More than 15,000 media jobs axed in 2018: report

It’s not just your imagination: Media jobs disappeared in 2018 at the fastest rate since year one of the Great Recession.

That’s according to a report out Thursday from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found 15,474 announced job cuts across all media including TV, publishing, broadcast and print news and movies.

News organizations accounted for 11,878 cuts, which was up a staggering 281 percent from a year earlier, when news organizations cut only 4,062 jobs, the report revealed.

It marks the highest number of total cuts since 2009, when there were 22,346 losses as the Great Recession sliced deeply into ad revenue.

“Consolidation, declining revenue, combative language from the Trump administration and occasional violence marked 2018 for members of the media,” the report said.

“Members of the media, especially journalists, have had a few tough years,” said Andrew Challenger, vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“Many jobs were already in jeopardy due to a business model that tried to meet consumer demand for free news with ad revenue. As media outlets attempted to pub news behind paywalls, consumers opted not to pay,” he said.

He said tech giants are a big part of the problem, citing figures from Bloomberg, which said Facebook and Google combined to make up 58 percent of the digital advertising market. Amazon, which had 4.2 percent, is looking to increase its share.

“This leaves less than half the market open for the large number of media companies that rely on ad revenue to survive,” he said.

On the same day, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said that through the first three quarters of 2018, digital advertising actually increased by 22 percent through the first three quarters of the year, to $75.8 billion.

But it also suggests that a lot of the ad spend may be bypassing traditional digital publishers and going direct.

“Last year saw significant growth in the OTT marketplace and in the direct-to-consumer brand ecosystem,” said Sue Hogan, a senior VP at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Programmatic advertising keeps prices low and platforms such as Facebook-owned Instagram cut out the middle-man media and go direct from influencers to consumers.

For traditional publishers, figuring out how to tap that ad spend might be the biggest challenge of 2019.

“Job cuts and consolidations are likely to continue until these companies are able to find ways to create growth in revenue streams,” said Challenger.

“Meanwhile, more news organizations may move to a subscription-based revenue model,” he continued. “The trick there is convincing consumers of the importance and value of real, unbiased and uninfluenced news.”