[remarkEon]

>It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians.

I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands. They probably just don't know how to deal with it, and so are giving too much deference to them because doing otherwise risks the online twitter mob.

Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.

[Gene_Parmesan]

As someone who majored in journalism and who graduated in 2009, what most people consider traditional journalism has been slowly dying since at least the 07/08 crisis. They were already struggling due to not knowing how to properly handle the internet. Giving away content for free was a mistake made in the 90s that was proving impossible to claw back, and online ads were nowhere close to making up for the lost revenue from print ads (because, in a bit of news surprising no one, there's no real proof that online ads work).

Then the crisis hit. I'll never forget one of my adjunct professors, who often appeared on CNBC, having a near panic attack in class one day. It came like a virus striking an already sickly herd. Local papers shed jobs, many papers shut down or became nothing but AP copy-paste jobs. I decided around this time to go to law school (ahh, the mistakes of youth) because I would have been competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for near-poverty-line salaries at local papers in rural states.

Many places that didn't fold during this time changed hands, and you should ask yourself what the motive would be for someone to purchase a traditional newspaper when it was clear the market for traditional news was being strangled. It's not exactly a good bet for profit-making, so I've always felt like alternative goals were in play.

[thisiszilff]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-... is a great article about changes at NYTimes in the past few years.

[dohnuts1919]

> I'm skeptical it's an actual takeover per se, and not the older generation being completely blindsided by the force with which the younger generation(s) release their demands.

This. The change is coming from the bottom up, and internal reports from the NYT and elsewhere usually suggest that when there's another "woke" controversy it's generally the young being pitted against the old.

There's been an enormous cultural shift at our elite colleges in the last five to ten years, and the inquisitors of the new religion have by now had several years to graduate and enter the institutions. This trend is going to continue - we're only just getting started.

[BurningFrog]

One quite possible scenario is that this is the dying process of the "legacy media", as it gets replaced by... whatever comes next.

That's one way to see the recent NYT purges. If I can force out a colleague for some marginal etiquette infraction, that's one fewer competitor in the shrinking job pool.

[pm90]

> Is legacy media really leaking talent and cash like I hear so often (honestly asking, haven't seen the data)? If that's true, and social media and technology have neutered their position atop of opinion-forming institutions, that is going to build some very bad incentives in these legacy media companies as far as journalistic integrity goes.

They're definitely in decline financially, but that does mean there are a lot of great journalists that are available to hire.