This has been the journalism industry’s worst week in recent memory, with around 1,000 people losing their jobs. Layoffs at Gannett cost dozens of jobs at newspapers across the country, from the Indianapolis Star to the Tennessean to the Arizona Republic. Verizon announced it was cutting seven percent of its total workforce, leading to significant cuts at HuffPost, including the elimination of its entire opinion desk and distinguished investigative reporters. On Friday, BuzzFeed began laying off 15 percent of its staff, including its entire national desk and national security desk.

This industry is broken. Print outlets, particularly local newspapers, have been decimated for years—first hamstrung by the loss of their classified advertisement monopoly, and then ultimately undone by a lethal combination of digital disruption, mismanagement, and private equity. But now web outlets, once held up as the future of news, are also struggling to survive. “It’s clear that we have a digital content bubble,” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, told the Guardian. “There’s no question we’re going to see more cuts, both in legacy media and digital-born ones.”



The blame increasingly has been laid on two culprits: Facebook and Google, whose ad duopoly presents an existential crisis for the industry, starving digital and print media outlets of essential revenue. “The problem seems to be that it’s gotten harder and harder for news outlets to make money off of the readers they have because such a huge share of advertising spending is sucked up by Facebook and Google, with what’s left increasingly going to Amazon,” Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley argued, noting that many of the outlets hit by layoffs, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, have hundreds of millions of readers.



There’s no question that breaking up Facebook and Google would have a number of positive social and economic effects in America and around the world. While it would clot some of the bleeding in print and online journalism, though, it won’t save the industry. That will require much more ambitious and holistic acts: public funding, philanthropy, and increased taxation, particularly of internet service providers.



The arrival of the internet, and Craigslist in particular, was devastating to newspapers and magazines, which had enjoyed a longstanding monopoly on print ads, classified, and otherwise. But this disruption merely accelerated existing trends. Newspapers’ market penetration began a moderate decline after the advent of television in the 1950s, while print circulation began to dip during the Reagan administration, years before the digital revolution.