Another gut punch to the news biz

The Washington Post just laid off one-third of its staff.

Three hundred journalists who covered everything from politics in the Middle East to NFL games to local weather in D.C. were kicked to the curb by a man who’s worth $250 billion.

The reporters leaving now, including one who found out she was laid off while she was reporting from Ukraine, follow more than 200 who were offered buyouts three years ago.

It’s a shock to the journalism world. Even though we’ve all seen round after round of layoffs across the industry, it’s still disconcerting to see once-mighty institutions crumble.

Closer to home, the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic offered buyouts to some of its top reporters last fall. Decades of experience vanished overnight, and now, some of the top reporters at the Republic are stuck covering breaking news, like car wrecks. That’s like forcing LeBron James to work the concession stand.

In rural Arizona, five newspapers closed for good last August after publishing for more than a century, leaving residents of Globe and Page without a local paper.

The nonprofit news system in Arizona also is showing some cracks. LOOKOUT, which delivers legit news for the LGBTQ+ community in Phoenix, launched three years ago with strong backing from donors.

But lately, “those in power are showing us they don’t care,” LOOKOUT editor Joseph Darius Jaafari writes. He reached out to foundations and found “the majority of institutions that claim to support local news routinely abandon it.”

It’s a gloomy outlook, that’s for sure. And it’s been that way for a long time, as we’ve shown every few months when we shine a light on the state of the news business.

Rather than stew in the misery of the Post layoffs, today we’re checking in on some of the big storylines in the news biz.

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad.

Reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested for covering a protest at a church in Minnesota where the pastor is an ICE official.

Federal agents seized a Washington Post reporter’s phone and laptops during a leak investigation at the Pentagon. The DOJ didn’t tell the judge who issued the search warrant about a 46-year-old law that protects reporters from being searched.

Trump’s FCC chief is trying to force late night talk show hosts to invite as many conservative candidates as liberal ones, based on a rule that nobody has followed since the George W. Bush administration said it didn’t apply to “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

The Pentagon forced out the respectable outlets. So did the White House. The right-wing podcast crowd has taken the place of reporters who spent decades learning how to navigate the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy.

Rupert Murdoch just opened the California Post. Which isn’t necessarily “bad,” it just sucks because Murdoch’s Fox News is a Republican lapdog of a news outlet and now it’s in print format, alongside the New York Post.

The billionaire Ellison family bought the company that owns CBS News and appointed as editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, an “anti-woke” crusader who routinely pisses off her reporters. And one of the opinion writers she hired to replace reporters shared some really gross messages with Jeffrey Epstein, long after Epstein was a registered sex offender.

Public broadcast stations were on the edge of extinction after the Trump administration gutted their funding. But a wave of $300 million in donations from regular people is keeping those stations afloat. That’s welcome news, though public radio station operators worry it was a one-time wave that might not happen again next year.

News organizations are speaking up more. After Lemon and Fort were arrested, 50 news outlets condemned the arrests, including LOOKOUT. Even the by-the-book Associated Press — which was targeted by Trump for not bowing to his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America — seems to have sharpened its edge in its reporting about national politics.

TikTok could head in the same direction as Twitter (as in, turn into a cesspool), but Bluesky isn’t driven by the same malicious algorithms and the company’s structure isn’t geared toward maximizing profit. We’ll see how it goes, but so far, it feels a lot better than the other social media platforms.

While the Washington Post tanks, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are thriving. The Gray Lady added 1.4 million digital subscribers last year and the Journal now has 4.7 million subscribers. They still have the resources and prestige to tell federal officials, and their lawyers, to take a hike.

Speaking of the Times doing well, they just added a Phoenix correspondent, Reis Thebault. The former Post reporter will cover Arizona as “one of the political and economic centers of the journalism world this election year and far beyond.”

The Post layoffs are shocking, but they also offer an opportunity to take stock of the news business, and think about what we want journalism in this country to look like.

While some big institutions die, other news outlets are rushing to fill the void, including hundreds of small, independent news outlets, like the Agenda.

In many ways, it’s an exciting time.

The news business is no longer trapped on the East Coast. It’s decentralized now. Every community in the country could spin up a solid newsletter, if they have trained reporters and editors and a dedicated audience searching for someone to fill the void.

And small outlets can innovate much faster than big ones. We were able to leave our former publishing platform for one that doesn’t milk us dry. It took a lot of work, but a pivot like that would’ve been a monumental, months-long process for a major newspaper.

But it’s also a scary time for journalism.

Most of these new, small outlets don’t have nearly enough resources to withstand an attack from the Trump administration or fend off lawsuits from angry powerbrokers.

And all of these changes aren’t easy on readers. A refrain we hear every time there’s a shock to the news system, including this week’s layoffs at the Post, is “I want to support reporters, but I can’t subscribe to every newsletter.”

We feel your pain. We spend a significant portion of our resources on subscribing to small, independent outlets, to help support them, and introduce their work to you.

But we still have to make some tough choices. We decide which ones are indispensable, or just really fun to read. Then we support them with our dollars.

New institutions are already emerging. Just look at us. We’ve been around for almost five years and we’re still growing.

With your help, someday we might even be able to afford a lawyer.