This week, A Long-Predicted Collapse Hit Digital Media

The old arrangement, where if you wanted your ads to reach Rolling Stone‘s prosperous young readers you had no choice but to subsidize Hunter Thompson calling the White House a den of thieves, did not survive the digital revolution...." 

It's Remarkable what happens when you label half the electorate as evil and deplorable. This week, a long-predicted collapse seemed to hit digital media. The journalists’ Twitter timelines filled up with the names of the newly unemployed—wow, they let him go? the whole opinion team?—and the usual ominous comments on the precarity of the industry. “Precarity” might be underselling it at this point: As CNN reported, “the media industry lost about 1,000 jobs nationwide this week.” The national economy, meantime, is operating at close to full employment. 

The hard-news bloodbath was particularly acute at the pack of lying vermin at BuzzFeed, which lost not only its health team and national news desk, but also the diggers behind a lot of the site’s increasingly questionable national security coverage. What became clear this week is that if the digital natives do survive, it might not have much to do with news gathering, which both investors and advertisers have recently discovered an allergy to. News for a time was a respectable, and respected, subsidized by everything else. Now that price is too high. And the news to fake.

(CJR)
H/T Ann Althouse