Last Updated on January 25, 2024
Washington Post employee Taylor Lorenz appeared on the verge of tears in a video she posted online mourning the death of the corporate media. People just “don’t understand,” said Lorenz, “how bad” the world will be, without her and her colleagues controlling the flow of information.
“The entire journalism industry is basically in a free fall,” Lorenz said in her video.
“Today The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees. They wiped out their entire DC bureau in an election year.”
“But what’s really dark,” Lorenz went on, “is this is just the latest in months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry.”
“In fact, tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year,” she said, before rattling off the names of failed publications like Buzzfeed and Sports Illustrated, and the fledgling Time Magazine, which went through major layoffs in an effort to stay afloat.
“Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out,” Lorenz went on.
Remarkably, as Lorenz complained about crummy wages, layoffs, and shuttering publications, she shouted out unionized magazine employees who are currently on strike, “because they’re also facing impending layoffs” – something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you consider that, if you’re fighting to keep your job, you may actually want to show up to work, not stand outside with a sign screaming at your boss.
“Even mainstream national media outlets owned by billionaires, like The Washington Post where I work and The Atlantic where I used to work, have done layoffs.”
“If you’re a young journalist today, there’s almost no on-ramp to traditional journalism,” she said. “Even if you do get a job, journalists salaries have been stagnant and even declined.”
“I don’t think people understand how bad the world would be without journalists,” she claimed.
Watch the full video below:Â
NEW – WaPo's Taylor Lorenz: "Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out."pic.twitter.com/k5kokYenKI
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 25, 2024
Related: WaPo Reporter Taylor Lorenz Doxed Creator of Popular ‘Libs of TikTok’ Twitter Account
Though Lorenz claims that journalism and media altogether are dying out, it’s only the notoriously fake news corporate outlets that are suffering, as independent media, like National File, rises to the top of the food chain.
Polling data over the past several years shows that American confidence in corporate media is at an all-time low, and in addition to the switch over to digital print media, millions of Americans are watching digital TV media on a daily basis, cutting their cords to tune into the likes of Stew Peters and Tucker Carlson online.
While numerous corporate media types have attempted to jump into the digital media world, they’ve usually failed, unable to shake their old fake news habits and gain the trust of their readers and viewers.
