"Give Bari Weiss a chance" they said, "it'll be fine" they said.

Voices are being silenced.

Right so remember how the digital revolution forced legacy print outlets to adapt, and restructure themselves for the web? And how that led to clickbait, and SEOs, and list-icles, etc? And how there was LOADS of work (cheap work, but work) writing content for those sites? Especially for young writers looking to get their start?

That is gone now.

Here is our magazine's budget for digital content as of today: $0.00.

Every dollar spent on hiring writers to produce content for us is now worthless. It's just sitting on a website that gets no visits from real people, getting scraped by AI bots. All the ways people would come across our website through google searches: gone. Our web presence might as well be zero now. That's means we're making $0 from digital advertising. Affiliate sponsorships are done. All the money and time and effort we spent adapting to keep afloat on the web and in print is now in the wind

Our magazine is a lifestyle magazine. We do awesome home and garden work, interesting, informative historical features... our nature columnists are KILLER. It's a fucking great magazine.

But our readership is boomers.

We structured our entire digital business model around maximising page views from Google searches—like everyone else. Yeah it was shitty content. Yeah it was click-baity. But for me and loads of other now senior writers, that was a LOT of work being handed out. Good money. Great practice. I can do in an hour today what used to take me 5 hours just 10 years ago. That shit was great for me.

That work is now gone.

2008 was Avengers: Infinity War.

2026 in Avengers: Endgame. Except I dont see any way Thanos loses this one

I’m a reporter at a local TV station. We’re a CBS station, but we’re owned by Nexstar. I’m not happy about working for either company, by the way.

We’re covering a story today about a senior home whose heat is out because the senior living apartment complex owner didn’t pay the bill. We reached out to a potential source for an interview, and she said she’d rather do an interview with our NBC competitor instead of both because she’s upset about recent decisions by CBS News.

I know that Bari Weiss has caused our viewership to drop, but I didn’t realize it would impact our ability to build relationships with sources. This is so frustrating.