What to Watch: 2024 Could Be Another Darwinian Year for Legacy Media
In November, Popular Science revealed that it would stop publishing its digital magazine. The news came three years after the 151-year-old magazine discontinued its print issue in what turned out to be a futile stab at “sustainability,” a euphemism for our grim era of legacy media bloodletting.
The demise of the PopSci, which debuted in 1872 and included articles written by Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, made but a ripple in the vast ocean of media evaporation. The year started with pink slips at Vox Media, publisher of New York Magazine. (Penske Media, owner of WWD, is the largest single shareholder at Vox.) BuzzFeed News, once viewed as the prototype for digital native news, was shuttered. Vice Media, an erstwhile Wall Street darling with a bloated evaluation, filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times last summer eliminated its once-storied sports section, bouncing dozens of writers and editors out of their jobs and announcing that it would instead rely on sports coverage from the writers at The Athletic, the digital vertical the Times acquired in 2022 for $550 million. Weeks later, Hearst Magazines rolled out its latest restructuring, which resulted in pink slips for more than 40 journalists, including at Elle and Seventeen.
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Even NPR — a comparatively lean nonprofit — laid off more than 100 staffers and canceled a slew of programs and initiatives amid a budget shortfall of more than $30 million. And Condé Nast — the once-poster child for high-spending media conglomerates where staff at titles like Vogue, GQ and The New Yorker, among others, seemed to have endless expense accounts — in October revealed its latest workforce reduction of 5 percent (or about 300 employees), including at The New Yorker, which had heretofore escaped the downsizing that has plagued its sister magazines.
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The current shake-up also resulted in the restructuring of Condé Nast Entertainment — the film and production studio created in 2011 to convert its journalism into entertainment projects. Its five branded studios — for The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ — remain, but the anticipated windfall from Hollywood mostly never materialized. Agnes Chu, the well-regarded Disney executive who was hired in 2020 to run Condé Nast Entertainment, exited the company amid the reorganization.
Meanwhile, newspapers, especially local papers, are on life support. About 2.5 a week closed last year and since 2005, nearly 2,900 of them have folded, according to the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Their demise continues apace as the U.S. barrels toward a presidential election that could return Donald Trump, whose untruths were exhaustively documented by the media during his first volatile term, to the White House. During his presidency, Trump’s near-daily norm-busting was a boon for national news organizations. The Washington Post doubled the size of its newsroom in the years after Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, and digital subscriptions tripled at the Post and The New York Times during Trump’s presidency. CNN, which breathlessly covered Trump’s 2016 campaign, saw record revenue during his term in office.
But so far, Trump’s current run for the top office in the land has not produced another so-called Trump bump. While the Times, which has invested heavily in apps and games, has added subscribers since Trump left office, the Post has weathered a subscriber exodus and, last December, it shuttered its Sunday style magazine after 30 years. CNN, which also weathered a rocky transition during parent Warner Bros.’ acquisition by Discovery, has seen its ratings and profits dip.
But legacy media has been in the throes of a contraction, and attempted reinvention, well before the current digital advertising downturn sent so much red ink spilling across balance sheets. The aspirations of Condé Nast Entertainment were in part a hedge against old revenue models. The Times has attempted to meet the moment by diversifying — snapping up Wirecutter and Wordle and investing in its Cooking app. The Wall Street Journal, which has maintained a paid-subscription model for its digital content from the outset, saw its digital-only subscribers grow by 10 percent in 2023 to 3.4 million.
There is still value in content and events that drive outsize interest; Barbie ($1.44 billion box office gross), the tours and subsequent concert films of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, the spectacle of the Met Gala. It’s why Vogue’s Anna Wintour has poured resources into minting Vogue World as a new signature event that potentially can drive engagement and sponsor dollars. (This year’s Vogue World event will take place June 23 at Place Vendôme in Paris, a month ahead of the city’s hosting of the 2024 Summer Olympics.) In a year-end note, Journal parent Dow Jones claimed that WSJ Magazine cover stories on Travis Kelce, Angelina Jolie and Dave Hollis “drove a surge in digital subscriptions.” These big, zeitgeist-y moments are the antithesis of the current Substack model, where journalists can turn a profit by speaking to a small clutch of like-minded, paying subscribers because they have virtually no overhead.
But new media economics — e-commerce, affiliate revenue, viral social content, cutting costs to the bone — are not going to save legacy media.
Because the current scenario – thousands of employees, a top-down corporate infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical office space, an aging paying subscriber base supporting a product for which there is not enough demand — is probably not sustainable without even more retrenchment. The question for legacy media is how to consistently mint quality content that can be scaled into a profit-generating business that will thrive in a future that is sure to generate even more competition for consumer attention and dollars.
Unfortunately, all signs point to 2024 as another year of downsizing as legacy media attempts to find a manageable cost-benefit ratio. But perhaps 2024 will also be the year the industry begins to collectively emerge from its natural selection hangover. To paraphrase Charles Darwin, that onetime contributor to a magazine that last year became all but extinct, the world is a dangerous place and only those best adapted to their environment will survive.
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