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The journalism industry has been facing a crisis for years; the COVID-19 pandemic has simply accelerated the inevitable, swelling a steady and dispiriting trickle of localized layoffs and outlet consolidations to a national deluge of pay cuts, furloughs, mass layoffs, closures, print reductions. These cutbacks threaten individual journalists and also journalism as a whole, eroding the robust coverage that is essential to a functioning democracy. As the traditional commercial foundations of journalism give way beneath our feet, The Columbia Journalism Review is partnering with The Tow Center for Digital Journalism to launch the Journalism Crisis Project, joining ranks in an attempt to document and bear witness to losses and fundamental changes in newsrooms all over the world. As Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, wrote in their introduction to the project, “Now, we may have finally arrived at a moment of reckoning with the problem.”
Our goals are two-fold—we want to acknowledge what is lost, and to systematically document the crisis with an eye toward the future. How are newsrooms changing? At what rate? What patterns arise when we measure these changes against geographical location or business model? The urgency of such questions intensifies as COVID-19 wreaks havoc on the industry, accelerating the collapse of advertising revenue and testing the sustainability of reader-driven revenues. In order to catalogue this moment and provide resources for further research, The Tow Center is building a database that tracks newsroom cutbacks by type, date, outlet,
Read more here: https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/the-journalism-crisis-is-gaining-momentum.php