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Since March of 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has been collecting data on cutbacks to US newsrooms happening amid the novel coronavirus pandemic; today, they published the sum of their findings for the first time.
Over the past six months, researchers at the Tow Center have aggregated and vetted reports of layoffs, furloughs, closures, print reductions, and a wide range of cutbacks—depending upon news reports, Twitter announcements, press releases, and Google Form responses. “covid came along and accelerated what was already an incredibly awful time for local news,” says Pete Brown, Research Director at the Tow Center. He hopes the project can bear witness, cataloguing losses in a critical moment for journalism, tracking trends and patterns that can be studied as the industry and its supporters look for solutions to the crisis. “Here is as clear a picture as we can provide on how it happened, the rate at which it happened, how many people have been laid off in a given day, how layoffs affected different regions,” Brown says. “Down the line, to be able to systematically track what disappeared will be a useful resource in comparing the past to what eventually emerges in its place.”
The published map is a bleak sight—the United States news landscape riddled with a mess of holes: lost jobs, stilled printers, newspaper nameplates retired forever. And the startling image only hints at the true cost of the crisis: the gaps in knowledge that grow in the wake of the cutbacks,
Read more here: https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/introducing-the-covid-19-cutback-tracker.php
