Name: “A Darwinian Moment”: The Coronavirus Is Blowing Up the Media Landscape
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“A Darwinian Moment”: The Coronavirus Is Blowing Up the Media Landscape

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The years 2008 and 2009 are remembered as exceedingly dark days for the media business. Between the digitally-fueled collapse of legacy revenue streams and the gruesome carnage of the financial crash, the industry began to endure pain and suffering like never before, from mass downsizings—a hundred New York Times journalists , 1,400 McClatchy employees , and so on—to newspapers and magazines going bankrupt or being shut down altogether: Farewell Rocky Mountain News and print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. RIP Radar, Gourmet, and Condé Nast Portfolio. (It would take too long to list all the titles that were shuttered.) of daily newspaper advertising quickly evaporated, never to return. High-flying glossy budgets became anachronisms. Editors and writers fled for PR, or consulting work, or anything that didn’t feel as bleak as their beloved trade. It was an agonizing era for journalism, or perhaps end of an era would be a better way to put it. And yet, the Great Recession’s dire toll on media now looks like child’s play.Just a little over a month into our national COVID-19 crisis, with more than people dead in the United States as of Tuesday morning, more than out of work, the economy in its worst shape , and no return to normalcy in sight—at least not the type of normalcy we’re used to—the ever-fragile news industry has been sucker-punched harder than, well, maybe any other time in the history of the news industry. As one executive put it, “This really is a Darwinian moment.”The last time around, it was a much different landscape, and still very print-centric. The bloodshed was largely chalked up to an old model giving way to a new one, as laptops and smartphones replaced paper for vast swaths of readers. In the decade since, many regional and local newspapers have been hanging on by a thread, and some magazines have only survived thanks to the investment of wealthy benefactors. But at the same time, digital media has exploded, and scores of new web-native publications have risen (and fallen).Until recently, even some of the major digital insurgents that had taken a turn for the worse over the past couple of years had started to seem like they were beginning to stabilize and figure things out. Overall, the future was beginning to look less dark. “Digital publishing,” Sara Fischer of Axios on January 21, citing rosy projections at the likes of BuzzFeed and Vice, “is doing something it hasn't done en masse since the dawn of the Internet: make money.”That was then. In our new and uncharted era of the Great Lockdown, certain media organizations are better positioned to weather the storm than others. But no one is really safe, most of all not those who still depend to some large degree on consumer advertising, which is falling off a cliff. In a cruel twist, web traffic is soaring, cable news ratings are through the roof, but people aren’t buying things, so marketers are pausing on trying to sell things. Moreover, those who are selling things don’t want to shill their wares alongside stories about intubated COVID patients or the probability that social distancing will last . A UBS survey shows digital ad spending is down nearly 50%, national TV nearly 40%, and print nearly 20%. “For the first time in history, you’re probably going to have the highest point of media usage in the history of the United States and the lowest point of advertising in the U.S.,” former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong The Information.That it all happened in the blink of an eye is what makes the current quandary so head-spinning. A number publications have already pulled the plug, from digital startup to various local newspapers around the country, most recently that are owned by the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. Announcements of salary reductions, furloughs, layoffs, and other belt-tightening measures have been coming so fast it’s hard to keep track of them all. Last week alone brought cuts to, among others, the , , the , , , and Condé Nast, which owns Vanity Fair, not to mention NPR’s that it is facing a budget deficit as high as $45 million. This week so far: , , and , the Politico-affiliated tech-news website that launched less than three months ago. Across the Atlantic, downsizing is likewise taking hold at places like and . The New York Times has been keeping a running tally, and as of Tuesday, it was that some “33,000 workers at news companies in the U.S. have been laid off, been furloughed or had their pay reduced.”Most PopularIn a memo to staff on Friday announcing a variety of austerity moves, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff hit upon the unprecedented-ness of it all: “Because we operate in such a tumultuous industry, it’s tempting to lump in the economic carnage resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic with other events or crises that we’ve seen in the media business. This is clearly very different: while the severity of the pandemic’s effect varies across institutions and individual lives, it is universal, and no one is immune from its impact.”Jim VandeHei, the CEO of Axios, offered a similar take. “For huge swaths of media, it’s not hyperbole to say it’s cataclysmic, worse than 2008,” he told me. “If you rely on retail and consumer ads, home delivery, ad exchanges, affiliate revenue, or physical events, you are screwed, at least for the short term. This is devastating to local news and traditional newspapers in particular—they started with several shrinking business lines that in some cases are literally evaporating before their eyes.” Any bright spots? “The big players, like the New York Times and Washington Post, and niche players like Axios, will be fine longterm,” VandeHei continued. “But all of us do physical events, which are dead until further notice, and rely on some advertisers who are pulling back until the economic damage is more clearly known. All of this sucks, broadly speaking, for the media and nation because the need and value of news you can trust has never been higher.”Even at those well-positioned big players that VandeHei mentioned, like the Times and the Post, which are insulated by the massive digital subscription businesses they’ve developed in recent years, it’s not as if the mood is particularly upbeat. “It’s tough to see how the industry is being hammered, particularly when people need quality journalism more than ever,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, the Times’ chief operating officer.Still, it’s not impossible to find optimism even in these most despairing of times. “You do wonder if certain types of media will come back from this,” said Nicholas Carlson, global editor in chief of Insider Inc., the parent entity of Business Insider, which also has a strong subscription component. (The company doesn’t anticipate any COVID-related cuts, but it won’t be able to hire as many people as it was planning to in 2020.) “We’ve been saying for 20 years that newspapers are dying, and now it looks like this could really be it, and that’s horrible. But people still need journalism, and the model for it is being developed. If people want or need information that they can’t get anywhere else, they will subscribe to what you’re doing. For those who are well capitalized and have diverse business models and are not too cost heavy, this is an environment for them to really fortify themselves and even flourish when things go back to normal.”Business Insider, Carlson pointed out, got its start amid the 2008 financial crash. “Great companies are founded in these moments,” he said, “so I’m optimistic that there’s capital that can be moved into trying to figure that out.”More Great Stories From Vanity Fair— Does Have a Case?— In the COVID-19 Crisis, —And Bill Ackman Stepping Up— Can You Beat COVID-19 Without a Lockdown? — With the Times Reprises Its 9/11 Storytelling Role— How Long Will the Last?— From the Archive: The Who Battled EbolaLooking for more? for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story. is Vanity Fair’s senior media correspondent and the author of **. He previously worked at publications including Politico and the New York Observer. Follow him on and .The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

The years 2008 and 2009 are remembered as exceedingly dark days for the media business. Between the digitally-fueled collapse of legacy revenue streams and the gruesome carnage of the financial crash, the industry began to endure pain and suffering like never before, from mass downsizings—a hundred New York Times journalists , 1,400 McClatchy employees , and so on—to newspapers and magazines going bankrupt or being shut down altogether: Farewell Rocky Mountain News and print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. RIP Radar, Gourmet, and Condé Nast Portfolio. (It would take too long to...

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Joe Pompeo

Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“A Darwinian Moment”: The Coronavirus Is Blowing Up the Media Landscape

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