40,000 newsroom jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020

David777

David777

Well-known Member
Location
Silicon Valley
One of the biggest surprises for this 74 y/o senior during my lifetime is how rapidly once seemingly powerful paper print news and media news organizations have been eaten alive by the Internet. A past daily part of this guys leisure life. Balance in our society requires adjustments so that local regions always have reasonable news and reporting processes for communities from regional locals with the experienced public interpersonal skills to perform such as well as part being of a modern tech heavy mobile news team with investigative skills.

In recent decades, the local urban regional TV news anchor filled that roll. Now much news is being fed in from distant worldwide telecom sites. That has become the World Wide Web Internet packet telecom media, so society is still sometimes driving about like a driver in the left turn lane but in a cell phone discussion, in how it all is implemented. Until that occurred, I read much information and news, especially science news from books, magazines, newspapers. So an unexpected twist in life's path for we of that era.

Facebook, Instagram to block news stories in California if bill passes

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179184256/news-facebook-california-journalism-preservation-act
snippet:

The media industry has been hemorrhaging jobs for years. Some 40,000 newsroom jobs disappeared between 2008 and 2020, the Pew Research Center has found. And while many factors have contributed to the news industry's woes, a significant blow has been delivered by the tech industry's dominance over online advertising. According to figures provided to NPR by Insider Intelligence, services owned by Meta or Google have collected nearly 70% of digital advertising revenue made in 2023.
 

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The internet is the consolidation of power into the hands of just a few.
It also acts as a price fixing tool and guarantees that nobody can offer a cheaper alternative.
The final result is a complete lack of involvement and creativity by a greater percentage of the general public.
The impact on news reporting is obvious.

We get the same few unsubstatiated facts from a smaller group of sources.

There's a lot less insight offered from these news sources as well.

Most of the news stories consist of gossip, heresay, and conjecture delivered with tone that suggests expertise where there is none.

That's all I have to say on this state of journalism today.
 
OldFeller said:
The internet is the consolidation of power into the hands of just a few.
It also acts as a price fixing tool and guarantees that nobody can offer a cheaper alternative.
The final result is a complete lack of involvement and creativity by a greater percentage of the general public.
The impact on news reporting is obvious.

We get the same few unsubstatiated facts from a smaller group of sources.

There's a lot less insight offered from these news sources as well.

Most of the news stories consist of gossip, heresay, and conjecture delivered with tone that suggests expertise where there is none.

That's all I have to say on this state of journalism today.
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i could not agree more ......... facts are irrelevant to the "news" that only wants to be fast and too bad if they are wrong.
 

OldFeller said:
The internet is the consolidation of power into the hands of just a few.
It also acts as a price fixing tool and guarantees that nobody can offer a cheaper alternative.
The final result is a complete lack of involvement and creativity by a greater percentage of the general public.
The impact on news reporting is obvious.

We get the same few unsubstatiated facts from a smaller group of sources.

There's a lot less insight offered from these news sources as well.

Most of the news stories consist of gossip, heresay, and conjecture delivered with tone that suggests expertise where there is none.

That's all I have to say on this state of journalism today.
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There are many ways by which mobile journalism has benefited society. An obvious benefit of mobile journalism is in the way that mobile devices and social media allow for interaction and communication with the audience. Now more than ever, the public is able to play an active role in the creation of news stories. Through citizen journalism, people can get involved by sharing their side of the story through text, pictures, and video footage. Eyewitness and first-hand accounts bring light to worldwide issues in a way that would have been previously impossible.

The Boston Marathon bombings of 2013, for instance, showcased the Boston Police Department’s use of social media in covering the events as they transpired. Tweets from the department’s Twitter account provided people with an assemblage of information and updates at the tip of their fingers.
 
Most of what I see these days is not reported news, it is opinion journalism and often slanted toward one political party's agenda bias. There is indeed a smaller cadre of news sources and as such, easier to control the news whole and dissemination politically. So many people tune in to "news" each day to find out what they are supposed to think, feel and how they are supposed to react. And if they do not go along and get along, they and perhaps independent journalists are hung with a label not socially correct. JMHO
 
The newspapers that have disappeared will all have an internet presence,
I suspect, unless they were all very small local issues, they do over here
and the small ones are all in a group, also on the internet, plus paper.

There are fewer copies of the ones that are still printed on paper, you will
have noticed that many newsagent shops, regularly run out of paper copies.

Mike.
 
Naturally said:
Most of what I see these days is not reported news, it is opinion journalism and often slanted toward one political party's agenda bias. There is indeed a smaller cadre of news sources and as such, easier to control the news whole and dissemination politically. So many people tune in to "news" each day to find out what they are supposed to think, feel and how they are supposed to react. And if they do not go along and get along, they and perhaps independent journalists are hung with a label not socially correct. JMHO
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Obviously you only see US reporting. Try reading reporting from other English speaking countries, like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. You will learn that in other countries, reporting is clearly labeled as being facts only, or opinion pieces. Here in Canada, we have 3 national TV broadcasters, and 5 national radio networks. CBC radio covers 96 percent of our 39 million population, even those who live in the high Arctic, with 24 hours a day broadcasting. CBC radio has no commercials, and is broadcast in both of our official languages, plus 7 Aboriginal languages, and the CBC overseas radio broadcasts are on shortwave, heard around the world. You need to expand your horizons, and find out what other nations are talking about. JImB.
 
chic said:
True. Walter Cronkite did his own fact checking.
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And for an entire week during the largest evacuation in Canadian history ( a massive train derailment that resulted in over 250,000 people being evacuated ) he never managed to pronounce the name of the Canadian city correctly once . Mississauga, which he managed to say as "Misstowaga ". JimB.
 
I know humans, and you can't trust the bastards. At least, newspaper reporters uncovered some evil deeds. With fewer reporters less uncovering. And factless based internet opinion is rumor at best. And TV news is either "isn't that cute stories" or "isn't that sad, and now, for tomorrow's sunny weather...."stories
 
I used to enjoy reading the paper. We always got the morning edition and the evening edition. Thursday was the big paper day here when all the weekend sales where in the paper. When circulation died due to the internet, jobs went away. It’s a shame to a point.
 
I worked for six years for one of the major big metropolitan dailies. I started out as a proofreader (back then, they actually cared if things were spelled correctly). Lasted one day and then they moved me over to advertising sales where I stayed for the rest of the years.

At that time, the entire typesetting department had been eliminated BUT they couldn't get rid of them because they had one of the strongest unions in the country. They had to keep them on payroll until they turned 65. So, you had a whole area full of middle-aged men with nothing to do but sit all day and read newspapers, play cards, make trouble and draw hefty paychecks.

The Sunday newspaper was so big that it was delivered on two days, Friday and Sunday. On a good Sunday, we could have 80 pages of classified advertising. That's only the classified section.....there were big ads scattered throughout the paper as well as the "blow-ins".

The last time I looked at our local rag, I could have cried. It looked like something that was handed out for free at the grocery store. The classified ad section was 1/2 of a page.

I remember the pleasure of sitting at the breakfast table on Sunday morning reading the paper. It's just not the same looking at the news on my phone......
 
jujube said:
...The last time I looked at our local rag, I could have cried. It looked like something that was handed out for free at the grocery store. The classified ad section was 1/2 of a page. I remember the pleasure of sitting at the breakfast table on Sunday morning reading the paper. It's just not the same looking at the news on my phone......
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Same here. In the San Francisco Bay area, the San Jose Mercury (Santa Clara County with Silicon Valley) had a ridiculously massive employment section for decades full of technical job ads. But for pure size, the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition was arguably the most massive during that era when vast numbers of people were moving to the LA region. Especially the employment and the real estate ad sections. One almost needed a wheelbarrow to bring it in from one's driveway.

In that era, our large family of 9 usually ate breakfast and other meals together. My dad always grabbed the colorful comics section first while I would grab the Sports section and first move to the page that had all the league team baseball stats. Reading just parts of the Sunday newspaper me took hours. Probably a prime reason I have such strong language skills. My mom went for the shopping section classified ads where retailers had endless images of products, especially clothing. Remember all the pages with ads for current movies? Some movie ads filled whole pages with many smaller boxes for theaters showing a film. People born during this Internet era would be astonished at how different newspapers made everyone's daily world.
 
This is not a surprise to me at all. I've never had a newspaper subscription. I watch the news or go online to find out what's happening. My partner who is Gen X never watches the news but is always up-to-date on what's happening in the world via the internet.

What is unfortunate is that so many of the local newspapers, who reported the news in an objective way, have gone by the wayside.
 
I still get a paper daily, mainly for the football/soccer
and the crosswords!

You say that your paper got all politically biased, Gaer,
Over here the libraries, have every daily newspaper for
people to read, if it is the same in America, then you can
scan them all and pick a non-political one.

Mike.
 
I would be thrilled if I read next year or sooner that 100,000 TV, radio, newspaper and magazine journalists jobs disappeared!! We only get opinions or censorship from the news media today. There is no such thing as "reporting" the news. We only get opinion or worst yet, the media ignores what does not suit their agenda. For instance the US President falling after a Graduation speech and later the same day hitting his head as he exited Air Force One.
 
well it seems to be the law of the jungle - with the advent of internet which not all of us have still remember the oldies - yes I know we are but there were some before us!! - my gran used to keep the radio on all day - bit like the internet now - but ma and pa used to say don't leave that tv on all day now!! - and no one can really watch the internet if it is just idleing in between uses or can they? so many animal species are disappearing every year - any care ? clear air is disappearing ?? ; family values ; and so it goes on and on - life sucks and then we're dead?
 
I'm not sure but I think a lot of news articles that appear on the likes of Microsoft Start etc. are being written by artificial intelligence.

I'm not sure exactly how this works but I see very strange sentence constructions quite often.
 
rwb said:
I would be thrilled if I read next year or sooner that 100,000 TV, radio, newspaper and magazine journalists jobs disappeared!! We only get opinions or censorship from the news media today. There is no such thing as "reporting" the news. We only get opinion or worst yet, the media ignores what does not suit their agenda. For instance the US President falling after a Graduation speech and later the same day hitting his head as he exited Air Force One.
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That fall was certainly reported here in Canada, nationwide by all of our TV and radio networks. JimB.
 

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