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Newspapers are interesting because they had layoffs for fundamental economic reasons, they literally didn’t have the cash flow to pay reporters. But if you look at the newspapers that survived, whether they found a successful business model like the NYT or a billionaire to bankroll them like the Bezos Post, they still employ hundreds of pointless reporters. The NYT has 2000 journalists and the majority of them are working on completely pointless news that nobody wants to read, they still have like 10 people in Albany to report on the minutiae of New York State lawmaking. It’s clear they don’t really exist to make a profit, just to employ the maximum number of journalists they can.
So the question tends to be whether the entire business collapses, in which case yes people are getting fired, or whether the mere ‘need’ for the job is eliminated, in which case they might not be.
Part of the problem, though, is that the NYT only continues to exist because it continues to employ over 2000 journalists covering everything from politics in Belarus to a DIY column that runs articles like "All You Need to Know about Fixings and Fastenings". No, each individual article probably doesn't drive sales enough on its own to justify the cost spent on it, but I'm buying the NYT because I expect to get All the News Fit to Print. I went through a similar divorce with my own local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When I first started subscribing in college it covered all the national stories, local news, sports, etc. to the extent you'd expect from the major newspaper in a mid-size city. They were always accused of having a liberal bias, which led to the establishment of the Tribune Review in 1993 following the demise of the Pittsburgh Press (which was on-par with if not better than the PG). I wasn't a fan of the Trib, not because of the conservative views (which were limited to the editorial page), but because it was clearly a bush-league paper. It had existed in Greensburg for years prior, and, while the Pittsburgh edition got better over the years, it still always felt like a small town paper a little over its skis, relying more on being the conservative choice than having better coverage.
But as time went on, the PG became less and less worth reading. They dumped the DC bureau, and most of the national coverage was wire stories from the AP and bigger newspapers. More of the op-eds were nationally syndicated columnists (and not ones like George Will whom you include because they're big names with national followings). The sports department stopped sending reporters to out of town events that didn't involve local teams. It started to read more like the Trib, but I kept subscribing anyway because it was at least something that came to my door that I could read every morning and get a good idea what was going on in the world. Then they limited print editions to a few times a week and that was the last straw. My dad still gets the pdf edition but it isn't the same; I can't browse a pdf like I can a broadsheet. I probably didn't read half the stories when I got it, but I liked being able to browse it. Most people jumped ship before I did. To use a trendy term, it became enshittified, even if it still did a decent job of providing information about the big stories.
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Good point. NYT exists on a sort of patronage model. There are lots of people who have subscriptions who never or rarely read it, but they want to support the cause.
Music could end up being similar. It already is in many ways.
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