Media and Journalists: It’s a Messy Divorce and a Bitter Song

One of the best editors I ever worked for once told me, “When you’re stuck and you can’t get out what you want to say, just write. Write what you’re feeling. Write what you know.”

Last week I was in one of those situations. Not because I didn’t know what to write, but because I felt stuck. Confused. How many ways can I write that America is kayaking down a sewer, led by a sociopath and the political cult that worships him? What more can be said about three major wars in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in which hundreds of thousands have died?

And the Knicks have pulled one of the dumbest moves in sports history. But they always do that. Anyway, I felt burned out by the Idiocracy that surrounds me.

“Just write,” she said. So I will. But I won’t write about those topics. I’m inclined to write about the people who have made it a career to bring those kinds of topics to you. The men and women who sit in front of computers, make calls, find facts, sift through data, and ask pointed questions of politicians, officials, companies, athletes, entertainers, and the man in the street.  Some of it is superficial, some of it is very dangerous. All of it is done so that you can be aware, make decisions, and manage your life with information.

Since I was 15 years old, I’ve counted myself among that number. The reporters, editors, photographers, rewrite people, videographers, copy editors, web producers, broadcasters, columnists, and a long list of intellects have married themselves to the craft of journalism.

But it’s a craft that is divorcing them in a most bitter fashion.

In my last post, I wrote about Marvin Gaye and his bringing “What’s Going On” into our lives. Several years after that album was released, he released another one titled “Here, My Dear.” It was created because a judge agreed to let him record the 1978 album and give half of the royalties to his estranged wife Anna Gordy as part of their divorce settlement.

Probably the most poignant track off that album was the one that anchored it:  “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?” It was about Gaye’s heart breaking over his split with Gordy, but it seems an appropriate question to ask about the collapse of the relationship between journalists and the media industry.

What’s That Sucking Sound I Hear?

Since my former employer gave me the boot in the way faceless, soulless corporations pride themselves on doing, I’ve been witness to the same happening to many friends of mine, people I don’t know, others I don’t care for, and people whom I’ll never meet. LinkedIn has become a gallery of “Open to Work” posts whose creators hope will catch the eye of a sympathetic recruiter or hiring manager. But they probably know the odds are against them. I have yet to hear any of these people proclaim they got a job because of this singular action.

An industry collapse is taking place in what seems like a vacuum – the only ones who apparently notice are the journalists themselves. During my time in the business, many media outlets have shifted to focus on low-hanging fruit in order to make money. Powered, of course, by SEO avarice and high click rate greed. Unique visitors became more valuable than an edified reader.

Sensational, barely truthful headlines from the 80s and 90s drove companies to compete to reach an ethical bottom where low information, high-dopamine seeking readers would consume the content. We can get into the 1987 elimination of the Fairness Doctrine later, but that certainly played a role in polarizing media.

There’s a long history of this descent into chaos, and nobody is truthfully happy about it except those who believe the media should only serve their interests. That tends to be politicians and billionaires.

Of course, many news executives have remained loyal to their journalistic missions, but they were employed by large corporations that found the bottom line more important than ethics. Not that I don’t understand this is a business, but as I progressed through my own career, I found fewer and fewer places that were willing to balance church and state (meaning the business side and editorial side for those who don’t know the jargon).

This led to my having sometimes screaming arguments with my superiors over content and ethics. I’m not the only one. I’ve seen people leave their jobs and fall out with good friends over corporate failure to understand ethics.

The Last Barrier

So now, with an army of local newspapers around the country biting the dust, leaving the public vulnerable to insidious actors on social media, the result is a public that is poorly informed, companies that are run by bean counters, and tech CEOs whose platforms dictate the analytics of most news organizations, as so many have become web-based.

The natural progression is the massive layoffs that companies are undertaking because they cannot stay afloat. When I first started, it was a common thing to meet a number of people who had worked in a newsroom most of their lives. Now, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who has been part of a news organization for more than five years.

According to the most recent data, as many as 25,000 people in the news biz lost their jobs between 2000 and 2024. About 10,000 got pinkslips in the last three years and bloodbaths at major companies like CNN, NBC, HuffPost, Vox, and most recently, Business Insider. Another report indicates America has lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. How long can we expect to have a democratic society if we don’t have an institution – warts and all – that defends not just the First Amendment, but the entire Bill of Rights?

Apparently, not long.

Many of my peers are Black Journalists who wanted to make sure media outlets told fair stories about all communities, serving as a barrier between the business and stereotyping with lazy, racist tropes. So with the layoffs also comes an erosion of social competency that media has always needed. It thus becomes easy to vilify George Floyd, for example, for his past crimes, rather than keep focus on the fact that he was murdered by a rogue cop.

It all comes down to this — the media industry doesn’t care about its flock. That's clear in the capitulation of some organizations that were once well-respected to the far right. Journalists are being shown in a very dour fashion that they are expendable and relationships between employee and employer that had once been collegial, offering guidance and mentorship, are fleeting. C-suite officers who talk the corporate script keep a distance because they know they will one day fire the very people they order to spend most of their waking hours in front of a screen.

Who Gets the Kids?

The change feels like an ugly divorce. One in which one spouse abruptly decides, “I want something different,” and has papers ready for the other spouse to sign the second he walks in the door. No reconciliation. No counseling. No therapy. Nothing.

There isn’t even a custody battle because the children are the content we spent our lives producing, but have no ownership of. We agree to that the moment we do our onboarding with HR, and can't even complain because of NDAs. The companies can run it again, retool it, remove our bylines, or even delete it, eliminating evidence that we even did the work. Callous and petty, but it does happen.

So will journalists ever find love again? We’re trying. The Don Lemons, Jim Acostas and Joy-Ann Reids of the world are finding spaces in places like Substack or YouTube. I started this blog several months ago on Ghost.org, and there are other venues people are using. Then there are nonprofit news ventures that are springing up to keep reporting news the way it should be reported. But I don’t think we were all meant to be freelancers and gig workers.

Journalism is a craft that best serves society when its workers have platforms where they are safe to produce their genius, debate best practices, and grow new generations of creators.

But right now, I’m not seeing that happen. Only a relative few are getting jobs, and some are being fired just months after they were hired. Some are lucky and settle into their companies, but I’d gather many of them were part of the tight networks of their managers and did not have to worry much about competition for their jobs. That doesn’t mean all of them are good; it just means the right people knew them.

So the rest of us are left in court at a divorce proceeding. Many in tears because they thought they were making their spouse happy, wailing about the best years of their lives having evaporated. While one spouse turns away and announces, “I’m going to do me,” the served spouse can only stand in court and ask, “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?”

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.