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Layoffs bookended Janice Llamoca’s career. Llamoca graduated from California State University, Fullerton, in 2009, just after the Great Recession swept layoffs through media and journalism. For four years, she stitched together unpaid internships while working as a restaurant server, until she got her first full-time magazine job at age twenty-six. She steadily climbed the industry rungs, learning long-form narrative audio at Futuro Media’s Latino USA, the longest-running national Latino news-and-culture public radio program, before becoming a senior producer at Vice Audio. Mass layoffs in April 2023—followed by Vice’s bankruptcy filing—changed all that.
“I was just really sad. I lost something that was a dream job, and I was getting paid well, doing what I love,” said Llamoca, now thirty-seven. Since then, she has worked a series of contract journalism gigs. While grateful for the income, she doesn’t know how much longer she can wait before getting a full-time role with benefits. “I just didn’t think it would take this long to find a job. I have a lot of other friends with years of experience, who have gone to prestigious grad schools, and are still in the same boat as me.”
Llamoca is one of 8,297 US journalists laid off since the beginning of 2022, according to job cuts tracked by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm. That’s 9 percent of the 89,330 people employed as newspaper, broadcast, and online editors, reporters, and journalists in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These layoffs have dramatically reshaped the news business, affected the individuals producing the work, and called into question the durability of journalism careers.
Because news organizations no longer disclose their employees’ demographic data to researchers who compile that information, it has been hard to understand the impact of these layoffs on the diversity of US newsrooms. That’s why the Institute for Independent Journalists, which I started in 2022, decided to ask journalists who lost their jobs to voluntarily report their demographic information and share their layoff experiences.
Beginning in January, the IIJ Foundation asked individuals who experienced a layoff or buyout to answer a thirty-plus question survey about their background, demographic, experience, and perspective. We received 176 responses. While this pool isn’t a representative sample, we cast a wide net: over thirty journalism organizations, unions, and newsletters circulated the survey to their members and audiences.
While journalists of color make up only 17 percent of the industry, according to Pew Research Center data, they represented 42 percent of the laid-off individuals who responded to the IIJ’s survey. Women hold about 46 percent of journalism jobs, but they made up 68 percent of the survey participants. People aged twenty-six to thirty-five accounted for 41 percent of those responding to the survey, while those aged thirty-six to forty-five made up another 30 percent. (Pew didn’t have comparable data on the age of working journalists.) Finally, people with seven to fifteen years’ experience in journalism made up the largest group of those laid off, by tenure in the industry.
Beyond the numbers, journalists described the experience of layoffs as particularly brutal and taxing, with one individual being laid off twice in one year and many others describing an intense toll on their mental and physical health, in addition to being financially stressed. And some learned about their layoff while on parental leave, during a honeymoon, or from external sources before management told them directly.
Last October, Sarah Belle Lin, thirty, lost her first full-time journalism job, reporting local news for amNew York, after a series of internships and part-time roles in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, she’s actually earned more money working three different part-time, non-journalism jobs: at a music venue, a Brooklyn yoga studio, and as event staff for New York Runs. But the layoff took a tremendous toll on her. “It just caused this mountain of stress to fall on top of me,” said Lin, who questions whether to leave journalism permanently. “It is usually the first thing I feel in the morning and the last thing I feel before I go to bed.”
María Inés Zamudio, a Chicago-based investigative journalist, lost her job in the Center for Public Integrity’s mass layoff in May. Zamudio, forty, had seen signs of trouble and started job hunting in December 2023. Since then, she’s had thirty-six interviews and informational meetings and was in the running for five different jobs that included multiple rounds of interviews and writing tests. But none resulted in a hire—despite her Peabody, Murrow, and other awards, and a history of reporting that exposed wrongdoing and led to institutional change. She recently turned down contract work that paid $20 per hour.
“I started my career in 2007 at the height of the housing crisis. Here I am almost twenty years later, realizing that the extra hours of work and strategy that went into publishing investigations that changed people’s lives doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to job stability,” she said. “I grew up poor, and I have always figured out a way to survive. I just don’t know if I’ll survive in this industry.”
Many journalists described the experience of layoffs as destabilizing. Even people who kept their jobs afterward feel the impact, whether through sadness or guilt at saying goodbye to talented colleagues, the stress of handling the same or similar workload with fewer hands, persistent fear that another round of layoffs will come for them—or some combination of all three. “Most journalists have experienced a layoff or had colleagues laid off. It deeply impacts people’s sense of safety,” Zamudio said.
Llamoca dramatically cut back her expenses after the layoff: stopped going out, ended weekly therapy, and went without health insurance for a year and a half. She rents a two-bedroom apartment in Boyle Heights that she shares with her younger sister, a nurse. Connecting with other laid-off journalists helped her find camaraderie and support. Recently, she established health insurance with one of her contract jobs and was able to complete her annual medical exams and get lab work done before the contract ended.
Rachel Cheung, twenty-nine, lost her reporting job in April 2023, when Vice World News cut the entire Asia Pacific desk. After about four months of unemployment, Cheung found a role as a staff writer with a smaller outlet. As a debt-free single woman living with her parents in Hong Kong, she didn’t struggle financially, but she still felt shaken at seeing talented, more experienced colleagues forced to fundraise for their expenses. “It’s very difficult to think about building a career in the news industry,” Cheung said. “Seeing other colleagues being laid off without compensation or while supporting a family or paying medical bills makes me wonder if I might be caught in the same position a few years down the line. Many journalists I know are considering or have made a change in career.”
Indeed, some survey respondents are managing the looming risk of layoffs by leaving journalism, choosing to take an array of freelance roles rather than seek employment, or starting their own news organization or newsletter. Even a year after her layoff, Lin hasn’t closed the door to returning to journalism—but neither is she convinced it would be the best choice for her. “I never doubted my place and role in journalism. For the first time in seven years, I am, and it’s really earth-shattering, because now I question my role and place in society as a whole,” she said.
Layoffs seem like an old story in journalism. From 1990 to 2008, about 25 percent of newspaper jobs vanished, and with the layoffs of the Great Recession, newsroom employment fell off a cliff, losing another 74 percent of the workforce through 2024. Venture capital funds bought dying newspapers, only to sell off their printing plants and downtown office buildings and leave the newsgathering operations starving for funds.
Indeed, with entire organizations gone that previously employed hundreds of journalists, including BuzzFeed News, Vice Media, and National Geographic’s reporting corps, headlines in both The New Yorker and The Atlantic wondered about an “extinction-level event” for media. The pace of job cuts in 2024 thus far has surpassed the prior two years as of September 30, according to Challenger’s data, and the fourth quarter often is a prime time for layoffs.
So where do we go from here? The business forces that led to layoffs and a shrinking journalism workforce aren’t going away—if anything, they could intensify, noted Andy Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “A lot of it is due to the models in the news business and how those have changed with ad revenue being captured by Google and Facebook at such a high percentage. Now, artificial intelligence could potentially affect jobs in the news industry as well, particularly for reporting that is based on data, like sports reporting or certain financial reporting,” he said. On the plus side, the overall labor market remains strong and journalists possess many skills that are in demand in other occupations.
Indeed, every journalist interviewed for this story questioned whether they will have a long-term career in the field. Because many journalists pursue the profession from a sense of calling, leaving requires rethinking how we find purpose, in addition to the mechanics of presenting yourself as a valuable hire to an employer in a related industry.
Some new jobs are being created by nonprofit newsrooms and digital media organizations that have replaced legacy media organizations. But much of the attention by journalism leaders and philanthropic funders focuses on the business model and supporting new institutions—not on the damage the industry has done to individuals or the talent leaving the field, said Meredith D. Clark, an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was the research lead for the News Leaders Association’s diversity survey before it ended. In addition to persistent layoffs, journalists endure a 24-7 news cycle, exposure to violence and extremism, and being on the front lines of misinformation and disinformation.
“All the strategies that we can throw at funding journalism are meaningless if the people are broken, if they cannot do the job,” she said.
The IIJ Foundation Layoffs Survey was created, distributed, and analyzed by Katherine Reynolds Lewis, Cam Rodriguez, Adrian Garcia, and Lam Thuy Vo. Additional reporting by Grace Hyerin Lee and Taylor Keuther. This project wouldn’t have been possible without a grant from the Field Foundation of Illinois.
Katherine Reynolds Lewis is an award-winning science journalist, educator, and author (Good News About Bad Behavior) with bylines in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Nieman Reports, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. A Harvard physics graduate, Katherine is the founder of the Institute for Independent Journalists and a former national correspondent for Newhouse and Bloomberg News.