Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse

It’s over a decade since Nick Davies pointed out that profitable news media was a short lived historical anomaly in Flat Earth News, but just how much further we had to fall was unclear until the coronavirus pandemic. The Tow Center and ICFJ have released a reported documenting just how bad things are out there, with over one in five reporters (and 1 406 journos from 125 countries were interviewed) saying they’d taken a pay cut in the last few months. Loss of money wasn’t the worst thing about coronavirus, though: the mental health challenge of Covid-19 just beat it in the unpopularity stakes. Still, as Nieman points out, it isn’t all bleak – there’s nothing like a global crisis to remind audiences that they actually need quality media, and should support them. Read the full thing here.