The Human Toll of the 2019 Media Apocalypse
By: Maya Kosoff
Tags: Journalism, Media, Jobs, Culture, Gen Longreads

Driving westward through Pennsylvania on a stretch of land dotted by trees, hills, and rest stops along Interstate 80, you’ll eventually hit the Ohio border. The first major metropolis you’ll come across is Youngstown, the state’s ninth-largest city. This year, The Vindicator, Youngstown’s only daily newspaper, celebrated its 150th anniversary. It would also be the newspaper’s last.

On June 28, 2019, employees were told to meet in the conference room at 4 p.m. “We all know what a Friday afternoon meeting means at a daily newspaper,” Vindicator reporter Jessica Hardin told me. Some people thought the paper was being sold to GateHouse Media, and its employee roster would be cut in half. But in a meeting with Vindicator owner Mark Brown, they learned the paper had sought a buyer but couldn’t find one. On August 31, The Vindicator would shut down operations, laying off 144 employees and 250 newspaper carriers.

After graduating from Youngstown State University in 2017, Samantha Phillips was hired by The Vindicator to cover three small communities outside of Youngstown. During her two years at the paper, she covered everything from crime and local government to breaking news and education. However, even before the closure, Phillips had been contemplating changing careers. Journalism “didn’t seem viable long-term because of the low pay and job insecurity,” she told me, adding that a few weeks before the closure she had driven six hours to Washington, D.C., to interview for a communications position with a trade association. The two months between the closure announcement and the Vindy’s actual shutdown felt like “a long funeral.” Media outlets from around the country visited to eulogize the 150-year-old paper, and employees received a nearly endless supply of food from local businesses and Vindy alumni. Phillips got the job in D.C, and after watching the final press run with her co-workers in August, she packed up and left her whole life in Ohio behind. “I had been considering leaving journalism for some time, but being laid off cemented that decision for me,” she said.

Having a number to point to at the end of the year can still feel meaningless — the tale of 2019 is that nobody was spared.

While working on this story, I received literally hundreds of messages from people who wanted to speak to me about their experiences getting laid off in 2019, from outlets big and small. In April 2019, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the shooting deaths of 11 people and the wounding of seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue the year before. But as Post-Gazette reporter and editor Rich Lord pointed out recently on Twitter, many of the editors who led coverage of shooting had since left the paper — many through buyouts, another way media companies have whittled down the size of their staff. David Shribman, the paper’s former editor in chief, is now teaching at McGill University in Montreal; Web Editor Jim Iovino is now teaching at West Virginia University. Politics Editor Donna Eyring and Features Editor Virginia Linn have also left. And City Editor Lillian Thomas is now at the Houston Chronicle.

One of the immediate problems I ran into reporting this story was reporters’ apprehension in speaking on the record. Many laid-off reporters and editors I spoke to were nervous about violating the nondisclosure agreements their former employers made them sign as a condition to receive severance pay after they were laid off or bought out. I found this to be especially true with those laid off by newspapers owned by Gannett and GateHouse.

In many cases, the reporters and editors who spoke to me said they tried to apply for other media jobs after getting laid off. Jessica Hardin was able to stay in Youngstown after the Vindicator staff got the news about the layoffs, Mandy Jenkins, who had just been named director of the Compass Experiment — the McClatchy/Google project to put digital news startups in underserved news areas — reached out to Hardin. Jenkins had chosen Youngstown as the project’s first site and hired Hardin as one of the site’s two reporters. The four other positions on the local team were filled by former Vindicator employees. “I only spent a long weekend being unemployed,” Hardin said. “And honestly, most folks I worked with landed on their feet.”

Others, like Lynne Sherwin, who worked at the Akron Beacon Journal for 24 years before being laid off earlier this year, took jobs at trade publications. “The Cleveland area has a ton of B2B publications, where a lot of ex-journos tend to land, and I’m now managing editor of Plastics Machinery Magazine,” she told me. “It’s a big change from features coverage, but editing is editing.”

But often, employees laid off from media companies switch career paths entirely. Some, like Chris Kocher, who worked for Gannett Central New York for 22 years, find themselves in professions with transferrable skills — like working in communications. Kocher was part of Gannett’s January layoffs “I was determined not to move for another media job, under the theory that it too could be eliminated at any time,” he said. He ended up in the communications and marketing department at Binghamton University, a job he says he was “lucky to get,” with a short commute and state benefits.

Still, other reporters and editors consider jobs even further away from media and their skill sets. Elizabeth King, a freelance writer who wrote for Brit + Co. until its layoffs this spring, hasn’t been able to land a job in media since being laid off. “I’ve had a couple of interviews with nonprofits that haven’t lead anywhere,” she told me. “I’m considering moving back to my home state and getting a job on a factory floor where a couple of my siblings work. I signed up with a temp agency a few months ago that has gotten me one day of work where I literally counted crackers for a snack company.”

Brendan Skwire, who wrote for Raw Story until he was laid off earlier this year, applied to some media jobs, but one outlet that wanted to hire him would have required him to move across the country, and other offers he received were too low to be livable. He didn’t want to go into marketing or nonprofits, so he chose a different path entirely. “I’ve been a musician my entire life, and a friend here in Nashville asked if I had experience with audio-visuals. When I said yes, he gave me the number for the company he works for. I was hired that day without so much as an interview, he said. “I took any role that was available, until I realized carpentry was my strongest skill. I asked to be promoted and was bumped up accordingly. Next week I’m applying to the union, where my starting wage will again bump up quite a bit.”