. While the 14,909 jobs that were lost by mid-December this year offered an improvement on the 21,417 jobs that were cut in 2023, it would be unwise to consider this year a “comeback” by any stretch. Combined, the number of jobs lost between 2023-24 more than quadrupled the amount lost between 2021-22.

Tess Patton, Sean Burch, Lucas Manfredi, and Jeremy Fuster, “Entertainment and Media Suffers Another Major Blow in 2024 With 15,000 Job Cuts,” December 19, 2024

The basic problem, of course, is that the new media environment of influencers, podcasters, Substackers, and so forth does not need the vast, expensive corporate structures that the traditional media must support.

Some understand the change. See, for example, Taylor Lorenz’s defense of the Democratic Party’s convention decision to prioritize influencers over traditional media.

It’s less clear how well legacy media journalists in general understand their plight. Surveying the year for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop complains,

Journalists in the US have had to grapple with threats other than the financial, of course. Beyond Trump’s continued bullying of the press (which we wrote about in Monday’s “Year in Politics” newsletter), journalists—and photojournalists in particular—have faced intimidation while covering protests linked to the ongoing war in Gaza. In October, Merid reported, citing the US Press Freedom Tracker, that forty-three journalists had been arrested in the US in the past year, triple the previous number; assaults of journalists were up more than 50 percent, too.

“The Year in Media, at Home and Abroad,” December 27, 2024

Sadly, that’s partly because they don’t matter the way they once did.