COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 30/05/2019
Cerianne Robertson
We know traditional news organizations across the United States are shrinking, but there is little data on what the journalists who leave a shrinking major newspaper do next. At the turn of the 21st century, the Los Angeles Times was one of the biggest newsrooms in the world; despite experiencing significant cutbacks over the 1990s, it still employed nearly 1,200 journalists. But the unpopular sale of the newspaper to the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing Company in 2000 marked the beginning of 18 years of rapid decline in the size of the newsroom. By 2005, the newsroom had already dropped to around 940 employees. That number fell to 580 before Tribune filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and to around 400 by 2018.