You can leave journalism altogether or you can take the longest way around the barn possible to try and keep doing it (and maybe, in the process, save local journalism).Â
That was the choice that I and four other journalists were facing in fall 2021, after witnessing countless talented colleagues get fired, pushed out, or just endure being grievously underpaid until they said fuck it and quit, that they’d had it with an industry marred by catastrophically inept management decisions. Staring down the middle parts of our careers, the landscape where we had begun our time in journalism was completely cratered out — the once voluminous flow of investment into digital media had dried up, while the local news outlets where we cut our teeth were blinking out, little fires smothered by hedge fund buyouts and consolidation. Everything was getting balkanized, with popular writers from the internet launching their own Substacks after their publications died. The funders for non-profit journalism were, as ever, wildly up their own asses and couldn’t figure out how to sustainably fund or scale a newsroom. Google and Facebook had devoured whatever was once financially enticing about publishing on the internet, with their wild overpromise of ad revenue from clicks.Â
