Journalism

America’s two largest newspaper publishers will merge in an effort to combat declining circulation and plunging advertising revenue, but will still face pressure to cut costs at hundreds of already cash-strapped publications around the country. The $1.4 billion purchase of McLean (VA)-based Gannett by GateHouse Media, based in Pittsford (NY), will create a conglomerate that will own more than 250 daily newspapers and hundreds of weekly and community papers.

Layoffs continue to pummel US newspapers. Roughly a quarter of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018. The layoffs come on top of the roughly one-third of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017. What’s more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before. Mid-market newspapers were the most likely to suffer layoffs in 2018 – unlike in 2017, when the largest papers most frequently saw cutbacks.

For people pondering the potential effects of foreign interference in the 2020 elections here in the United States, it is worth understanding what other democracies are doing to confront the same problem and what lessons can be learned from their experiences. As a 2018 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put it: "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s Kremlin employs an asymmetric arsenal that includes military invasions, cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, and the weaponization

Political groups on both sides of the aisle are throwing money and resources at propping up local, partisan websites that are often designed to appear as straight news. Some of these sites are leveraging Facebook advertising to boost their content.

Craig Newmark, the 66-year-old founder of Craigslist, has many contradictions, and his dedication to journalism is just one. He's credited by some with single-handedly taking down the newspaper classifieds industry and strangling local papers of revenue. In Feb, he gave $15 million to projects that support journalism at a time of deep political divide over where and how we get our information, and how trustworthy those sources may be. "So far, I've given over $90 million for this combined effort of trustworthy journalism, cybersecurity, countering information warfare," Newmark says. 

Some key findings about the state of the news media in 2018:

Many Americans see declining levels of trust in the country, whether it is their confidence in the federal government and elected officials or their trust of each other, a new Pew Research Center report finds. And most believe that the interplay between the trust issues in the public and the interpersonal sphere has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems. 

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a commitment of nearly $50 million in research to better understand how technology is transforming our democracy and the way we receive and engage with information.

Newsroom employment across the US continues to decline, driven primarily by job losses at newspapers. And even though digital-native news outlets have experienced some recent growth in employment, they have added too few newsroom positions to make up for recent losses in the broader industry, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics survey data.

At last it’s happening—a growing national discussion about how America’s news and information “industry” is failing to nourish our civic dialogue. It should be something we expect the candidates to discuss—and take a stand on—as the 2020 election campaigns ramp up.