April 12, 2024 - 10:00am
“Freefall” is a term that’s often been used to describe the past couple of years in media layoffs. But 2024 poses the question: what happens when you fall all the way to Australia, and keep on falling?
This week, investigative specialist site openDemocracy announced that it will shed a third of its staff, including its head of news, news editor and political correspondent.
This comes on the heels of the total evisceration of Vice in February, which resulted in hundreds of job losses. And the mass redundancies at Newsnight that turned it from a journalistic big-dig into a discussion show that’s effectively The News Agents-Plus.
Across the pond, hundreds more have fallen in the past year. The Washington Post cut 10% of its staff, the LA Times 20%. The people behind the Panama Papers, The Center For Public Integrity, have lost half their staff.
Three years ago, the future of lengthy, journalistic investigations was meant to be in multi-part podcasts like Ronan Farrow’s Catch And Kill (on Harvey Weinstein), or Wondery’s Who Killed Daphne? (on Maltese corruption).
But since 2023, those kinds of shows have gone extinct. Gimlet, formerly a market leader, has entirely disappeared, Malcolm Gladwell’s company got rid of a third of its employees, while Britain’s biggest investigative long-form podcast company has culled half its workforce.
What do all these layoffs have in common? The answer, intriguingly, is less than one might think. openDemocracy is funded by grants from other NGOs. Newsnight is technically gold-plated by the license fee. Vice was a new media model that was always a heavier-than-air machine. The podcast business was another, more recent, speculative bubble. Yet all of it — all the journalism that requires legwork — is going away in 2024.
Newsnight’s case is the most instructive. Its audience had dwindled from a million people to 300,000, giving it about as many viewers as your average Paul Joseph Watson video on YouTube. Did the Beeb believe in reviving the kind of intellectual salon that Newsnight once represented? Possibly. Could they justify the salaries for those numbers? Absolutely not. The programme couldn’t have survived even if it had all the funds. And as our attention fractionates, the tension between what we want and what’s good for us is not going away.
Because the truth is that proper investigative journalism is a trudge with an uncertain outcome. Supporting it requires an industry that is confident enough in itself to imagine that, at the end of many months of cracking heads and opening FOIs, you might not find something. And to be okay with that.
The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb once joked that if an economist designed you, he would give you “one lung, one eye, one kidney”. Today’s newsrooms are run by these economists, streamlined to within an inch of their life, so that up and down the chain there is no longer a culture that is prepared to justify important, if occasionally decadent, spending.
Even when investigation does truffle up something remarkable, it’s often initially pretty fibrous matter. For proof, look no further than Private Eye — which was talking about PFI scandals for a decade before the mainstream got near the case, and which had hammered even something as relatively glamorous as the Post Office Scandal for just as long before Fleet Street took an interest.
Of course, there are endless schemes to turn the oil tanker around — Australia is implementing a news tax on Facebook et al, with the proceeds going to traditional papers. In New York, newly retrenched hacks are forming their own “media collectives”, which seems rather too much like rushing into a burning building.
But the truth is that we are entering a world of known unknowns. As the quantity of deep journalism shrinks, we will doubtless sense the world growing a little colder, a little duller, much as it did at the closure of the News of the World. The end of that particular style of sting has left a red-topped hole in the gaiety of the nation, for better and worse.
Today, any reward from a big exclusive rapidly drains away, as it’s cannibalised by secondary sources. No one has yet solved that central problem: how can any one news organisation monopolise the rewards from breaking a big story, such that they’d be incentivised to hunt more big stories? Until we crack that, we’re wandering in a starless night.
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SubscribeIdeologically driven journalism is boring and predictable, irrespective of platform or technology. That is particularly the case when the state increasingly funds and heavily regulates notionally independent media, and when poorly paid journalists see their job as a stepping stone to a more lucrative role as an NGO lobbyist or corporate or political adviser. In the case of Newsnight, like many declining newspapers, it’s the boring product, steadfastly refusing to cover salient issues on ideological grounds, which is the problem, not cost, and not technological changes to the media landscape.
The masthead of one US newspaper used to say ‘all the news that’s fit to print’. Now it’s ‘all the news that fits the narrative’.
Could it be that when actual investigative reporting (Hunter Biden laptop, lab leak, Labour partygate) is on the “wrong” side it gets ignored while other stories (Russiagate, Aaron Banks’ funding of Brexit) get hyped up and magnified by the very publications who the author of this piece lionises? Private Eye is good and I used to read it almost weekly when I was younger. They seemed to be pretty scattergun in their investigations (especially local stories).
Yes right, there are “conservative” journalists and groups who are still doing the old-fashioned work, but the author and the industry at large do not recognize the work produced which is outside of the approved narratives.
yes that is right
I gave up my subscription to Private Eye not too long after I stopped listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4.
Both previously excellent news sources became politically skewed and disfunctional, a pity.
I’ve argued before that many newspapers have become focused on opinion and gossip rather than proper news. It’s cheaper to employ general purpose media types rather than those with expertise in any subject and takes far less effort to investigate or validate (because there are few facts).
Opinions might sell papers, but they are not ‘precious’. Everybody has opinions.
Too many outlets have been writing the narrative, rather than chasing the story, and consequently have missed or suppressed big juicy stories on ideological grounds. Who wants to read yet another rewrite of this month’s talking points, or another political hit-piece slighting someone for a micro-aggression?
The actual stories haven’t gone away though, and readers still crave warts-and-all shock-horror journalism. As a result investigative stories have become fertile soil for bee-in-a-bonnet citizen research, or money-spinners for independent journalists who can now make a reputation and living away from the major outlets – but that requires real journalism, really chasing down the story without fear or favour, a skill that an lot of those people being laid off seem to have lost.
Who needs investigative journalism when you can endlessly pump out “begging the question” op-eds.
I’m not so sure investigative journalism is dead, it’s just moved. Go to Substack and you’ll see dozens and dozens of examples of individuals and small groups hunting down and reporting on all sorts of stuff (see for example ‘The Twitter Files’. or any number of pages reporting on the deceptions and fall-out from the Covid debacle and the war in Ukraine).
Prior to it’s existence there were all sorts of ‘Open Source’ investigative groups deep-diving and FOI-ing into various concerns. The problem with these though was the way that they challenged the Establishment line to a level much deeper than the skin deep, boat-unrocking exposes of the likes of Private Eye, Newsnight and Dispatches.
Likewise they’re not so desperately scared of the advertising-revenue consequences of any large exposes (as highlighted by Peter Obourne in his HSBC resignation from the Telegraph a few years back).
Similarly they’re not put off by losing access to all the very serious people in charge of us, because they haven’t started with any and know they never will have any. And that goes too for their access to a seat on Question Time, Have I Got News For You, or the papers-round up on ‘Sunday Morning with the Tosspot De Jour’.
And beyond that you’ll still find it at the (off the top of my head & across the political spectrum) likes of The GrayZone, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, The Cradle, Consortium News, the various ‘Real Clear’ outlets, Daily Wire, Antiwar.com, Guido Fawkes (FFS), Jon Solomon’s outlet (whose name I forget), Mondoweiss and on substack TK News, Lee Fang and Public.
Oh and regarding this from the article: “while Britain’s biggest investigative long-form podcast company has culled half its workforce.”
Can anyone enlighten me as to who this was/is?
“And beyond that you’ll still find it at the (off the top of my head & across the political spectrum) likes of The GrayZone, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, The Cradle, Consortium News, the various ‘Real Clear’ outlets, Daily Wire, Antiwar.com, Guido Fawkes (FFS), Jon Solomon’s outlet (whose name I forget), Mondoweiss and on substack TK News, Lee Fang and Public.”
Thanks for the list.
Absolutely correct. There is fantastic investigative journalism now – it simply is not to be found in the mainstream outlets, which unfortunately means it is easy to ignore.
I love the fact that as many people view a Paul Joseph Watson video as watch Newsnight.
Go woke, go broke.
I didn’t know what you were saying half the time. That’s probably part of the problem… being from vice and assuming you’re representative of journalists, that is
I read a fairly compelling explanation (maybe here?) of how the collapse of local journalism (and the oversight it provided) directly led to the current crisis of local govt – the bankruptcies; the sheer, mind-boggling incompetence & corruption.
I don’t see any good coming of a repeat performance at national / international level.
Government propaganda pretending to be news has driven consumers away. When reporters all write and sound like “The View” – and they do – people laugh and look elsewhere for information. There’s a reason for the oft quoted meme You don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.
The article nails it at the end. You can not sell investigative journalism (or any kind of mainstream information) for profit as secondary sources will piggyback you.
Financial markets bypassed it by making (almost) all information proprietary. You have to pay to publish copyrigthed information, such has FTSE levels. Maybe it’s an option.
The only alternative are
“private non-disclosed journalism”, also known as spying.
outreach journalism : you get information from activists and whistleblowers who have an interest in making a (possibly) true information public
Dire alternatives:(
What’s the point of investigative journalism when the approved narrative is constructed by the government and constantly “leaked” by “high ranking officials” to certain approved outlets?
The truth is that they stopped doing journalism a long time ago. Good riddance
Like Vice, investigative journalists kneecapped themselves by only bothering to investigate one side of the aisle.
‘Wandering in a starless night’ ? Really??? Have you actually read the Guardian or Waco recently? I figure Unherd has to print BS like this every so often for ‘balance’…..but seriously. Surely you could do better than this. How about getting a couple of those journalists to go head to head with Douglas Murray to defend their rags. We ARE in a post-truth world because of the Internet and because the MSM gave up being journalists. Look at MSNBC firing Ronna McDaniel….and the reaction of all their ‘journalists’. ANd don’t kid yourself that BBC or Guardian or Times are any better. I’ve been a Radio 4, World Service, Newsnight, Panorama (and Archers, Letter from America) news junkie all my life…..and I now find these publications and outlets repugnant. They really make me want to physically wretch. And I have the same feeling about the UN, WHO – yuck. I would cheer if the Guardian and the BBC went tits up.
Douglas Murray did this and the other side had a serious mental breakdown after the event. They won’t bother trying again.
Right with you regarding R4, the Guardian & the BBC, but Douglas Murray – the author of ‘Neoconservatism: Why we need it.’ is as preposterously progandist as any of the worse on those outlets.
he doesn’t pretend he is not ideological, he will talk openly and honestly to anyone, and he doesn’t cancel opposing views
He doesn’t try to obscure his biases, that is the difference. He is conservative and puts accross his side of the argument.
You’re not alone.
Radio 4 has badly let down it’s most loyal listeners. For instance the shameless way that “The Archers” is used to push approved narratives. People don’t tune into Ambridge to get lectured on current issues and what they correct line is – they go there to escape from these things. Or used to be able to.
It’s a long way back from a betrayal like that. This is what happens when you don’t treat your customers/users with respect. As the Conservative party is also about to find out.
Even the FT now is now often just another narrative factory.
When Michael Ashcroft becomes the most salient investigative journalist of the day – and I’m afraid he has – then journalists such as our author here should be asking themselves hard questions. If they’re not, their lookout.
openDemocracy is funded by grants from other NGOs.
And who, pray tell, funds NGOs? We do. The taxpayers. Who have this habit of expecting something other than advocacy and naked shilling for particular side. Journalism’s ongoing suicide is just that, a death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts but few in the industry want to notice that reality. This week in the US, a senior employee at National Public Radio said the quiet part out loud and the rest of the media yawned while the guy’s employers basically said he’s full of it.
I find no joy in anyone’s layoff but journalism’s problem is not one of quantity, it’s one of quality. Having a point of view is one thing; being blind to anything that challenges that point of view, however, is something else entirely. That’s called activism, not journalism.
As an aside, it’s worth remembering Unherd occasionally publishes pieces (or at least excerpts) of some great investigative journalism, including into the origins of the covid pandemic and the possible complicity of the US government with the Wuhan Institute.
Is there any chance Unherd will start its own investigative journalism effort? Too expensive for such a small organization, I’d guess.
‘Journalists’ of the mainstream media are their authors of their own misfortune. They parrot the regime propaganda, and the public are largely tired of it.
Neil O’Brien MP has done more investigative journalism on immigration in the last year than any of our mainstream media has done in their entire sorry existences. And he is an MP ffs!
A plague on all their houses, they deserve to lose their jobs, because frankly, they are largely rubbish at their jobs.
And on the other side, thank goodness for some of those on substack and here and elsewhere who are not journalist activists, or churnalists bogging out the same stories covered elsewhere.
Hopefully the future holds a complete disintegration of the BBC, the Graun, and the rest of them, and perhaps out of the ashes, some proper journalism will rise again.
For a while I liked Triggernometry but turned off them when they started helping Dan Wootton on to recover his ‘reputation’.
I don’t like the Byline Times much but I respected the work they did on Wootton. And that’s the issue, really.
At heart they’re only good when it’s a guy on the other side, and they stop being dependable when there’s a mate to help out. I had thought Wootoon was going to f__ off to Canada or the US, but it looks like they don’t want him?
Great piece.
I first heard the term ‘disintermediation’ in the late 1990s.
I ran a News and Photo Agency with my wife, that we’d founded in 1984.
Back in the early 2000s it was clear a kind of rising damp of disaster was on its way, but the big National titles and broadcast news managements seemed either complacent, saying it was a problem for the regionals and weeklies, but they’d be OK, or totally unaware.
If the TV channels dropped their ‘tomorrow’s front pages’ schedule padding, I think that would be that for ‘print’…or rather faked up digital…front pages.
The last holdout for the press has been interest in sports particularly the Premier League, most ‘success story’ old style press websites are actually quite small in the TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook scale of things and entirely proxies for their big city football teams.
Which is nice, but also fragile as newer, more aggressive, less embedded, insurgents are constantly nibbling away at that last food and fuel source.
If it was ever a war, and I am not sure it really ever was, it was over by 2010…. and as everybody knows, the good guys lost.
We’re just watching the sediment settle these days.