Opinion: The future of journalism is now

Last month’s job cuts at the Los Angeles Times sent a shock wave throughout our region. Though staffing cuts in newsrooms have been the norm for almost two decades, this one struck a nerve. Maybe it was the loss of hope that a local tech billionaire could save our hometown paper, or our collective sense of how precarious democracy is without strong journalism. These unprecedented times require a crucial examination of how traditional American journalism is collapsing, with an eye to how local independent and nonprofit newsrooms are rewriting history and building the future of journalism. 

Daily print newspapers began their slide in the mid-2000s when the younger generation of publishing dynasties began cashing out their inheritance–ceding local ownership to larger newspaper chains and triggering some of the first major reductions in newsrooms. Coinciding with the launch of upstart internet competitors like Monster, Cars dot com and Craigslist, the industry was caught off guard. 

Instead of doubling down on their true competitive advantage: the immense pool of talent found in their newsrooms, they tried to compete with dotcoms by rolling out less than optimal digital products while continuing to trim staff. Then the hedge funds moved in, buying up newspaper chains for pennies on the dollar, selling off all the real estate assets and demanding unrealistic profit margins, leading to even more cuts and the death spiral that we are now witnessing. 

The LA Times seemed to be one of the survivors, bought by a well-meaning billionaire, all-too ready to invest in growing the newsroom and growing an audience. New reporters were hired, new initiatives launched. It felt like someone was finally making the right moves. But what we saw last week was the culmination of months of labor strife and the realization that at $40 million dollars in yearly losses, even a local billionaire won’t throw good money after bad. 

These cuts hit Latino and Latina journalists hardest, with over 38% of the Latino Caucus being laid off. Many of these were reporters and editors who had been hired most recently, in a good faith effort to diversify the newsroom, and were the first to be let go. So where does this leave our surging multicultural metropolis, starved for news and information in a post-pandemic world that appears to be tearing at the seams?

The answer to this media crisis has been percolating for almost as long as newspapers have been shuttering Heidelberg presses. Non-profit news organizations like ProPublica and Mother Jones, with ample budgets and national audiences have been producing quality journalism for years. Many online news upstarts sprouted as laid off reporters teamed up to launch sites in places like Denver, Texas and Baltimore. The Institute for Nonprofit News currently has over 425 independent news organizations across the country. Nationally, organizations like Press Forward and the American Journalism Project are looking to fund upstart and established news outlets. 

CALÓ News, our two-year-old initiative launched out of the non-profit Latino Media Collaborative, is one of these emerging voices, filling the void left by legacy media. Our cause, however, is two-fold; not only reporting on local news, but trying to serve the long neglected news deserts of east and southeast Greater Los Angeles, where more than 5 million Latinos live. 

Now is the time for a concerted effort, not just from governmental and philanthropic organizations, but from the private sector, to coalesce around focused strategies that result in meaningful investments in a variety of local news outlets, both big and small. Spreading resources, keeping equity front and center, sowing seeds and nurturing the burgeoning media ecosystem is the only way to save journalism, and in the current environment of artificial intelligence, deep fakes and other emerging technology, quite possibly save our Democracy.