media

Almost every week in 2024 has featured news of media layoffs (more than 800 so far by one count, which would place the sector on pace for 10,000 jobs lost this year, according to Fast Company) and left many professionals penning eulogies for the news industry while asking hard questions.

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If 2023 felt tumultuous, 2024 seems to have gone completely off the rails. Poynter’s media business experts dig into the causes — and effects.

The media world in general shed more than 830 jobs in a brutal month for media, tech and finance.

Across the industry, contraction, layoffs, sales and labor unrest remind of 2008 — but insiders are less optimistic this time.

Mass layoffs, closures and reader fatigue are afflicting news organizations as Americans prepare for a consequential election year.

Nearly 90% of top news outlets like The New York Times now block AI data collection bots from OpenAI and others. Leading right-wing outlets like NewsMax and Breitbart mostly permit them.

What will the New Year bring for CNN, Fox, The Washington Post, Paramount, The Telegraph, and more?

This past week, Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Politico and Business Insider, signed a “multiyear licensing deal” with OpenAI worth tens of millions of euros. According to the company, the deal “will enrich users’ experience with ChatGPT by adding recent and authoritative content on a wide variety of topics,” in the form of “summaries of selected global news content.” Its stories will also be used to train OpenAI’s models. Now, as small startups, open source projects, and tech giants alike start to close the basic performance gap with OpenAI, and simultaneously start to figure out what their users, customers or potential customers actually find valuable — the subject of training data is back at the center of the conversation around AI.

Historically, there’s palpable friction between finance and sales departments at media companies, but to get budgets and sales forecasts right, they need to work together. Sometimes, each camp may even grow to appreciate their former foes.

After record deal-making in 2021, the number and dollar value of M&A in media and telecommunications fell during the past 12 months through November, according to the latest report by PwC.

Donald Trump says he plans to file lawsuits against “a large number” of news outlets, just as he has against CNN. In an email to supporters, the former president said those other news outlets — he did not identify them — were guilty of “lies, defamation, and wrongdoing,” including as it pertains to “The Big Lie.”

As Russia continues its attack on Ukraine, the suffering of its citizens and damage to the concept of democracy is playing out via broadcast and the internet. The media industry has joined much of the world in its response to Russia’s bullying, with media and tech companies throughout the U.S. stepping up and enforcing a variety of sanctions and taking other actions against the superpower in an effort to stop a madman.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin on Monday, Feb. 7. The media, were mentioned as a potential target. In a nutshell, the bulletin said several factors have “increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment.”

Eager to look neutral — and worried about being accused of lefty partisanship — mainstream news organizations across the political spectrum have bent over backward to aid and abet Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting by mail by blasting his false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

President Donald Trump’s press briefing today had a flurry of newsworthy statements, updates and some startling moments. Days after saying that a lot of the media “actually has been really fair” in its coverage of the coronavirus crisis, on Thursday he was back to calling a number of news outlets “dishonest.”

David Zurawik: “This has been a decade of revolutionary, existential media change most of which would have happened had he never stepped off that elevator into the heart of the nation’s political life.”

David Brooks: “Those of us in journalism primarily do one thing: cover events. We report and opine about events like election campaigns, wars and crimes. But a funny thing has happened to events in this era. They have ceased to drive politics the way they used to. Increasingly, sociology is.”

The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies — studios — made stuff — TV shows and movies — and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers. Now things are up for grabs. To help sort this all out, Recpde created a diagram that organizes distributors, content companies and internet video companies by market cap — the value investors assign to the companies — and their main lines of business.

The Hollywood Reporter’s ninth annual list adds dozens of new stars, reporters, editors — and even a mogul or two — who keep racking up the scoops as ratings soar and platforms boom amid the provocateur-president’s continuing attacks on the press: “Sometimes when you’re pro-truth, it comes off as anti-Trump.”