Terminal illness, slow death, the disappearance of icons. It's sad in some ways but nobody lives forever. I recall I had a subscription with Time Mag but I'm embarrassed to say how long ago that was. But if you were interested in international politics etc you had no choice. No internet before about 1980, no streaming of foreign news services. The foreign news sections of local press were very limited and so was the range of opinion. That's what made the Packers and the Murdochs so powerful. But even the biggest names in international media are dying now. The advertising dollars are going where there is more bang for bucks.
"Time Magazine laid off an uncertain number of staffers across departments on Tuesday, a move CEO Jessica Sibley called “The necessary step we must take in order to drive our business forward and improve our financial position.”In an internal memo to staff, obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani, Sibley announced the cuts.“We have made the difficult decision to eliminate roles today across several departments including editorial, tech, sales, and TIME Studios,” Sibley wrote to staff. “We are immensely grateful for the contributions of these talented team members during their tenure at TIME.”When I was a kid, Time Magazine was very highly respected and my parents would often have a copy of it on the coffee table.But now it is dying just like the rest of the mainstream media. Just look at what is happening to the largest newspaper in California. The Los Angeles Times has decided to eliminate “slightly more than 20% of the newsroom”…The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, facing what senior leadership described this week as a “financial crisis,” commenced a round of painful layoffs across the newsroom, a workforce reduction that is set to be one of the most severe in the newspaper’s 142-year history.The cuts will impact at least 115 journalists, a person familiar with the matter told CNN, or slightly more than 20% of the newsroom. Some 94 of those cuts will be among unionized employees, union chief Matt Pearce said, meaning a quarter of the union will be laid off."
"...NBC News has laid off several dozen staffers, the latest of dozens of companies to start off the new year with bad news for its employees, USA TODAY confirmed Friday.A source familiar with the plans said that employees were given a 60-day notice and will get severance packages and outplacement." (Crikey, NBC and CBC have been there since the start of radio broadcasting
Household names. It's sad because the more the industry shrinks, the more diversity of opinion shrinks and diversity is fundamental to democracy.
And it's not just the big icons that will shrink or even disappear, it's also the huge range of lower tier media especially online publishers. Clicks were enough to run them for some years, very few will survive without subscriptions soon.
