We're paid in exposure and sustained by massive layoffs
You know what else is paid in exposure? This new newsletter!
I've been in journalism since 2010. For my entire career, it's been an industry in crisis.
It won’t be news (heh) that journalism has been falling off a very long cliff for a couple of decades now. You can’t point to a number of factors for this. Ad revenue has dwindled; people don’t want to pay for news anymore; journalism is now just clickbait headlines and misinformation; mainstream outlets are reporting on how trans kids are transitioning too soon like it’s the most important news of the day. All of this is at least partially true.
Journalism is called the Fourth Estate, an institution that sits alongside the government to shape opinions and politics. This is also at least partially true. Some outlets and journalists still work to hold truth to power, whether it’s something as grand as politics or as niche as video games. But journalism is also a business. While anybody with a passing understanding of U.S. history, yellow journalism, or the movie Newsies could’ve told you that, it’s quickly eroding itself. Journalism is now almost exclusively a business, and like with everything else, capitalism is destroying it.
Take video game journalism as an example. I was laid off in September from my job at Future, a gigantic U.K. media conglomerate, where I was a copyeditor and video game section lead for four years at three tech specialist websites. We were among the first in a long line of video game journalism layoffs. The day after, G4TV was shut down. After that, Fanbyte, a video games and culture site, saw massive layoffs, leaving the publication as a husk of what it once was.
Over the next four months, the carnage continued — `The Washington Post’s video game vertical Launcher, IGN, Gamespot, and so many others. I started tracking them on Twitter, but the longer the thread got, the more depressed I became, and I couldn’t keep it up. Plus, when other media layoffs started to roll in, I realized we were in the middle of something a Twitter thread from a horror-loving, Drag Race-obsessed journalist couldn’t solve.
Beyond video games, the layoffs hit tech. BDG’s Input was shuttered (the company would later shut down its Gawker reboot and lay off people from Mic), Protocol was shut down, and people were laid off at Vice’s Motherboard verticle. This came right on time, as almost every part of Big Tech — Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc. — also saw massive job cuts.
Then came the rest of media. Axios says that 3,000 jobs were lost in 2022, and 2023 started with many more. Here’s an incomplete list because I’m sure I missed at least a couple:
Acast
BDG (Mic, Input, Gawker in 2023)
CNN
Fandom (Gamespot, Giant Bomb)
Future
G4TV
Gannett
Morning Brew
NPR
Protocol
Recount
Recurrent
Red Ventures
Vice Media
Vox Media
Washington Post
Ziff Davis (IGN, etc)
Being paid in cyclical layoffs
It’s ridiculous that once I saw what was happening, I experienced apathy. This was just another end-of-year layoff spree. This happens in cycles. At the end of Q4, executives and investors look at how their media properties turned a profit but didn’t make as much money as they should, and start laying people off. Come Q1 or Q2, those companies will start to open job postings. A year or two down the line, they’ll post jobs for similar roles that had been recently removed.
Just take a look at Buzzfeed. It was one of the many media companies that laid off employees in 2022 — 12% of staff, according to reports. But this was just a retread of Buzzfeed layoffs from 2019, where it cut 15% of its workers. In 2017, it laid off 100 people. All of these happened either at the end of the year or at the beginning, which makes sense because that’s when investors start to get antsy about profits.
With each of these layoffs, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti had to issue a cut-and-paste statement about how the company had to cut people off from their primary source of income because it needed to restructure content efforts or was impacted by economic trouble. in the case of the most recent layoffs. Each statement is the same: Buzzfeed was impacted by the everchanging internet and media consumption trends and therefore needed to rethink its strategy and lay off workers. Here’s his statement from 2019:
“Over the past few months, we’ve done extensive work examining the trends in our business and the evolving economics of the digital platforms. We’ve developed a good understanding of where we can consolidate our teams, focus in on the content that is working, and achieve the right cost structure to support our multi-revenue model.”
At least Peretti didn’t say that Buzzfeed was pivoting to video again.
I was let go from my contract job in 2016, which was traumatizing. I was a weekend editor at Gizmodo, and in the wake of OG Gawker getting bankrupted by a billionaire with an axe to grind and a very tan wrestler, I was removed to make way for all the Gawker employees looking for a new home. Nobody ever tells you that getting fired/laid off/deemed redundant will rewire your brain. While you’ll get many better jobs, you’ll still wonder if it’s something you did that put you in a position to scramble for health insurance and to retool your resume for the sometimes years-long job hunt. What if you’re just… bad at this.
Those feelings of dread and unease might be strangely alleviated after the second, third, or ninth layoff. After all, it’s very likely you were impacted at least once if you work in journalism (Pew Research estimates U.S. newsroom employment is down by 26% since 2008, and that’s not including 2022 layoffs). But after it happens more than once, you might experience something odd: acceptance.
Layoffs… in this economy?
You might notice 2022’s layoff reasoning has been slightly more specific than usual. Many executives cited financial pressure from investors. As spending started to drop amid some of the highest inflation we’ve seen in decades, brand advertising budgets started to crumble. Media runs on ad dollars and affiliate revenue, so decreased spending means lower profit, at least in theory (many companies impacted by layoffs, not just in media, posted profits in 2022). Then you have shareholders, who are pressuring media executives to cut costs, driven by “economic uncertainty.” As many of us know, what investors say goes, even if they’re wrong or not coming from a place of expertise in the industry they’re investing in.
Buzzfeed cited “worsening macroeconomic conditions,” while Morning Brew’s CEO said in a memo that “the economy is evolving, and unfortunately, there is a lot of fear and uncertainty among companies around the world.” Gannett, which sees layoffs and cost-cutting every few months, noted “ongoing macroeconomic volatility.” You’re probably sensing a theme.
And let’s not get into how Big Tech has made journalism more reliant on platforms like Google and social media. That’s a post for another day.
I saw all of this happen on the video game side. Game spending increased in 2020 following the start of the pandemic, but dropped in 2022. Then came the Xbox Series X|S and PS5; two new consoles that nobody could buy due to supply chain issues meant more opportunities to drive readers to affiliate links and urgent deals tweets. But spending is now down and there is lower demand for consoles, so investors are pulling back. Nobody is paying for investigative video game journalism. The money is in guide SEO and commerce. But if there is no ad revenue from SEO clicks or affiliate revenue from e-commerce, then what else is there?
Like other economic downturns, this will also cycle out. People joke about the end-of-year layoff spree in media because it happens almost every year. Companies will figure out new strategies, hire people to work on them, and then lay them off once again once they don’t make enough millions. That’ll happen again.
But it’s not like getting out of this rut will fix online media. The internet fucked everything up and will continue to do so. Big Tech fucked it up even further. We can have our jobs and our publications and our RSS feeds filled with the stories we want to read, but we can’t have what journalism should be: a way to inform people about the ideas and news that will impact them.
That’s why I decided to start Paid in Exposure. I wanted to shine a spotlight on the problems impacting journalism, why it’s dangerous for both the journalists and the readers, and maybe how we can fix them. There is so much more to discuss than what I mentioned above, from the larger issues of objectivity, abusive workplaces, and ad-driven economics, to why it's not a scoop if you leak a press release before embargo.
I know I could just “learn to code” or hop into the journalism-to-PR pipeline, but why do that when I can dig into *points at post you just read* all of this.
Reading list
Shannon Liao, one of laid-off Washington Post staffers, started a Substack and has been reporting on the tech and media layoffs. The post linked below is another great explainer with insight from experts and peers.
Robert Evans hosts the amazing podcast Behind the Bastards, which tells the stories of the worst people in history, including the history of 20th-century authoritarianism. He just wrote a long but fascinating piece in his newsletter Shatter Zone on the mainstream media’s history in periods with rising fascism and how little they did to face it.
Excellent stuff, Carli. I've appreciated all of your coverage of the mass gaming layoffs, and your ability to put it all in perspective.