Notations From the Grid (Weekly Edition): On The State of the Media Industry

Our team received this from the Daily KOS that underscores the challenges of the Media Industry this week.     We remain hopeful about the opportunity and the possibility to make a difference:

pandemic-related job losses continue to ravage the media industry.

Earlier this month, ESPN and WarnerMedia both announced hundreds of layoffs. These job losses compound what has already been a brutal year in the media industry. In just the first six months of 2020, 11,000 newsroom jobs vanished. Times were difficult even for employees at media organizations who kept their jobs, as tens of thousands suffered paycuts and furloughs. Scores of media outlets, especially local outlets, have closed up shop entirely.

If Daily Kos were to shut down--as has happened to other progressive media outlets, such as Think Progress in 2019 and most of the original progressive blogosphere a few years earlier--it's a good bet that nothing would ever take our place. This is because, whether we like it or not, journalism and publishing are shrinking. Eyeballs and advertising dollars that once went to support journalists and publishers are now flowing, in ever-increasing amounts, to Facebook, Google, and Amazon, which collectively account for almost 70% of all digital ad spending. We live in an age where social media networks owned by gigantic corporations are crowding out any space that, in a different era, new publishers might have been able to occupy.

Despite this, at Daily Kos we have not only survived 2020, but we have thrived without layoffs, paycuts or furloughs. How? Simply put, because we do things differently than every other media organization in the country:

• Small donations from our community of readers and activists are our largest source of income. This makes us accountable to our grassroots donors, rather than to big corporate advertisers or a small number of wealthy contributors.

• Daily Kos takes sides in the fights we write about, rather than just explaining the news or promoting a false balance. For example, we signed up over 100,000 volunteers to help get out the Democratic vote in 2020 and protect the results of the election afterward. Also, in September and October, we generated over 1.1 million grassroots actions in a valiant attempt to stop Republicans from filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat on the Supreme Court. We are here to fight back, which is why we always provide immediate, impactful ways for our readers to take action on the news they are reading.

• We give our community a real voice. This means not only letting readers post comments, but giving them the ability to publish their own articles--and even to determine which community article appears high up on the front page of our website for an extended period of time. In fact, many of our most widely read articles are written by our community!

There is nothing else like Daily Kos anywhere else in the media landscape: participatory, grassroots-funded, news you can do something about. We can--and will--survive and thrive as long as our small donors continue to support us.


Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Executive Campaign Director, Daily Kos