Job losses, declining circulations and local newspaper closures could mean spread of misinformation in pivotal election year

As the election battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden begins, there are growing fears around the health of the US news media which has been struck by job losses, declining circulations, the closure or crippling of well-known brands and rise of new threats such as fake or AI-generated information on social media.

Evidence of this state of crisis abounds. Last year, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest since 2020, when 16,060 cuts were recorded when print was still in the process of being succeeded by digital news distribution. Major names including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Vice have taken serious hits, alongside scores of smaller brands and the total collapse of newcomers such as the Messenger.

“We’ve settled into the final act of the election season, and it’s promising to be the harbinger of all kinds of problems because of the nature of the candidates,” says Robert Thompson at Syracuse University. At the same time, he says, “the very industry that should be girding up for this is in a total state of crisis”.

Readership and income from digital production has been falling overall, and industry downsizing in 2024 appears to be accelerating. Meanwhile, social media is uncoupling as a referral service to news organizations, which hits both readership size and revenue generation. Meta has dropped its news tab from Facebook, Google is more unpredictable, and X has de-prioritized posts that contain outside referrals.

Readers are fleeing to mediums in which fresh dangers lurk, even when accounting for the partisan nature of some US news sites. The share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023, yet such sites are subject to the threat of viral misinformation – whether deliberately sown or spread organically.