The Year in Media, at Home and Abroad

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Recently, the twenty-fifth anniversary of major protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization also marked the anniversary of IndyMedia, which offered an alternative to mainstream coverage of the demonstrations, harnessing the power of the early Web. IndyMedia was intended as a temporary endeavor. But as Feven Merid reported for CJR, it grew into a “full-fledged open publishing network of activist journalism, with some two hundred community centers and national and global online hubs.” IndyMedia served community needs and connected local reporting to stories around the world. Over time, though, the network declined. Most of the hubs folded.

This year, the themes raised by the rise and fall of IndyMedia—innovation in the media business as well as the perilous conditions for survival; the need to see journalism as a local service as well as a medium with international reach—have been as visible as ever. Despite a difficult climate for traditional journalism, some individuals and institutions are taking new approaches and thriving, or at least surviving. That is no small feat. CJR’s Lauren Watson profiled Hell Gate, a cooperative covering New York City that runs on revenue from thousands of subscribers, topped up with donor support; this year, the team were able to give themselves a raise. (“It wasn’t much,” Watson wrote. “Still, they get to be their own bosses.”) Haley Mlotek profiled The Business of Fashion, a onetime newsletter that has become a must-read for more than a hundred thousand paying subscribers, while, as the designer Diane von Furstenberg told Mlotek, it has created “a community.” At the local level, community is also central to the work of Kit O’Connell, who covers stories about people in Texas—trans workers, drag queens, low-income renters—who traditional outlets sometimes misrepresent, or simply miss. “To be in tune might involve a personal connection, a deep tie to the place from which one is writing, a sense of trust within the community about which one is reporting, and time to watch events develop,” Lucy Schiller wrote in a profile. “If anything, O’Connell is painfully attuned.”

In other ways, though, journalism’s painful realities have been the focus of 2024. The year began with a wave of layoffs; before January was out, I had counted a minimum of two hundred and thirty journalists who had lost their jobs at major outlets, and that was likely a conservative estimate. As the year went on, so did the job cuts, including at CNN, which eliminated a hundred or so positions over the summer—part of a broad restructuring aimed at repositioning the network for a digital future under Mark Thompson, its CEO (and one of many Brits who, we were relentlessly told this year, were coming to lead the US media industry out of its quagmire). As Adam Piore reported for CJR in August, that task will take time. In 2021, Thompson had described the US TV news business as “unchanged since the nineteen-eighties” and in “dead trouble.” He has “experience turning around struggling news companies—first as director general of the BBC, then at the New York Times,” Piore noted—but “even for an executive of his experience, CNN posed any number of vexing challenges that could blemish his reputation as a turnaround artist.”

Journalists in the US have had to grapple with threats other than the financial, of course. Beyond Trump’s continued bullying of the press (which we wrote about in Monday’s “Year in Politics” newsletter), journalists—and photojournalists in particular—have faced intimidation while covering protests linked to the ongoing war in Gaza. In October, Merid reported, citing the US Press Freedom Tracker, that forty-three journalists had been arrested in the US in the past year, triple the previous number; assaults of journalists were up more than 50 percent, too. (The Tracker recently updated the arrest figure to forty-eight.) As demonstrations flared on college campuses nationwide (starting with Columbia’s), student journalists did an excellent job of covering them—a much better one, often, than many of their professional counterparts—and were sometimes harassed and detained. In the spring, Betsy Morais spoke with the editor’s of Columbia’s student newspaper about their coverage. Recently, Bill Grueskin spoke with Dilan Gohill, a student reporter at Stanford, who was arrested while covering an occupation of the university president’s office; administrators want him prosecuted, and at time of writing, local law enforcement was still deciding on whether he will face charges.

Still, the threats to journalists covering Gaza-related protests in the US pale in comparison to the danger facing members of the media on the ground. The war continued well past the year mark; as of earlier this month, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a hundred and twenty-nine Palestinian media workers had been killed in the conflict . (Other counts have arrived at even higher figures.) In the spring, after years of wind-up, Israeli officials moved to ban Al Jazeera from operating in the country, as Ayodeji Rotinwa reported. Months later, the government enacted a boycott of Haaretz, a left-leaning newspaper; writing for CJR, Aluf Benn, its editor in chief, pledged that the paper would not back down. (Josh Hersh also spoke to a pair of Haaretz journalists for The Kicker, CJR’s podcast.) Some groups pushed back, including, Yona TR Golding wrote, a coalition of human rights organizations that in September accused Channel 14, a pro-government TV network, of inciting genocide with its rhetoric. That month, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon intensified, with deadly consequences for members of the media. Merid wrote about efforts to archive the social media posts of journalists in Gaza for posterity.

In 2024, we covered threats to the press in other parts of the world, too: from Russia and Ukraine to Guatemala and Peru. Sacha Biazzo wrote about the life-and-death ethical considerations facing journalists who cover cartels in the Mexican state of Sinaloa; Joel Simon profiled José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas, a journalist who committed the crime of posting accurate exchange rates between the US dollar and the Cuban peso on his news site, El Toque—and who continued to face threats even after moving to the US.

Not that it was all doom and gloom on the international press freedom front. Russia released two jailed journalists—Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a staffer at the US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—as part of a prisoner swap. It was not unalloyed good news: other RFE/RL journalists remain incarcerated in Russian-controlled or -allied territory; critics have noted that the swap appeared to validate Vladimir Putin’s tactic of seizing innocent foreign nationals for diplomatic leverage. But the moment of their release, at least, was “a day that I suspect is indelibly marked on everyone who worked on the campaign,” as Paul Beckett, who oversaw the Journal’s laudably dogged efforts to free Gershkovich, wrote in a detailed account for CJR.

Even in dark times, seeds of hope can flower, or at least be planted. While IndyMedia, the global network that Merid profiled, mostly collapsed in the years after its founding, in 1999, one of its hubs—the Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center, in Illinois—thrived, thanks to its sustainable business model. Today, a pair of academics view the project as a blueprint for how “grassroots community journalism” might one day thrive again. As a new year dawns, our eyes turn, once again, to that future, and how we might get there.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.