This article first appeared in Village magazine, June/July/August 2024 edition
THE NEWS business has always been a difficult industry but the media landscape in 2024 is looking particularly challenging for journalists at the moment, particularly as a freelancer.
In January, Mediahuis, owners of the Independent, Sunday World, Belfast Telegraph and other well known titles, said they were looking to lay off te percent of their staff, the second redundancy scheme within a year.
“Mediahuis Group estimates that this year 70% of our revenue will come from print and 30% from digital, but by 2030 we foresee that it will be a 30-70 ratio of print-digital,” the company said in its statement.
In addition, the Business Post also laid off several of their senior staff before Christmas.
Reach, owner of the Star and Mirror, has been shrinking in UK and Ireland, in November announcing that 450 jobs would be cut.
Meanwhile. RTE is about to have another existential crisis, even before the it finishes the last one. This time, it faces questions about the continued existence of 2PM.
The cuts in Irish news outlets echo international moves, with publishsers from Buzzfeed to the Los Angeles Times slashing numbers, and some publishers exiting news journalism entirely.
Most ominously, the new media outlets born online aren’t immune either. VICE announced in mid-February that it was shutting down its news website, and would only supply stories – or content – to other news businesses, producing film packages to CNN and the like.
Many of these publications have seen jarring shifts in readership in the last few years. At firstly, the blame could mostly be laid at the door of the social media giants. In particular, Facebook decided to deprecate news links. News is negative, and Meta doesn’t want to upset people. Happy readers looking at baby photos and cat memes stay around longer, and generate more advertising revenues.
To a lesser extent, the implosion of Elon Musk’s new toy also helped, as Musk stripped headlines out of news stories on Twitter, promoted far right conspiracy theorists, restored racist accounts, and even banned journalists for making fun of him. Twitter is dead, having lost one in five users since the takeover. It’s X now, filled with nazis, trolls and bots as Musk takes the motto of moving fast and breaking things a little too far.
Beyond the obvious, other social media is hurting too. TikTok traffic is down 9.5%. Instagram 4.4%. Snapchat 1.7%. Even Facebook, the best performer , is down 0.6%, essentially flatlining.
But the killer blow was delivered by Google, in their rush to get aboard the AI hype train. Changes to the search engine pushed news stories off the Google front page, hidden below advertising, clickbait, and inaccurate summaries “written” by Alphabet’s answer to the HAL9000. Site traffic for many sites, in decline for two years, fell off a cliff in March 2024, as the company rolled out its latest search updates.
This may be a part of why, for example, the Journal.ie, mostly an advertising-driven publication, has been more aggressive in its use of pop-ups asking for reader support (although the reported attempt to sell the platform to Mediahuis or the Business Post may also be a factor here.)
So, for multiple reasons, news publishers are looking at a crisis for anyone not behind a paywall, and for many who are.
This means that, in the short term at least, the freelancing sector will see a surge. But if traditional patterns repeat, some of these new freelancers will secure new positions, and some will drift out of journalism into other areas or retirement. Meanwhile, some older freelancers get so discouraged they give up.
In the short term, there will be more freelancers, chasing fewer gigs, with budgets not only frozen since before the Great Recessions, but cuts which were never reversed. Freelancing isn’t a solid choice any more, it’s a series of job applications in a shrinking market.
So if it feels like the newspaper you read isn’t just thinner than it used to be in on page count, but that the stories inside feel thinly written and under-researched, keep in mind that most of them are being produced by reporters who are underpaid, overworked, and overstretched covering too many beats with too few resources.
