By Paul Farhi, Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, Washington Post
April 8, 2020 at 10:10 a.m. EDT
Two months ago, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Brie Zeltner became consumed by one topic: the coronavirus crisis that would soon sweep into her state.
The veteran health-care journalist chronicled the early reports of illness in nearby states, and then the first cases transmitted within Ohio. She interviewed a local woman who had tested positive; explored the impact of the virus on maternal health; and questioned the state’s shortage of coronavirus tests and the reasons local health departments were pursuing such different strategies to thwart the disease.
Last week, the encroaching crisis took a hit on Zeltner’s own workplace — a financial one. Suffering a dramatic dip in advertising revenue amid the sudden economic downturn, the long-struggling newspaper cut 22 journalists from its payroll. Among them, Zeltner.
“It’s very difficult to watch what is going on in the world right now and be a health reporter,” she said, “and not be able to be out and about covering it.”
A tsunami of layoffs, cutbacks, furloughs and closures has washed over newsrooms across the United States over the past month — a time, ironically, when readership and viewership is surging with consumers in search of reliable information about the virus.
The Tampa Bay Times laid off 11 journalists and stopped five days of its print edition. Seattle’s Pulitzer-winning weekly the Stranger laid off 18 staffers and stopped printing altogether. There have been layoffs at the Denver Post and Boston Herald and salary cuts at the Dallas Morning News. Some smaller papers are folding altogether.
Small businesses of all kinds are hurting everywhere, of course; and this month’s cuts follow more than a decade of shrinkage for the media industry. As readers started to gravitate to online sources, news sites have struggled to claim a piece of a national Web advertising market increasingly dominated by bigger players.
But this frailty had seemed almost manageable — until recent weeks when the coronavirus turned it into an urgent existential threat, striking at local businesses that had been the last pillar of support for many news organizations.
The upshot is a void: stories that aren’t being covered and news that isn’t reaching readers and viewers because there’s no one to report them.
“There’s a huge appetite for what we do right now,” says Paul Tash, chairman and chief executive of the Tampa Bay paper, which until last week had never missed a print edition for almost 96 years. “On the other hand, the advertisers that subsidize our business are under enormous strain. . . . For many, many of our local businesses, [the lockdown] is a terrible reversal.”
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