WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN ONLINE MEDIA?
"I think it’s worth considering the possibility of a post-news world."
Sports Illustrated just laid off most of its staff. The LA Times Union just staged a walkout ahead of anticipated layoffs. Jezebel is no more. WaPo staff got a buyout. Not that I’m a fan, but Barstool Sports laid off 25% of its staff. Disney had mass layoffs that affected ESPN and ABC News. Buzzfeed shut down their entire news division. NPR laid off 10% of its staff. NewsCorp eliminated 1,250 jobs. Bustle Digital Group went through four rounds of layoffs in a year. Dotdash Meredith cut 7% of its staff. Vox Media cut 4% of staff (including a few friends of mine, and of course I have opinions about who they did and did not let go). And then of course there’s Condé Nast, whose layoffs have been so messy that NewsGuild has been forced to sue the company twice (over intimidation and regressive bargaining), leading to a 24-hour walkout.
I just survived the layoffs at Condé. “Just” as in chronologically: The company prolonged the layoffs for so long that I was able to find a new job and resign as of last week. I was working on their SEO team, which along with the rest of their Audience Development organization and Condé Nast Entertainment they’ve just about gutted; where the company initially announced 5% layoffs, the SEO team, for just one example, is slated to lose more like at least 20-25% of its employees. This, in my opinion, is a non-trivial detail that provides some clues about what’s happening in online media. I got into SEO because I used to work as a digital media editor (at SpinMedia, from which I was laid off, of course), and I know the kind of decision-making fatigue editors face when they’re pitching stories without any data behind their decisions, leading to lower-than-expected traffic on stories that sometimes took a lot of resources to produce. While Condé is losing some of its editors, the biggest cuts aren’t going to be on the brand side, they’re going to be on central teams like Aud Dev and CNE.
Another important insight comes from my job search. The SEO and Audience Development roles that are available in editorial right now are either 1) on the technical side of SEO (not my specialty; I work with content) or 2) on editorial, but only the side of editorial that deals with commerce content like product reviews and roundups. Take, for instance, CNN Underscored, the company’s commerce editorial arm, which is aggressively staffing up.
Pair that with the fact that the other side of the layoff story is in tech, particularly platforms. As I’m writing this, TikTok just announced layoffs. Meta, Twitter/X, Twitch, and Google have all gone through at least one round of layoffs in the past year and more are projected in 2024. Where these two stories converge is in distribution: Publishers have to attract an audience in order to earn revenue; over the last decade-plus of life on the internet, options have been more or less limited to posting on social media, writing newsletters, partnerships with apps like Flipboard or Pocket, and paid and organic search. If trouble brews in any of those arenas, it threatens publishers’ traffic, which threatens their revenue.
Trouble is brewing. X is becoming less and less viable as a distribution method by the minute under Elon Musk’s leadership. Even though TikTok is popular, some publishers are wary because it’s, you know, under congressional scrutiny, and as I pointed out to my leadership at Condé last year, there are a lot of reasons to be less than uncritically enthusiastic about its algorithms and the content they demand. Facebook made the decision to deprioritize news publishers in July 2023 (this includes magazines and blogs), which led to catastrophic traffic losses that sent some publications into a tailspin.
And then there’s Google, which, God, I don’t even know where to start. I think AJ Kohn’s incredible blog post “It’s Goog Enough” does a great job of explaining many of the current frustrations about Google search from within the SEO industry. I get why The Verge has started just openly having a vendetta against SEO managers and SEO content in general, even if their reporting is incorrect about a lot, even if they hired a cannabis writer with zero expertise in SEO to do their SEO takedown, and even if they proved the opposite of their intended point with that printers story when it ranked high on the basis of their existing authority only until Google quickly deprioritized it and sent it down to the 20s or 30s in ranking once the algorithms cottoned on that it wasn’t a genuine story. I do get it – search results are often baffling; Google doesn’t seem to know what’s helpful to readers even as it demands more and more that publishers write resource-intensive “helpful content”; their algorithms’ grasp of search intent seems to be slipping, and they keep introducing new features to results pages so that you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get past ads, sponsored results, images, knowledge panels, People Also Ask widgets, related stories, and all the rest: I’ve had search result pages that contained a sum total of two or three unpaid links to genuine, unsponsored webpages because the SERP was so crowded with other junk I didn’t want or need.
And now they’re rolling out their Search Generative Experience, a new feature at the top of search results that will create a summary answer for your search query and link out to the websites where they got the summarized information. It’s a big, like spacially big, feature. Google clearly wants its users to search this way or else they wouldn’t give it so much real estate (or lay off other employees to put their whole ass behind AI), but since the technology is so new it’s hard to know if people actually want to search that way or if we’re just going to be forced to adopt and adapt.
So OK, we have all of that. And then, finally, there’s the fact that NYLON and Saveur both announced in November that they were going back into print; NME came back in July, Elle in September. Even though Condé is almost plum out of print magazines after Allure went digital-only in early 2023, a telling part of CEO Roger Lynch’s email to his staff was the claim that “While we can’t control platform algorithms or how A.I. may change search traffic, we believe our long-term success will be determined by growing the many areas that we can control, including subscriptions and e-commerce, where we directly own the relationship with our audience.”
Here it all comes together. My belief is that the catastrophic Facebook drop in July – and when I say “catastrophic” I truly mean it, as in 100% traffic loss for some publishers – spooked digital media C-suites. The growing hype over AI is bogus, but CEOs don’t know that because CEOs rarely even know how the industries they work in function, in my experience (Lynch came from Sling, Dish Network, and then Pandora, at which time he embarrassingly admitted that he plays in a cover band with other CEOs called – wait for it – The Merger; he wouldn’t know how to write a news story or a feature article or for that matter build a GPT tool if his life depended on it). So because CEOs are often fragile, whimsical, and prone to blow in whatever direction the wind takes them, media C-suites are pulling back on any traffic source that has an algorithm attached and trying to “own the audience.” This explains the return to print, it explains the dearth of techy editorial strategy jobs, and it explains why it’s not really editors who are losing their jobs in some of these layoffs.
A couple questions for you: When’s the last time you went straight to a magazine’s .com instead of accessing a story through Google or a link on an app? Are you planning to anytime in the near future? Is there a publication you trust so much that you depend on them for their specific coverage of current events? As McKinsey points out, “Gen Z was raised on free news” (good luck with those subscriptions) and mostly get their news from social media (good luck with that direct traffic). Millennials, too, typically get our news either from social media or from broadcast. Gen X watches TV; it’s only Baby Boomers who read newspapers (meaning they have the direct relationship with a publisher Lynch wants).
Keep this in mind: Google isn’t just a search engine. Most of its money comes from its advertising business; same goes for Meta. So the same companies that are pulling back on publishers in 2023 are the companies that drove the editorial industry to ad-based free content that needed to be distributed on their platforms to reach a wide enough audience to earn ad revenue in the first place. And now they’re investing in GPT tools that aren’t technically engaging in plagiarism, but that do take the articles written by the editors that work for the publications that Meta and Google have undermined and use it to train their AI tools so that those AI tools can generate text-based answers to questions that users otherwise would’ve Googled and found an answer to on a publisher’s website, which to me sounds like a roundabout way of saying “plagiarism,” especially when Google and Meta have been mining publishers for all the content and value they can get and then throwing their corpses aside for at least a decade now.
What I’m saying here is, I think it’s worth considering the possibility of a post-news world, and the responsibility lies on Google and Meta. I think editorial could functionally cease to exist as we knew it. We’ve spent the past 20 years building a business model around tech distribution of free news, and all it’s done is degrade the editorial industry. Now neither any tech but AI nor editorial seem to be able to survive, and the youngest generation of adults probably doesn’t really care because they never lived in a world where newspapers and local TV news were the norm. They’ll let it die because to them it was never alive in the first place.
Before the printing press, people got their news from heralds, town criers, word of mouth, and handwritten pamphlets, and the arbiters of knowledge were religious officials, who tended to have the most complete libraries. I agree with Vox’s Sigal Samuel that technologists treat AI as a religion; if the press is falling, it’s no wonder they’re behind the fall of the press.