The years 2008 and 2009 are remembered as exceedingly dark days for the media business. Between the digitally-fueled collapse of legacy revenue streams and the gruesome carnage of the financial crash, the industry began to endure pain and suffering like never before, from mass downsizings—a hundred New York Times journalists here, 1,400 McClatchy employees there, and so on—to newspapers and magazines going bankrupt or being shut down altogether: Farewell Rocky Mountain News and print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. RIP Radar, Gourmet, and Condé Nast Portfolio. (It would take too long to list all the titles that were shuttered.)

Roughly 20% of daily newspaper advertising quickly evaporated, never to return. High-flying glossy budgets became anachronisms. Editors and writers fled for PR, or consulting work, or anything that didn’t feel as bleak as their beloved trade. It was an agonizing era for journalism, or perhaps end of an era would be a better way to put it. And yet, the Great Recession’s dire toll on media now looks like child’s play.

Just a little over a month into our national COVID-19 crisis, with more than 42,000 people dead in the United States as of Tuesday morning, more than 22 million out of work, the economy in its worst shape since the Great Depression, and no return to normalcy in sight—at least not the type of normalcy we’re used to—the ever-fragile news industry has been sucker-punched harder than, well, maybe any other time in the history of the news industry. As one executive put it, “This really is a Darwinian moment.”

The last time around, it was a much different landscape, and still very print-centric. The bloodshed was largely chalked up to an old model giving way to a new one, as laptops and smartphones replaced paper for vast swaths of readers. In the decade since, many regional and local newspapers have been hanging on by a thread, and some magazines have only survived thanks to the investment of wealthy benefactors. But at the same time, digital media has exploded, and scores of new web-native publications have risen (and fallen).

Until recently, even some of the major digital insurgents that had taken a turn for the worse over the past couple of years had started to seem like they were beginning to stabilize and figure things out. Overall, the future was beginning to look less dark. “Digital publishing,” Sara Fischer of Axios wrote on January 21, citing rosy projections at the likes of BuzzFeed and Vice, “is doing something it hasn't done en masse since the dawn of the Internet: make money.”

That was then. In our new and uncharted era of the Great Lockdown, certain media organizations are better positioned to weather the storm than others. But no one is really safe, most of all not those who still depend to some large degree on consumer advertising, which is falling off a cliff. In a cruel twist, web traffic is soaring, cable news ratings are through the roof, but people aren’t buying things, so marketers are pausing on trying to sell things. Moreover, those who are selling things don’t want to shill their wares alongside stories about intubated COVID patients or the probability that social distancing will last until 2022. A UBS survey cited by Yahoo Finance shows digital ad spending is down nearly 50%, national TV nearly 40%, and print nearly 20%. “For the first time in history, you’re probably going to have the highest point of media usage in the history of the United States and the lowest point of advertising in the U.S.,” former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told The Information.