Layoffs are such a part of our industry that it might feel easy to get numb to them if you or your newsroom aren’t directly impacted. For me, reporting on them, and now reading about them, wards off any chance of getting used to them. My colleague Angela Fu is now doing that work, and I wanted to highlight it this week, as well as a few bright spots. 

On August 4, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported on the dreary second quarter results for Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the United States. On August 12, Fu started covering the layoffs that followed.

Fu’s reporting counted at least 70 layoffs across 54 newsrooms, and those are just the ones she can confirm. 

“A lot of the layoffs seem to be targeting smaller and mid-sized papers, including weeklies, and there are a few papers that will shut down completely,” Fu told me. “It's difficult to know when the layoffs will end, especially since Gannett has not been forthcoming with that information. Gannett started laying off people August 12, but throughout the last week, I've heard of others who have also gotten termination notices.”

This week, the Lenfest Institute started publishing a new series: Signposts on the Road Map for Local News. This essay series, published with the Aspen Institute, aims to help newsrooms answer the question “what now?” It includes smart essays from S. Mitra Kalita on designing news products to better serve communities; Amanda Zamora on healing polarized communities; Jim Friedlich on what nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms can learn from each other; Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro on taking an ecosystem approach to building local news; and Deb Roy on how local journalism can pull communities together. 

A (very thrilling) day in the life

Poynter’s Annie Aguiar launched a new series on TikTok and Instagram this week featuring a day in the life of a journalist. Aguiar starts with the one and only Selene San Felice from Axios Tampa Bay doing something I can only watch and think “no, no, nope, nope, nooooo." 

“As a frequent TikTok watcher, I've seen so many day in the life videos that I couldn't help but wonder what those would look like for journalists,” Aguiar told me. “We have wildly different workdays, from public meetings to python hunting, and that just begs to be shared.”

Aguiar wanted to show people what physically goes into making the news and the people behind the bylines. 

“The other big thing is that there are so many ways to be a journalist,” she said. “It's important to me with this series to get a sampling of people across beats, markets and mediums and show that they're all journalists in service of this larger project of informing the public.”

You can watch the day in the life on TikTok and Instagram.

Want to take part? Reach out to Aguiar via email at [email protected] and tell her:

• A little about your current role

• A specific upcoming assignment/day on the job you would want to showcase

• What your availability looks like for a zoom call to talk about how this would all shake out

That’s it for me. My Twitter got hacked last week and I got it back over the weekend. I am now older and wiser and would like to share this sage advice with you – never click the link. 🫢

Kristen

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