Newscorp, the parent company of Fox News, is set to announce its second quarter earnings on Thursday. So is Amazon, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is being criticized by many in the news business for hundreds of layoffs at the news outlet he owns — The Washington Post.
The Washington Post layoffs represent a disturbing trend not just in the media business, but in the country overall, according to Archon Fung, who teaches public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
“A successful democracy depends on an information environment in which people can understand what's going on with their government, and that information and news isn't going to produce itself,” he said.
Old-school news organizations have struggled to find a sustainable business model.
“A huge amount of advertising revenue, which used to go to organizations like The Washington Post and hundreds of local newspapers, has shifted over to social media organizations,” Fung said.
Some of the struggles of the news business are self-inflicted, argued Nik Usher, who teaches communication studies at the University of San Diego.
“There's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘We're not making money, so we're going to cut labor,’” Usher said.
But when you get rid of your journalists, it’s kind of hard to do journalism.
“So newspapers and news publishers are putting themselves in this death spiral where you weaken the product, and when you weaken the product, people leave,” Usher said.
The people in this case are subscribers and audiences, who have ever more options for where to get their information — whether it’s real journalism or not.
From our 2024 series on news and democracy, “Democracy in the Desert”
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