Where Are the Victims of 2024’s Q1 Media Bloodbath?

Study Hall talks to media workers six months after their layoffs at Pitchfork, Business Insider, The Intercept and the LA Times to find out how they dealt and what they’re up to.

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Since he was a teenager, Evan Minsker has known that he wanted to be a music writer. For the West Virginia native who came of age listening to Sufjan Stevens, The Go! Team, and Art Brut in the early aughts, there was one obvious place he hoped to end up.

“Pitchfork was my dream,” Minsker said during a recent phone interview. He moved to Chicago for college specifically because some students at Columbia College had interned at the pioneering music criticism and news publication.

Minsker saw that dream come true. He first interned at Pitchfork, scored a part-time role in 2012, and was hired full-time not long after. “It was a huge deal. I, like, wept during my first shift.”

He worked his way up from associate staff writer to staff writer, then to news editor, and was eventually promoted to news director, sticking with the magazine through a purchase by Condé Nast, the rise of streaming, its embrace of non-indie music, and the unionization of its editorial staff, even the birth of his child.

And then he was laid off.

In January, Condé Nast chief content officer Anna Wintour convened staff on a Zoom call to announce that Pitchfork would be folded into GQ and there would be layoffs. He learned roughly an hour later that he was among those who would be let go.

For years, working in journalism has been a precarious proposition, but in early 2024 the idea of finding stable employment in media began to feel almost delusional.

In January alone, the industry shed over 500 journalists, and in February layoffs totaling triple digits were announced, prompting headlines such as “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?”. On X, posts from recently laid-off media workers poured in, a reminder of how an already competitive industry was now flooded with hundreds of highly talented workers suddenly looking for work.

For some outlets, the layoffs were not the end of the tumult. Jimmy Finkelstein, formerly of The Hill, launched the digital news startup The Messenger last year, hiring hundreds of staff from outlets like the LA Times, Politico and Reuters, just to run out of cash and lay off its 300-person staff less than a year later. Former employees have slapped him with multiple lawsuits, saying he did not pay them the severance they were owed. In February, left-wing investigative outlet The Intercept laid off 15 staff, citing “significant financial challenges.” Its board also fired then-editor-in-chief Roger Hodge, according to reporting from the Semafor. The layoffs were followed by the departure of some of its biggest talent and leadership.

Study Hall spoke with workers who lost their jobs in January and February. The majority, three, are now freelancing in journalism. One has landed a full-time job as an editor. Only one left media completely, and is now working full-time in education. For some, their layoffs ended up feeling like a step forward, if an uncomfortable one: a chance to devote more energy to work they’re truly interested in. For others, it’s been a process of reflecting on what brought them to journalism in the first place, and what comes after you either achieve or decide to move on from a dream.

“The thing about dreams is that they come true sometimes, and it’s amazing. And then you find new dreams. My dream is no longer Pitchfork,” said Minsker. 

Jeremy Childs, like Minsker, is recalibrating his dreams post-layoff. 

Childs was raised in the Los Angeles suburbs and grew up reading the LA Times. He stayed in southern California for undergrad, and worked his way up through the local journalism world, covering breaking news and writing weekly stories for the Ventura County Star. The trajectory got him hired as a reporter with the Fast Break Desk at the LA Times in May, 2023.

“Once I got that, I was like, ‘Okay, now that I’m here, I’m ready to be here for the next 20, 30, 40 years,” Childs said. By early 2024, he had bylines on some of the paper’s biggest breaking stories—helping cover last year’s mass shooting in Maine and latest developments in Boeing’s 737 Max crisis—and even branched into profiles for the arts section.

The first sign of trouble came in January, when former executive editor Kevin Merida abruptly announced he was stepping down. The LA Times Guild was already on high alert, after 74 newsroom positions were cut in July 2023. But a day-long walk-out didn’t prevent the paper from attempting to lay off 115 people—a fifth of its staff—in an effort to stem financial losses, according to the paper’s owner. (The Guild secured voluntary buyouts for a number of its members slated for layoffs). Childs was among the layoffs.

Childs received both garden leave (meaning he remained technically employed for two months but didn’t work, thanks to a California law that requires 60 days notice before large layoffs) and then severance, negotiated by the LA Times Guild. Thanks to these benefits, he didn’t start applying for jobs for a few weeks. Once he did, things moved quickly. By the end of February, he was a regular contributor to Rolling Stone’s politics vertical. 

Still, looking back, he says the layoff left him with a feeling of “what next?” 

“You spend all this time trying to make your dream come true, and then they do and you’re like ‘Ok, what now?’,” he said.

He was the only worker I spoke to who, so far, has a new full-time job in journalism. The day we talked in early June, he was starting as an English desk editor with the international news agency AFP. The LA Times was Childs’s dream. But this new role—editing, versus writing—represents a new chapter for him. 

Childs is in it for the long haul, in spite of the tradeoffs. “When I was looking at jobs outside media, I was like, ‘All these ones make me want to shoot myself,’ he said. “I’d rather take a pay cut or a benefits cut [from what I could get in another industry] if it means I can stay in the city where I live doing what I love. That’s my personal decision.”

Skyler Aikerson, a former copyeditor with The Intercept, made a different calculation after being laid off twice in under two years.

On a Thursday in February, she and the rest of staff at The Intercept got an email from CEO Annie Chabel, announcing layoffs. She had also received a calendar invite from HR, which she knew meant that she was among those being let go.

In the roughly three hours between receiving the invite and the call itself, she decided she’d had enough of journalism’s instability. Aikerson had been laid off in 2022 from her copyediting job at the website The Doe.

Unwilling to go through the cycle again, in early June, she accepted a copyediting role in education. It wasn’t her first choice of industry, but she’s grateful for the new role and peace of mind.

“I’m of the mindset [that] once a journalist, always a journalist. I do still have a connection to that world,” said Aikerson, who still writes and fact checks on a freelance basis. Her view is that leaving journalism doesn’t have to cause an identity crisis: “I try not to make my job a part of my identity… I had a good time doing that work [and] there are other things that are still important to me.”

Jose Olivares, a former lead producer for The Intercept also received one of those calendar invites from HR. It came during a particularly stressful week. Right before being laid off, Olivares learned he was being priced out of his Brooklyn apartment, and had spent the week searching for a new place to live.

The Intercept’s union negotiated severance package (at least 11 weeks of pay and benefits), as well as unemployment checks, have cushioned him as he’s begun applying for new jobs. Still, he’s being selective about where he sends in a resume and focusing on seeking out work that he really cares about.

When he left, Olivares was producing both of The Intercept’s weekly podcasts, “Deconstructed” and “Intercepted,” which meant that his own reporting on issues like ICE detention had to be done largely outside of office hours. The layoff has given him more flexibility and time to pitch and write for new publications.

“Getting laid off from The Intercept made me go, ‘you know what, screw it. I’ve been putting off exactly what I want to be doing for too long.’ Now that I have the time and the energy and the ability to do what I want, which is investigative reporting on Latin America and immigration, why not just go for it?”

Olivares is both excited and daunted by this new chapter. Freelancing is a near-impossible financial equation, though picking up translation work has helped him make ends meet. The goal is a full-time job he genuinely enjoys. Since he’s choosing to be picky, thinking about how he’s going to pay rent come the winter gives him some anxiety. 

But he, like Childs, has no immediate plans to get out for good.

“I’m certainly not done with journalism. I love it too much to give up right now,” he said.

Yoonji Han, a former reporter with Business Insider who is also currently “giving the freelancer thing a go,” recounts feeling a false sense of security prior to being laid off in January, when the outlet let go of 8% of its staff.

Han was writing for the Voices of Color vertical, which covered race and identity. Her entire team of two was laid off, after it was determined it was not among the “areas that drive outsize value for [BI’s] core audience,” as chief executive Barbara Peng put it. She remembered thinking “there was no way that you could cut this entire division [focused on] diversity and racial issues [which are] topics that are really important.”

She, like Olivares, sees one clear advantage to her situation: “I get to pitch and write the stories that I’m genuinely interested in, and not having to worry about hitting these metrics at a news publication.”

Han has an anchor gig writing copy for a legal PR firm (she began her career at Business Insider as a legal reporter), which has helped make freelancing viable. She says she appreciates having “a higher paying, steady-ish stream of income” that has given her some “breathing room to start job hunting” during a “demoralizing” time in the industry. 

All the journalists I spoke with who are pursuing freelancing identified the same silver lining: a layoff can be a doorway that, once you’re pushed through it, leads to the work that matters to you most. 

In March, Minsker, Pitchfork’s former news director, launched a newsletter about punk music called see/saw. It’s the continuation of a column he started at Pitchfork but couldn’t sustain because it fell outside his job description. He blogs about new releases, interviews punk enthusiasts, and recently started a Discord for the newsletter that has drawn musicians, label owners and fans.

The project only earns him $4/month per subscription, but he finds the project so fulfilling that he would think twice about taking on a role that would prevent him from devoting time and energy to it. He feels at this point, a full-time job in media runs the risk of “[taking] away from the possibility that I could keep writing my little corner of the music world into existence.”

The freelance world can be a shock to the system after a full-time role, notably: having to constantly brand and promote yourself. “I’m literally pitching myself all the time. It is 100% brand building,” says Minsker. Some of it was uncomfortable at first, like starting a TikTok for his newsletter or encouraging followers to subscribe, but he’s just gotten more used to it with time. “The first few [videos] it took like 30 takes to get one that I felt was usable,” he said.

Idiosyncratic products like Minsker’s could well be where the industry is headed. Max Tani, Semafor’s media editor who’s become known for breaking layoffs news, believes we’re entering “a new era of media much more humble and with smaller budgets and smaller staffs,” focused on serving the niche audiences they have, rather than recruiting massive new ones. 

We’re also seeing media workers spearhead co-operative newsrooms. The flowering of worker-owned outlets charting an alternative path to both traditional for profit and nonprofit models is a bright spot in an at-times very depressing landscape. But for every encouraging piece of media news, some new threat to workers appears. Big Tech’s push into generative AI, for example, and a string of deals inked between publications and AI, that allow tech companies to train their products on journalists’ work.   

Every media worker right now is gambling, making their best bet based on fuzzy images of what journalism might look like in 20 or 50 years. What’s clear is that unions—and solidarity between workers more broadly—make the difference between a layoff that’s earth-shattering and one that’s full of silver linings, and between a media industry that’s defenseless against corporate interests and one that has a fighting chance. 

“It is brutal,” said Childs, “[but] there will be a next chapter, even if it takes time to figure out what it looks like.”