News and Media Layoffs Keep Piling Up

Tech layoffs may be crowding the headlines, but the news business itself is likewise getting downsized.

According to Fast Company, the media sector keeps taking it on the chin, with fresh rounds of layoffs landing in early 2024. In January alone, hundreds of jobs were cut at numerous outlets, as the media sector at large continues to contract across the spectrum. 

Here is a roundup of some recently announced layoffs in the media space:

• The Los Angeles Times laid off 20% of its newsroom in January.
• NBC News and MSNBC laid off around 75 employees in January.
• Sports Illustrated laid off most of its staff (around 100) after it failed to pay licensing fees to its parent company in January.
• Time laid off 15% of its staff, or roughly 30 employees, in January.
• Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced a staff reduction of 8% in January.
• Forbes reduced its staff by 3% in late January.
• TechCrunch laid off a handful of staffers and is going to end its paid subscription options.
• The Messenger, a news startup, shut down entirely at the beginning of February after less than a year in operation, leaving more than 300 employees jobless.
• The Wall Street Journal let 20 staff members go at its Washington, D.C., bureau in early February.
• CBS News also cut 20 jobs at its D.C. bureau in early February, as a larger round of 800 cuts at Paramount.
• The Intercept laid off 15 staff members, including its editor-in-chief, in mid-February.
• NowThis cut half of its editorial team in mid-February, a loss of 26 jobs.
• BuzzFeed sold one of its sub-brands, Complex, this week, and subsequently announced a 16% reduction in staff. This comes after shuttering its entire news division last year.
• Vice Media will stop publishing on Vice.com and will lay off hundreds, per recent reports.
• WAMU radio, the NPR affiliate in Washington, D.C., said it will shut down the local news website DCist and lay off its staff.

Data supplied to Fast Company from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm that tracks layoffs and other data points, shows that the media sector (including news, film, television, and streaming) shed 836 jobs in January.

And for 2023 as a whole, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest (excluding 2020) since 2009, when more than 22,300 jobs were cut, and 2008, when 28,800 or so jobs were cut—both in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession. 

For comparison, less than 4,000 media jobs were cut in both 2022 and 2021, so the uptick during 2023 is evident. Extrapolating January’s data out across all of 2024, and the media sector could lose an estimated 10,000 jobs this year.

Additionally, the data shows that 3,087 jobs were cut in the "digital, print, and broadcast" news subset of the media sector in 2023, the highest since 2018, excluding 2020.

And this year is shaping up to be even worse: As of the end of January, there were already 528 news layoffs—higher than last January's 360 jobs. Given the news from Vice Media and others this month, it’s possible that the uptick could continue in February.