The Real Reason for the Decline of Corporate Legacy Media
It's not simply about the loss of revenues. It's about the loss of trust.
Back in July 2013, I lost my job. At the time I worked for The Raton Range, a twice-weekly newspaper in Raton, N.M. I had worked at the paper for nearly 15 years.
Thus, I know what it's like to have lost a job in the journalism field. Losing a job is not something I'd wish upon anyone. It can be difficult to deal with the fallout, particularly if you had a job that you loved.
There were several factors that played into The Raton Range shutting down, from a loss of advertising revenue to the paper no longer able to print its own papers, because of the switch to digital production for printing presses. (Long story short: Printing presses are expensive equipment and the paper had to contract with another outlet to get papers printed, which also resulted in the loss of revenue from other papers our press printed.)
Certainly one can point to factors that needed to be considered to help the paper evolve and possibly withstand changes in the industry. I won't pretend I did everything right at my job, either. Everyone in journalism makes mistakes from time to time -- we're only human, after all.
However, one thing I can say is that I heard from almost nobody who said they were glad to see the paper go out of business. Most of the people who spoke to me, sent emails or left messages on social media were sad to hear about what happened and sent their best wishes. The truth is, in most smaller communities, the local news outlet is valued by its residents because it serves as a means to keep everyone informed about local events.
But I will add that, if I hadn't worked to build relationships and trust with people within the community, I never would have received those sympathetic responses from others. In fact, there would have been far more people who would have likely said they were glad to see the paper go.
This brings me to the recent wave of layoffs that have happened at multiple national outlets — a wave that led to a soliloquy from Taylor Lorenz of The Washington Post, who lamented about how so many outlets have laid off staff and how so many smaller outlets are going under.
Lorenz's remarks acted like that every single outlet is suffering from the same issues that digital journalism faces when, in reality, the national outlets have a bigger problem.
To get back to outlets such as The Raton Range, I can understand why the overwhelming majority of Americans would shrug their shoulders at the paper closing. That's because the overwhelming majority of Americans aren't impacted by what happens in Raton, N.M. As I said earlier, it's the residents of Raton who are impacted and more likely to have a strong opinion.
But when it comes to national outlets, you have a much bigger audience who is definitely impacted by what the United States government does and, thus, a bigger responsibility when the United States government is what you are responsible to cover. And considering that a lot of American citizens have many questions about the job the U.S. government is doing these days, journalists at national outlets are held to a high standard, particularly when it comes to trust.
As Glenn Greenwald and Hannah Cox have pointed out on a recent installment of Greenwald’s System Update, Lorenz and her ilk have done a lot to lose trust among the masses who expected national outlets to hold the government in check. Instead, these journalists often repeat government talking points and, even worse, go after everyday citizens who have nowhere near the influence of government officials, whether said officials are elected or not.
Too much of corporate legacy media is not about keeping people informed and asking questions that need to be asked, but about repeating a narrative that appeals to the ruling class, with the only difference being which side of the political spectrum you want to attract.
More importantly, the corporate legacy media has become notorious for how it treats stories, from the Hunter Biden laptop to the theory that COVID-19 came from a lab to every claim about Russia and the 2016 election, in which it takes what a government official says at face value — and in all likelihood, doing so because they share the same politics and worldview as said government official does.
Meanwhile, the work that is actually done to question what those in power at the federal level — public and private alike — comes from independent journalists who have found other means to share their work. In the process, they have earned subscriptions from people who want more of their work, even when said people don't agree with every position the journalist might take.
I wrote previously about the raid of the Marion County Record, in which I talked about small-town journalism and, more importantly, the police chief deciding to search the newspaper's offices and the home of the paper's owner in response to a citizen complaint.
In that piece, I mentioned what Matt Taibbi wrote in his book "Hate Inc." about how journalism used to be mostly people from working class families, but more recently, has become dominated by upper-class types at the mainstream outlets. I also wrote that you don't just rail against the police raiding a newspaper's office because you want to stick it to law enforcement.
I do ask myself how sympathetic some would have been if, say, the FBI decided to raid a newspaper office because its owner was a Trump supporter who railed about the deep state and the FBI's role. While I believe the majority of citizens would be appalled regardless of their support for Trump, would upper-class types like Lorenz do the same or would they be more inclined to let their dislike for Trump frame their remarks about such a situation?
And that's my biggest problem with what Lorenz had to say about the state of journalism today. While there is some truth to her remarks, putting every single outlet into the same boat is a bad take. There are those outlets that shut down because they truly couldn't make it work from a revenue versus expenditures standpoint, but many others -- particularly the bigger outlets -- simply lost the trust with the public at large.
We are seeing a changing of the guard happening in the industry. While it remains to be seen what happens at the local level (at which audiences are smaller), the national level is trending toward the legacy outlet fading and the independent journalist with a strong subscriber base leading the way. And the more that the likes of Lorenz remain oblivious to why they are losing trust, the more likely Lorenz could be the next to find herself out of a job.
(BTW, the people I work for have been trying to find somebody to fill a position for more than a year. While small-town journalism doesn’t pay a lot, you may learn a lot more about journalism and life in general than you would at a legacy media outlet.)