In 2020, the media got bigger. The New York Times continued its hegemonic expansion, announcing that it had topped five million subscribers in March, six million in June, and seven million in November. It has used its clout to hire whomever it wants, and digital publications, once seen as an existential threat, are now a hunting ground. A wave of consolidation swept through those digital publications, culminating in BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost last month. Unprecedented election interest swelled the coffers of cable networks, which practically minted their own money, a remarkable development given the rise of cord-cutting.
Another way of thinking about this, however, is that the media shrank. BuzzFeed’s acquisition of HuffPost capped a frenetic year-and-a-half period of digital consolidation—Vox acquired New York last September; Vice bought Refinery29 a month after that. Covid-19-related revenue loss led to the industry shedding tens of thousands of jobs; if 2019 was a bleak year for layoffs, then 2020 was much, much worse.
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