Local Newspaper Closures and Layoffs Accelerate During the Pandemic: ‘Hardly Anyone Is Safe’
It’s no secret that local newspapers weren’t in a good place before the coronavirus, but since the pandemic hit America, shuttering businesses that once bought ads, local news outlets are in a distinctly bad place. Since the pandemic, several local papers like Indiana’s Daily Clintonian have shut down altogether. Others have suspended print publication and laid off or furloughed staffers, including Seattle’s The Stranger, Portland, Oregon’s Mercury, Detroit’s MetroTimes and Cincinnati’s CityBeat. And virtually every news outlet, from the L.A. Times to the New York Post to TheWrap, has implemented some combination of layoffs, furloughs orJust pay cuts as ad (and other) revenues have abruptly eroded. As Poynter Institute’s list of newsroom closures, layoffs and furloughs, which is constantly updating, notes up top: “It’s getting hard to keep track of the bad news about the news right now.” Also Read: Can Local News Outlets Survive the Pandemic-Fueled Economic Downturn? Poynter’s Kristen Hare, who has been documenting the carnage, created the list because it was getting too hard to keep up with all the bad news. “I just needed a place to put all the stories I was doing into one place,” she said in a phone interview. It felt like...
Read original story Local Newspaper Closures and Layoffs Accelerate During the Pandemic: ‘Hardly Anyone Is Safe’ At TheWrap
