Information Sector Jobs Vanish as Publishing, Film and TV, Telecoms Take Hits

After a long career as a journalist, most recently in top editor jobs, long-time New Yorker Tom Lowry suddenly found himself out of work at the end of January, along with 300 of his colleagues when the news startup The Messenger shuttered suddenly.

“All of us knew the risks of a startup, of course,” said Lowry, whose resume includes stints at CNBC, Skift, BusinessWeek and the tablet-only publication The Daily, “but nobody was anticipating The Messenger would close down in less than a year.”

Lowry is far from alone these days.

“Listen, I’m a longtime New York journalist, so I’ve had a front row seat to the media industry’s ebbs and flows for many years,” said Lowry, who is doing consulting work while exploring new full-time opportunities. “But I have never seen a more difficult job market than what I have witnessed in these past months.”

The information sector — which includes publishing, film and TV production, broadcasting and digital content, as well as streaming and podcasting and telecommunications — is now the segment of the city’s economy shedding the most jobs. Since hitting a record 245,000 jobs in October 2022, more than 31,000 jobs have disappeared — or 13% of the total in the sector.

Publishing, which includes news outlets, reached a record 77,000 jobs in October 2022, climbing back from the depths of the Great Recession that saw the industry bottom out in New York City in 2010 with just 50,000 jobs.

In addition to The Messenger, layoffs have occurred at scores of outlets based in New York, including Business Insider, Forbes, the Daily News and Condé Nast. Some 10% of all publishing jobs have disappeared from the post-pandemic peak.

Meanwhile, like the rest of the country, New York continues to add jobs overall.

The city gained 57,000 jobs in the first five months of the year, and total employment stands at a record 4.75 million, according to data released late last week by the state Labor Department. The city unemployment rate in May was unchanged at 4.8%. That’s the smallest gap with the national rate of 4.0% since the pandemic shut down the economy in 2020.

The gains are, however, primarily in low-paying health care jobs especially for home health care, which has an average wage of only $31,000 a year. With information workers averaging $193,000, it takes six new home health care jobs to make up for the loss of one job in the information sector.

And the contraction in information jobs is the first time since the pandemic that the city’s highly paid, mostly white professionals have faced economic turbulence.

“It’s a really important sector and has helped to diversify the city economy beyond finance,” said James Parrott, an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.

Media Mayhem

Film and TV production has recovered only a small portion of the jobs lost when the writers and actors went on strike last summer, as industry turmoil has studios greenlighting fewer productions. In May, jobs had inched back only to 43,000, compared to the post-pandemic high of 58,000.

Just about a quarter of all telecommunications jobs have disappeared since the pandemic began in what appears to be a long-run shrinkage of the industry driven by technological improvements and the consolidation of wireless companies.

Besides publishing, other media industries have ridden a roller coaster since the pandemic with a wave of new investment in media outlets, streaming, podcasting and related fields sending employment soaring to all-time records — and then crashing when those investments did not turn out to be profitable.

Traditional TV and radio positions have declined by about 10%, but newer web-related broadcasting content jobs have plunged by almost 8,000, or 20%. One of the largest radio companies in the country, Audacy, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and in April began layoffs. It owns nine stations in New York

Streaming has seen a similar contraction . The once booming podcasting industry is contracting so rapidly the cutbacks have been labeled a bloodbath .

Several factors are behind the bleak numbers, says Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. Media startups like The Messenger didn’t deliver the profits expected. Fragmentation of audiences between more outlets and entertainment options has eaten away at business models. And the fact that platforms like Facebook no longer emphasize news has sharply reduced traffic for established media outlets.

The industry’s woes will fall mostly on a group that had been relatively unaffected by the pandemic recession: white professionals.

While whites comprise 34% of the city workforce, they hold 60% of all the jobs in the information sector. Black and Hispanic workers hold only 13% of those positions, about half the rate in the workforce as a whole.

“Black women are particularly underrepresented,” said Lauren Melodia, another economist at the Center for New York City Affairs.

The Adams administration continues to take an optimistic view of the economy.

“New York City hit another all-time high jobs record this month, as the city’s tech scene continues to thrive with more tech start-ups calling New York City home, as we were once again ranked the #2 tech ecosystem in the world by Startup Genome,” said Adrien Lesser, a spokesperson for the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

“Our film and TV sector continues to rebound from last year’s strikes, with more new studio s development projects continuing to spring up across the five boroughs — from the west side of Manhattan to Queens,” Lesser added.“The financial challenges will continue,” said Edmunds. “Those that will succeed will need to develop new business models.

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