TITLE: 2023 was the worst year for the news business since the pandemic
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2023/2023-was-the-worst-year-for-the-news-business-since-the-pandemic/
EXCERPT: As the holiday season approached, CNN laid off hundreds of employees. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, cut its news division by 6%. The Washington Post, NBCUniversal and ABC News all announced layoffs for early 2023.
What followed has been a bloodbath. Though data from December is not yet available, the news industry has already seen more job cuts this year — 2,681 — than all of 2022 or 2021, according to employment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The firm has tracked a total 20,324 job cuts in media through November, the highest year-to-date total since 2020, which saw 30,211 cuts in the same time period.
Seemingly no medium or business model within the news industry has gone untouched by the cuts, and the list of news organizations that have held layoffs includes everything from magazines to public radio stations, trade publications to cable networks:
ABC News (50)
Alabama Media Group (“a little more than 100”)
Barstool Sports (“nearly 25%”, about 100)
Bloomberg Industry Group (“at least 14”)
Bustle Digital Group (“about 8%” in February; “roughly 5%”, 21 in June)
BuzzFeed News (“about 60”)
CBS-owned stations (“about 17”)
Cheddar News (6 in April, “approximately a dozen” in June)
CoinDesk (16%, 20)
Condé Nast (“about 5%”, “about 270”)
Dot.LA (8)
Entertainment Tonight (“less than 10%”, “less than 20”)
ESPN (“around 20”)
Fox News (investigative unit in May, 8 in June)
G/O Media (13 in June, 4 in September, 23 in November)
Hearst Magazine (41)
Insider Inc. (10%)
KTLV (17)
Lee Enterprises (unclear, but a company filing shows 1,000 fewer employees)
Lehigh Valley Public Media (“roughly 12%”, 9)
Los Angeles Times (more than 60 in June, 9 in December)
Mail Tribune (all staff)
Morning Consult (“dozens” in January, 7 in June)
MTV News (all staff)
National Geographic (17)
NBC News and MSNBC (“roughly 75”)
New England Public Radio (roughly 20%, 17)
New York Public Radio (6%, 20)
News Corp (5%, 1,250)
Paper Magazine (“between 20 to 30”)
Southern California Public Radio (more than 10%, 21)
Texas Tribune (11% of staff, 11)
The Athletic (“about 4%”, “nearly 20”)
The Hollywood Reporter (at least 3)
The Washington Post (20)
Vice Media (“dozens” in April, “less than 100” in November)
Vox Media (7% in January, 4% in November)
And those are just some of the layoffs that have received coverage. The list obscures smaller publications that are part of larger companies (The Buffalo News and Lee Enterprises, for example, or Gizmodo en Español and G/O Media). It does not include international publications (Bell Canada Enterprises, CBC) or outlets that are losing longtime employees through buyouts (The Dallas Morning News, KCRW, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Washington Post).
This is not the worst year on record for news or media, according to data from Challenger. However, it marks a sharp reversal from the last two years when layoffs fell and some news outlets even expanded. Outlets that had escaped layoffs in 2020, when the pandemic ravaged the economy, weren’t so lucky this year.
TITLE: Fox News Dominates Ratings in 2023, As Cable News Suffers Viewership Declines
https://www.mediaite.com/news/fox-news-dominates-ratings-in-2023-as-cable-news-suffers-viewership-declines/
EXCERPT: Fox News closed out the year on top, extending its reign as the most-watched cable television network for the 8th consecutive year. The network scored the top six shows in the cable news industry with The Five becoming the first non-prime time show to land at number one in both the key 25 to 54 age demographic and in total viewers. 2023 also marked Fox’s 22nd year in a row leading cable news in both total viewers and the demo in both total day and prime time viewers.
MSNBC was the only network to grow year over year in total viewers and solidified its spot as the second most-watched network on cable behind Fox with strong ratings for prime time hosts like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell. MSNBC’s Morning Joe as well as early evening hosts Nicolle Wallace and Ari Melber also continue to be major ratings draws for the network, which benefited from Trump-heavy news cycles and former president’s ongoing legal dramas.
CNN, which changed leadership this year, has yet to see its ratings rebound and ended the year with its lowest numbers in total viewers since 2014 – hitting an all-time low in the demo. CNN did however top MSNBC in the demo for the tenth consecutive year in total day and the fourth year in a row in prime time, which also highlights MSNBC’s long struggle with demo viewers.
MSNBC, which had its lowest-rated year in the demo since 1999, has the oldest audience of the big three cable news networks, with viewers averaging 70 in the fourth quarter of the year. Fox’s average viewer is 69, while CNN’s is 67 — up from 60 in 2017. S&P Global Market Intelligence data puts Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC in only 70 million homes in the U.S. today, which is down from 90 million in 2016 as the cable business continues to contract.
TITLE: So who are the consistent news avoiders
https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/11/so-who-are-the-consistent-news-avoiders/
EXCERPT: Whereas older people, like many of the news lovers we interviewed, may have great affection for traditional forms of news, such as newsprint and broadcast news with their authoritative anchors intoning the events of the day, younger people who have grown up consuming most of their information digitally, much of it via mobile phones and social media, often feel no such attachments. Sofía at one point recalled a time when, encouraged by her parents, she tried to pay closer attention to news by reading it on her phone. (Newsprint was messy and impractical, so she did not even consider it.) But the experiment had been short-lived because even on her phone she found the format—small print, long stories—so awkward. Meanwhile, the television news that her mother watched seemed old-fashioned, slow, and tedious. She wondered how the TV news anchors did not die of boredom.
We found that the digital natives we interviewed, perhaps even more than being actively turned off by the form or content of news, felt they did not need to dedicate time specifically to consuming news from a news source because they would see it on social media anyway. Academics who study digital communication have taken to calling this phenomenon the “news finds me” perception: the assumption that one need not seek news out because all the news that is really worth knowing will simply land on one’s digital doorstep. Although this assumption is not unique to young people, they spend more time on social media, and more of them report social media as their main source of news, so they are more likely to have this belief continually reaffirmed.
Young news avoiders like Sofía are also highly aware of a diverse array of other forms of media that are competing for their attention. These media include streaming services, social media, and messaging apps, which many interviewees, including Sofía, described as important parts of their media diets. Scholars have argued for years that as media options expand, people who were never particularly interested in news will consume less of it because they now simply have more access to more appealing fare. Although this expansion of media choices applies to people of all ages, young people tend to have greater facility with and exposure to the contemporary media landscape and all of its wide-ranging, attention-grabbing offerings. In combination with the various other reasons young people may be less attracted to traditional forms of news, described earlier, the vast array of alternatives may be especially likely to lead them away from news (or to keep them from forming an interest in it in the first place).
Moreover, algorithms may compound the likelihood that young people will not develop a news habit even as they age. If young users never like, follow, or otherwise engage with anything related to news topics online, thereby training algorithms to screen out such content, they may not get enough initial exposure to ignite an interest that could develop later on.
For news lovers, the ease of access afforded by digital media makes it possible to consume larger and larger quantities of news—to convert a personal preference into something akin to an addiction. But, for avoiders, especially young ones, these same infrastructures may well be integral to why and how some turn away from news altogether.