It's Been a Brutal Stretch for the Media Industry

The Los Angeles Times laid off 20% of its workforce this week, a devastating blow to its newsroom, and it's only the latest such move by mainstream outlets in the last week or two as the industry reels:

• Business Insider said Thursday it will cut 8% of its staff, reports CNN. The outlet also notes that Time cut dozens of jobs and Conde Nast announced plans to do so.
• Forbes said the same day it will cut 3% of its workforce even as its newsroom union began a walkout to protest earlier cutbacks, per Axios.
• Staffers at the New York Daily News also walked out in protest Thursday of cuts that have decimated the newsroom, per the Guardian.
• Sports Illustrated might be history after laying off pretty much all of its staff.

• "At a time when America arguably needs more solid news coverage than ever, it is very disturbing to see economic forces arrange so powerfully against traditional news sources," Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president who now analyzes the industry at MIT, tells the New York Times. "It's not just disturbing," he adds. "It's dangerous." Among those economic forces: "Ad growth in the 2010s was unsustainably high, and publishers acted like it would last forever," per Axios.
• All of the above applies to the local level, too, with Northwestern's Medill School estimating that half of all US counties have little or no access to local news.
• It's not just news outlets hurting. Reuters rounds up layoffs at tech/media outlets including Audible, Amazon's streaming operation, streamer Twitch, and Microsoft's Activision Blizzard and Xbox. The Verge also has details on this front.

(More media stories.)