How US Media Outlets Cope With Challenges

A media executive in Nevada, United States, shared some insights as to why there needs to be more effort made about news literacy in all societies.

With shrinking revenue and sky-rocketing production costs, this is the reality of media organisations across the globe, which has been further exacerbated with the audience’s heavy reliance on social media.

Heidi Kyser is the managing editor of Nevada Public Radio.

She shared some insights with journalists across the globe, including Fiji, into what her organisation was doing to adapt with the changing environment.

The 20 journalists were part of the Foreign Press Centre’s Democracy is More than Election Day reporting tour.

It is something that all newsrooms in the U.S are facing, she said.

We do have a little bit of an advantage.

We started off with a print magazine, which is bimonthly, and then the daily news and the talk show.

We perhaps have more resources internally, but our staff has shrunk.

However, we were able to adapt by thinking in more multi-media ways, which has been one of our coping strategies for the reduction in staff.

So, we have to consider how we can continue doing the things that we do well, such as the magazine, the talk show, and the daily reporting, but make more of that work available across the three different platforms.

“We combined our newsroom about six months ago, and we are still in the process of working that out and becoming proficient at it.”

According to a report from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, the media industry in the U.S, which includes television, film, streaming, and news, announced 836 job cuts in January, down 24 per cent from the 1,093 announced in December.

News, including digital, broadcast, and print, and tracked as a subset of media, announced 528 layoffs in January. This is the highest monthly total since March 2023, when 532 cuts were recorded.

The Challenger Job-Cut Report provides information on the number of announced corporate layoffs by industry and region.

Ms Kyser emphasised the importance for news consumers to understand the significance of paying for subscriptions.

I will say, though, that this is not a long-term sustainable solution. As a news industry, we need to educate the public on the importance of what we do. We need leaders in the industry to educate the public in news literacy, the importance of the news media, and not just during the election cycle but all the time, she said.

We need well-informed news consumers to understand the value of paying for the products that they consume and share, and we need government, in my opinion, legislation and control over the sharing process. We have to do what we can with what we have.

The visiting journalist were from Albania, Austria, Bolivia, Germany, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, North Macedonia, Peru, Qatar, Russia, Serbia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Suriname, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Fiji.

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