2024: the year of legacy media travails

The media industry is one business that is breathing a sigh of relief at the end of 2024. The year has been, by almost all calculable metrics, a bad one for the news. From layoffs and continued consolidations to heavy criticism levied at the coverage of the presidential election, these past 12 months amounted to a year of reckoning for the fourth estate.

And if the incoming presidential administration is an indicator, the media business will not be receiving any breaks as the new year arrives. President-elect Donald Trump and those around him have pledged to go after those in the media they view as enemies, a trend that is likely to continue throughout his second term.

Media landscape changes and consolidations

Media layoffs began ramping up significantly in 2023, and they continued throughout almost all of 2024. Over 500 journalists were laid off from media outlets in January 2024 alone, according to reports, and they kept coming as the year went on. CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Vox Media, Time magazine, NBC News and ABC News were among the legacy media players that saw large job cuts this year.

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Many of these media companies also dealt with internal strife. The Washington Post "found itself in some turmoil" in June after the "abrupt departure of the newspaper's executive editor and a hastily announced restructuring plan aimed at stopping an exodus of readers over the past few years," said The Associated Press. This came as the Post continued to shed readers, as its "website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020, and had dropped to 50 million at the end of 2023."

With the urge to save money also comes consolidations that will continue to shrink the media landscape. Beyond newspapers, this consolidation is being heavily seen in TV news. The "broadcast news landscape is changing as ownership of the U.S. television market consolidates," said the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In the past 10 years, there "have been $23 billion in broadcast TV ownership deals, further concentrating an industry in which the three largest owners control 40% of all local news stations and are present in over 80% of media markets."

Media and politics

By far the most consequential media story in 2024 was the industry's relationship with the presidential election. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise given polls consistently show that American trust in the media is continuing to fall. Americans have "significant concerns about misinformation — and the role played by the media itself along with politicians and social media companies in spreading it," said the AP.

Media owners' influence on their newsrooms was especially notable this election cycle. Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has "waded into the publication's opinion section in ways that he hadn't until this fall's presidential campaign," said The New York Times, and reportedly told opinion editors that an anti-Trump op-ed "could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view."

The Washington Post also received heavy criticism for not endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years. This reportedly came at the behest of the newspaper's owner, Jeff Bezos, and "more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions" in the following days, said NPR. If "this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would've been fine," former Post editor Marty Baron said to NPR. But "this was made within a couple of weeks of the election," and it "was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle."

And the news landscape is likely to continue shifting away from traditional media organizations toward sources like influencers and podcasts. The "legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth-telling is in. No more complaining about the media," right-wing activist James O'Keefe said on X. "You are the media."