It was never about the numbers

Teen Vogue was swallowed whole by Vogue.com this week—and the entire Teen Vogue political desk was reportedly laid off near the end of the Monday workday, effectively immediately.

Posts abound on social media about the groundbreaking impact that Teen Vogue had on its readership—and about the incredible numbers the political desk consistently brought to the publication. Simply put, their regular political coverage has been a bright spot in a churning sea of bullshit since at least 2017. Now, it appears, those days are over. 

It was never about the numbers, though. It never is. You can bring insane audience engagement, break records on views, court new eyeballs to your verticals, shape the national and international conversation with accurate, empathetic, even funny coverage of the important topics that are dominating our minds these days; get new laws passed by exposing the ill-treatment of regular-ass people, etc., etc., etc.; you can win awards—Pulitzers, Murrow Awards, Emmys—champion new ways of Doing The News, including maybe even swallowing your pride and misgivings about giving up editorial control to a goddamn AI fact-checker, and on and on and on—and they will still nuke your job and your entire desk in the name of capital consolidation and kissing the fucking ring.

At CBS News, Black and brown and women journalists who worked on groundbreaking investigations and hard-hitting news coverage were also laid off and their divisions shut down last week. At places like the Washington Post and other legacy outlets, they have dumped cumulative decades of diverse thought and experience in favor of transforming their editorial and opinion departments into one carbon cutout after another of the same fascist, uniformly-evil-from-tip-to-tail propaganda machine. They do so because it’s profitable to do so, and because they, like most tech oligarchs, believe in the project that the current regime is ramming down our throats. 

It’s about money, it’s about power, and they couldn’t care less who you are and what you might bring to the table. If you aren’t willing to bend the knee and take your rightful place amongst their army of mewling sycophants so that they can step on your head on the way to bigger and bigger mergers and further stretching their deep, velvet-lined pockets full of cash and dividends, then fuck off, friend, you’re not needed. 

At this point, frankly, the capitalist juggernaut that is devouring what is left of our industry seems to be running out of things to cannibalize, and must manufacture more scarcity in its quest to sate its horrifying bloodlust—and we working people are trapped in the gears of this churning machinery, trying desperately to free ourselves.

Unfortunately, the same contractions and layoffs are hitting everyone—not just at the corporate giants that are merging into an ever-expanding monopoly. Nonprofits run afoul of the same capitalist machinations all the same, as do publicly funded media—PBS, NPR, and others are laying off journalists across the country in the wake of a total loss of federal funding. They, too, fell prey to the political cat-and-mouse game, and despite their best efforts, were eaten as well. 

This, like many other jobs that primarily serve the public—teaching, non-profit work, community service, etc.,—is seen as some sort of noble vocation, where its practitioners do it for the community it serves, or because they seek out truth, holding a spotlight on corruption and mistreatment, so that maybe, the public will pressure those n’er-do-wells to get their shit together and reverse course. In such a characterization, payment is an afterthought—I'd do it if I never got paid a day in my life, because I love it, you hear some folks say. In my utopian world, my job on the commune would be community news. 

Your favorite journalist, the one you read most often or banter back and forth with on Bluesky or watch on Instagram, is more than likely barely subsisting (if at all) on unemployment, side gigs, a struggling newsletter, now-interrupted SNAP benefits, and a horrifying freelance rat-race-to-the-bottom, wherein colleagues become competition, and important information is gatekept and hoarded jealously because to be scooped is to be unable to pay the rent that month. 

For those lucky enough to get on staff somewhere, the likelihood of a layoff within 1-2 years is so high that you have to wonder if the psychological damage of having that axe hanging over your head day in and day out is worth the fucking salary. Meanwhile, the worst, period, assholes, period, you fucking know are raking in the dough at the top of CBS News and presiding over dozens of layoffs of their own.

The “Creator-Journalist” independent newsletter economy is creating more problems than solving them (I should know, I’m trying to be one of them—you’re fucking reading this rant on my own newsletter), and is barely a stop-gap in the hemorrhaging of generational talent to other industries that can provide more stability—though, let's be real, the ability for knowledge workers (journalists, academics, researchers, etc.,) to make any sort of somewhat easy lateral career move is swiftly becoming the exception, not the rule.

The success of an indie newsletter depends entirely on your ability to capture an audience of individuals willing to support you—and in this expanding creator-journalist economy, the options are endless. Many find success—Aaron Parnas, a journalism influencer on TikTok, has millions of followers, and many well-known names from CNN, MSNBC, and elsewhere, have successfully leveraged their celebrity into extremely successful Substack careers, even if the news they put out is frankly trash. That, however, isn’t always sustainable for others, particularly those who work in local and community news. On the other end of the donor spectrum, outlets and indie pubs are at the mercy of donors who have closed their pocketbooks at the precise moment when we need them to do the opposite. 

The information environment has been nearly irreparably damaged by fractures and schisms due to digital technology, the siloing of information onto social media platforms, and the news deserts that have steadily grown over the last 30-40 years as local newspapers and weeklies have been devoured by insatiable private equity juggernauts like Black Rock, Alden Global Capital, etc. 

I wish I could say that a union would solve this crisis, and god knows the NewsGuild, The National Writers Union, The Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, and others are doing what they can to try and staunch the bleeding, but they’ve (we've—I am a dues-paying member of Newsguild Local 32035) been fighting rearguard battles against an enemy that has never, not once, fought fair or within the bounds of the legal guardrails that restrict what unions can and should do in the fight for workers’ rights.

Any number of good and well-intentioned thoughts about how to shore up the industry—opening the floodgates on public funding, better philanthropic initiatives, new for-profit digital models, state-level policy to fill in funding and information gaps, divesting from and outlawing private equity takeovers of media institutions, breaking up the media and tech monopolies— are absolutely wonderful, and should remain on the roster of concrete steps this country could take to rebuild this industry. 

The reality, however, is that in this horrendous end-stage capitalist hellhole, any solution like I mentioned above would require a herculean effort to accomplish, and frankly? There isn’t enough political will to force half of those things through. The regime likes what’s happening to us, and the opposition party isn’t an opposition party at all.

We are tradespeople in a dying trade, fighting the Fat Cat media execs and each other for scraps while still trying to do this job, because many of us (myself included) believe in the mission of informing the people of this country, holding up the brightest spotlight we can on the powerful, and providing a platform for the hundreds of thousands of people local journalists talk to each year to tell their stories. But there’s no safety net for us, not really, not at this moment.

I remain convinced that the American journalism industry as it stands has already run itself off the cliff, and is now falling through the air and toward the bottom. The casualties of this devastation are and will continue to be the working class reporters who are just trying to make ends meet and do something worth a damn in our lives. As I said on Bluesky, lol, right now it just feels like we’re majorly fucked.

What it’s going to take is a courageous set of radical idiots who are willing and able to potentially burn their own careers down in service of rebuilding this industry, I think. I daydream often of the ragtag group of visionaries that most folks think of when we’re looking for someone to come save us—maybe we’ll be able to see their work laid out in some sort of upbeat montage in the biopic about them in 50 years, I don't know. Maybe the best answer is to try and hold on while the whole thing burns and build something sustainable, good, and punk-fucking-rock from its smoldering ashes. There's an opportunity in there somewhere, I'm just struggling to figure out exactly where it might be.