Science journalism is no longer safe

Advance Publications is owned by a couple of billionaire families. Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications. Wired magazine is owned by Condé Nast. And this week — as the world reaches the hottest temperatures on record, as another deadly COVID-19 variant steals into the public’s lungs, as owners of unregulated artificial intelligence threaten to unleash mass unemployment with their article-generating internet toys and the whole world needs increasingly complex topics explained — the science desk at Wired got gutted. It’s not just Wired, of course. Recurrent Ventures axed 151-year-old Popular Science magazine this year, and presumably the last 13 staffers to steward its cultural legacy, leaving only five editorial staffers to crew the online-only ship. There are no full-time staff writers left at National Geographic after this year, and The Washington Post took a tough hit too. Climate desks at CNBC and Gizmodo got cut down. As did the climate team remaining at CNN, the select beat preserved in 2008 after the outlet axed the general science desk.  Only a couple of years after buying it, billionaire-owned Red Ventures pummeled CNET with layoffs before making it one of the first major outlets to get caught pushing AI-generated articles. Short-sighted layoffs also hit the science desks at Inverse and FiveThirtyEight. Buzzfeed News, with its powerhouse science desk, was brought down. Fortress Investment Group laid off “under 100” Vice News staffers. And 74 journalists at the L.A. Times got the ax. Great Hill Partners owns G/O Media which burned Jezebel and its editorial staffers right when women’s health is facing greater attack in this country than it has since Roe v. Wade.  “We stand in solidarity with you. You are valued. Your work matters,” wrote Cassandra Willyard, president of the National Association of Science Writers, in a May release. “​​Only five months in, 2023 has proven to be a year of layoffs and shrinking budgets, threatening science journalists and editors whose expertise is crucially important.”  Private equity catastrophes, faceless hedges and trusts, unchecked conglomerates and the ongoing shell game of parent companies — the wealthy gutted US science journalism in 2023 through a number of opaque and convoluted financial vehicles. And there’s no evidence to suggest that trend will stop. Rather, ad-reliant revenue models of wealthy digital proprietors are now failing so hard that their slash-and-burn newsroom tactics are likely to get more aggressive as short-selling the news ramps up to a fire-sale finale. One recent report holds that news outlets saw 2,681 job cuts this year. That’s more than the totals in 2021 or 2022.  Yet when we read the stories of these layoffs, we rarely see the names of the bigger companies and wealthier people who hold the pursestrings. As journalists, we can’t do our job, nor save our field, unless we’re willing to follow the money. Vanity Fair correspondent and former CNN anchor Brian Stetler had a salient point along these lines this week.   “I know, after twenty years on the TV beat, that moguls like Lachlan Murdoch do not want to be mentioned in the press, unless it’s about charitable giving or canny dealmaking. I know that owners do not want to be questioned about how they will stand up to a wannabe autocrat. But the recent controversy involving Univision and its cozy interview with Trump proved that media power structures are not exempt from interrogation,” Stetler writes in his 2024 prediction. There’s too much on the line for readers. They need science journalism more than ever and if we don’t cut out the rotted financial root of this industry, our chances of serving those readers are only going to get slimmer. This is no time to quail. Not only are we obligated to reveal the broken parts of our revenue models, but we have the chance to fix many of the broken parts of our larger function in the world. “As a science writer, I have written about many topics throughout my career. None have affected me more than long Covid. None have more profoundly changed my view about what journalism can achieve and how it can do so,” Ed Yong wrote this week. “Journalists can, instead, act as a care-taking profession — one that soothes and nurtures. And we are among the only professions that can do so at a scale commensurate with the scope of the crises before us. We can make people who feel invisible feel seen. We can make everyone else look.” I can say without hesitation that I’ve yet to meet a journalist who hasn’t been tempted to start their own outlet at least once (even if they never admit it). But when nearly every news article you could want to read is available for free, the idea of starting a subscription-driven online news outlet from scratch while already burned out is a nightmare for most. Likewise, it surely seems a safer bet for many small outlets to become the skinny runt in some equity hedge’s 50-company portfolio, than to stake their writers’ welfare on risky hand-to-mouth alternative revenue models.  But it looks like we’re running out of options, and we’re going to have to save ourselves from the wealthy one way or another. I hope Michael Greshko’s Neiman prediction is right, and that science journalism is truly “having its Defector moment.” More than that, I hope we’re ready to meet that moment with gusto, and that we don’t hesitate to burn everything we’ve got left in the tank. We’re going to need it if we’re going to crank-start something new.  An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.