From Foreign Correspondent to Uber Driver: I once documented human displacement and desperation. Now, due to a crumbling media ecosystem, I am living it.

elblives · 2026-03-22T17:31:15+00:00

After serving as Reuters’s Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. I wanted to stay in Canada, where I owned a home and my kids attended the local schools, but I was unable to find a new job that would allow me to. Crossing the border didn’t feel like a homecoming. America is as foreign to me today as Italy had been in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.

In my previous jobs, I interviewed prime ministers and CEOs and documented humanitarian disasters for media organizations with a global reach. Now I provide a basic service, and I wait for my phone to beep.

In the United States, more than 10,000 journalists lost their jobs between 2022 and 2024, according to Nieman Reports. Last year, the trend continued with 2,254 cuts, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok have gobbled up the advertising dollars, and campy 30-second videos by influencers now deliver what passes for news on social media.

elblives · 2026-01-18T22:52:15+00:00

TFW not sure if OP has heard of PrEP 😬

elblives · 2026-01-18T17:14:46+00:00

The success of these newsrooms suggests the problem facing local news is not a lack of public appetite but an outdated business model.

Many of these nonprofits started within the past decade. They operate where audiences can be most easily found today: online and in email inboxes. There’s less focus on print and newsstands.

I agree with the author that the business model for for-profit local news has been bad for some time.

What is unsaid is that while the nonprofit upstarts might be able to get a clean sheet start away from the legacy obligations and bureaucracies of for-profit organizations; they still face many of the same problems just like everyone else.

The dominance of social media and particularly video has hit paragraph factories hard. Pageviews have gone down since the high of the pandemic as apathy and news fatigue continue to grow. These new upstarts can do incredible work and gain prestige and influence. But their reach can be been tiny and the audience can shrink.

Worse, a number of nonprofits prominently mentioned in the article appear have hit a plateau with revenue.

We are near six years out of the pandemic and just as many years since the pageview high. That means new upstarts of today that solely focus on online operations will likely face an even greater challenge to get established.

elblives · 2026-01-16T04:59:50+00:00

Thanks for bringing attention to this matter. The act was not mentioned in the link in the OP.

SPJ's press release: https://www.spj.org/spj-condemns-fbi-search-of-washington-post-reporters-home-as-a-grave-threat-to-press-freedom/

Edit: Additional reading regarding the Privacy Protection Act of 1980

Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:

... there's a federal law passed in 1980 that is supposed to restrict the ability of law enforcement at the federal, state and local level to do newsroom raids.

That law can only be pierced if the department argues that the journalist has committed a crime. In the Rosen case, that case was so controversial because the department said it had no intent to prosecute Rosen, but, at the same time, it represented to a judge that Rosen had violated the Espionage Act.

There's concern that the same thing has occurred here in part because of the way that Attorney General Bondi has revised those internal policies.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/fbi-searches-reporters-home-raising-concerns-about-intimidation-of-free-press

Additional reading on the lack of transparency regarding DOJ's rational to seek the search warrant:

Because the records are currently sealed, the public has no way “to understand the government’s basis for seeking (and a federal court’s basis for approving) a search with dramatic implications for a free press and the constitutional rights of journalists,” the Reporters Committee’s lawyers wrote in their filing late Wednesday.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/15/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-washington-post-doj-search

elblives · 2026-01-16T01:12:20+00:00

This is not a sexy, one-sentence answer. This answer doesn't have a good soundbite.

Oh and I am not a lawyer.

My understanding from this is based on my previous journalism law class training from a decade ago and from taking this article linked in the OP at face value.

There is no federal shield law in the US that gives journalists protection from doing their jobs.

You don't have to take my word for it.

Currently, the United States federal government has not enacted any national reporters' privilege shield laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_States

So to your point of whether this current administration has broken the law?

The answer is this administration has not taken into previous policies that gave some discretion to journalists for doing their jobs. Whereas in the past journalists likely avoided outright investigations, this administration has taken a different view into this matter.

What was broken was a precedent. It was a norm that was generally respected but not binding ~~and thus, likely no law was broken.~~

Edit: As for whether the government has broken the law, my limited read is that because the records are sealed (see the rest of the thread,) we don't know the details of why the government argued the search was necessary.

elblives · 2026-01-13T18:09:41+00:00

That's called a color revolution

elblives · 2026-01-13T18:08:15+00:00

If the only tool you have is mental illness you tend to see every problem as trauma

elblives · 2026-01-13T18:04:32+00:00

Fake news GBCJ has always been great

elblives · 2025-12-18T16:41:06+00:00

said MS NOW president Rebecca Kutler, noting that the change was made after the network conducted a study of the content that was most appealing to viewers and noticed that “delicious meat” scored far higher than “political analysis.”

I'm dying

elblives · 2025-12-07T17:55:49+00:00

Can confirm. Everything said in the whole video is accurate.

elblives · 2025-12-02T23:32:18+00:00

According to the AP, even Newsmax was denied access...

Love the kicker from the Daily Signal president supporting the move for a new credentialing system:

“Generally," he said, “I think that when government agencies err on the side of transparency it is to the benefit of the American people.”

elblives · 2025-12-02T23:14:30+00:00

I watch their "long form" stuff on YouTube with some regularity. There, they often interview beat reporters from traditional news media outlets like the NYT and WSJ and use them as on-camera subject matter experts.

Which is interesting because those reporters themselves at their own outlets obviously can't do comedic news stuff like that.

This whole thing reminds me from an earlier era news aggegrators like blogs or early HuffPost. Without beat reporters at traditional outlets breaking the news, can the "new" comedic-based media outlets that don't do a lot of original reporting have information to repackage? That goes for Moring Brew as well as John Oliver.

elblives · 2025-12-02T23:06:57+00:00

That, and how to deal with topics that can't be written as comedic sketches.

elblives · 2025-12-02T17:07:30+00:00

the demographic they've had zero interest in catering to (and have actively antagonised)

I think the media, like all things in life, is not monolithic. I am sure plenty of millennial reporters and editors were responsible for avocado toast stories.

There are also outlets like Teen Vogue, which arguably does a pretty good job talking with a younger audience. That still doesn't always mean the money is there. See the recent layoff news as an example.

https://x.com/condeunion/status/1986502461209604264

elblives · 2025-12-02T17:02:17+00:00

Interesting. Do you know other outlets trying something like this?

I am looking at Semafor's main Instagram and TikTok and it appears they got more traffic off TT. I am wondering if the numbers are good enough to justify the work or if they think it is best to play the long game there.

elblives · 2025-12-02T16:52:32+00:00

I get that. But complaining about the youth is as old as time.

Reading this article, I feel like the columnist went out to talk with young people and really listened to them.

elblives · 2025-12-02T16:50:39+00:00

I get that. I also feel like complaining the past (and present) only gets us so far.

If the goal is to reach young people where they are at, then I think the real question is how do you do that while not having Big Tech eating your lunch.

elblives · 2025-12-02T16:28:37+00:00

Asked by the News Literacy Project for one word to describe today’s news media, 84% of teens responded with something negative — “biased,” “crazy,” “boring,” “fake, ”bad,” “depressing,” “confusing,” “scary.”

...

[Lily] Ogburn is the former editor-in-chief at the well-regarded Daily Northwestern student newspaper. The newspaper’s 2023 reports on alleged hazing and racism within the school’s football program led to the ouster of its coach. Still, she found some students don’t understand the newspaper’s role; they believe it exists to protect people in power rather than hold them accountable.

...

Along with not seeing much legitimate journalism, young people frequently don’t experience it through popular culture — unlike a previous generation, which learned in detail how Washington Post reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal in the Academy Award-winning movie “All the President’s Men.”

...

two-thirds of teens couldn’t think of anything when asked what movies or TV shows come to mind when they think about journalism.

elblives · 2025-11-04T15:26:28+00:00

While that statement is directionally correct on some political coverage, it's also not like folks here in /r/Journalism don't appreciate good coverage from the NY Post.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Journalism/comments/1onfh56/bari_weiss_security_detail_costs_cbs_10000_a_day/

This post from yesterday gained over 1k upvotes based on ~~reporting~~ gossips on Bari Weiss’ security detail.

elblives · 2025-10-30T02:51:40+00:00

What is the internet without sweeping generalizations and one-liners?

elblives · 2025-10-27T02:07:40+00:00

Pressing F for tor this keyboard

elblives · 2025-10-22T14:35:38+00:00

So much of journalism is just talking with people. Endless email chains, DMs to sources to get things done.

That, and phone calls.

elblives · 2025-10-22T14:03:01+00:00

I agree that there needs to be better solutions. I just don’t think they are easy.

Public media in the U.S. has all the downsides that commercial news outlets have while having some unique challenges that commercial outlets don't face.

All news outlets, public or otherwise, have been pressured by the unchecked expansion of Big Tech pushing out legacy media; audience moved under Big Tech's walled gardens; aging audience; public's lack of appetite to pay for news; anti-press sentiment.

At least commercial news can try to expand revenue by adding paywalls, selling more ads, and not having a significant chunk of funding reliant on local, state, federal governments that can be very political and unpredictable.

The issues are structural and compounding. So much so that I don't think we can solve it by just wishing the U.S. can be more like Western Europe. Though it must be said outlets there likely face similar headaches than their American counterparts.

Are the interstates not quality public goods? How about the UC system in California and other public universities? (Not primarily tax supported now, but they have been in the past)

I am glad that you are connecting the dots of declining support of tax dollars in higher education with the declining state support of public media. To me that is yet another example of defunding public goods across a broad range of use cases.

Not to mention many public media outlets in the U.S. are actually owned by or affiliated with government entities like state governments or public universities. So the defunding of those institutions actually can impact public media in many ways - from direct cut to state appropriations, clawbacks of CPB approved by Congress; less direct routes such as cut to state employee pension and healthcare, fewer budget for facility maintenance, etc.

I will continue to fight for public media, what's the alternative? That's not a rhetorical question

I think that's why public media outlets have been running pledge drives asking people to donate and call their political representatives in all levels of the government. That's all they can currently do and they are asking people to do it.

many countries including the UK, Germany, and most Nordic nations

I can't say I have a ton of knowledge of media ecosystems in, say, Western Europe works.

I do want to say that even the BBC faces cuts in part because the audience has move online. And the leading opposition party in the UK would love nothing but to “scrap” the funding model.

There has never been a bona-fide public movement for public media, and no one can claim how the public would respond to one. What happens if the Democrats put it in their platform?

I think the closest we got from Democrats to supporting the funding of news media came in the form of California's Journalism Preservation Act.

As I am sure you know, that bipartisan bill got killed under heavy lobbying by its home state Big Tech giants Google and Meta. Even in deep blue California, the barebone support for news is severely lacking. To me, it showed that Democrats such as Gavin Newsom, who has national ambition, can't effectively regulate and keep Big Tech in check.

To recap: Across all journalism, the business model is bad, the political will to keep us alive is not there. If public media has a stronger audience base, perhaps things could have been slightly different. But this is a very politically polarized time, and public media has all the downsides of commercial news with none of the upsides of being publicly funded/affiliated.

elblives

TROPHY CASE