The coronavirus crisis is devastating the news industry

Two months ago, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Brie Zeltner became consumed by one topic: the coronavirus crisis that would soon sweep into her state.

The veteran health-care journalist chronicled the early reports of illness in nearby states, and then the first cases transmitted within Ohio. She interviewed a local woman who had tested positive; explored the impact of the virus on maternal health; and questioned the state's shortage of coronavirus tests and the reasons local health departments were pursuing such different strategies to thwart the disease.

Last week, the encroaching crisis took a hit on Zeltner's own workplace - a financial one. Suffering a dramatic dip in advertising revenue amid the sudden economic downturn, the long-struggling newspaper cut 22 journalists from its payroll. Among them, Zeltner.

"It's very difficult to watch what is going on in the world right now and be a health reporter," she said, "and not be able to be out and about covering it."

A tsunami of layoffs, cutbacks, furloughs and closures has washed over newsrooms across the United States over the past month - a time, ironically, when readership and viewership is surging with consumers in search of reliable information about the virus.

The Tampa Bay Times laid off 11 journalists and stopped five days of its print edition. Seattle's Pulitzer-winning weekly the Stranger laid off 18 staffers and stopped printing altogether. There have been layoffs at the Denver Post and Boston Herald and salary cuts at the Dallas Morning News. Some smaller papers are folding altogether.

Small businesses of all kinds are hurting everywhere, of course; and this month's cuts follow more than a decade of shrinkage for the media industry. As readers started to gravitate to online sources, news sites have struggled to claim a piece of a national web advertising market increasingly dominated by bigger players.

But this frailty had seemed almost manageable - until recent weeks when the coronavirus turned it into an urgent existential threat, striking at local businesses that had been the last pillar of support for many news organizations.

The upshot is a void: stories that aren't being covered and news that isn't reaching readers and viewers because there's no one to report them.

"There's a huge appetite for what we do right now," says Paul Tash, chairman and chief executive of the Tampa Bay paper, which until last week had never missed a print edition for almost 96 years. "On the other hand, the advertisers that subsidize our business are under enormous strain. ... For many, many of our local businesses, (the lockdown) is a terrible reversal."

While newspapers - many owned by heavily indebted chain owners - have been hard hit, the broader media landscape has pits in it at every turn. Alternative weeklies and city magazines, dependent on ads from restaurants, museums and local attractions, were the first to hang out urgent appeals for reader donations; several have shuttered and others are contemplating it. Even local TV stations, the most resilient sector during the media's troubled years, are hurting from the disappearance of two reliable advertisers, local car dealers and political candidates.

The news media's plunging fortunes have elicited glee from the likes of President Donald Trump. "Advertising in the Failing New York Times is WAY down. Washington Post is not much better," he noted in a tweet Monday morning. "I can't say whether this is because they are Fake News sources of information, to a level that few can understand, or the Virus is just plain beating them up."

In fact, it's the virus. And yet the national publications he considers his adversaries - the Wall Street Journal as well as The Post and the Times - are in relatively healthful condition, thanks to a wide base of national advertisers and, critically, millions of digital subscribers. Smaller news organizations, though, are limited to a local readership base and reliant on local advertisers, many of which have stopped buying ads as they grapple with the economic fallout of a nation stuck at home.

The mounting misfortune has driven some to embrace a formerly unthinkable idea: a government bailout.

Media-business analyst Rick Edmonds, of the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a journalism education organization, said some news companies may have to resort to applying for loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government's newly created plan for small businesses.

News organizations have long resisted, and have rarely needed, government loans, fearing that any such financial entanglements pose a conflict of interest in reporting about the government. But Edmonds says they may be the only way ailing companies can "keep the lights on" through the crisis months. "Who (besides the federal Treasury) has the means to take this coun... (Read more)

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