As Margaret's thread points out, The Atlantic signed up 90K new subscribers since March on the strength of its excellent coverage. The conference business is suffering and the newsroom is being devastated for that. These cuts come from the billionaire owner's desire for profit. https://twitter.com/sulliview/status/1263461467262779393

The Atlantic's job cuts come as the entire media industry struggles. But: Important to draw attention to two things:

1) The common media "sugar daddy" business model of depending on a benevolent billionaire fails

2) Journalists pay the price for business side's failures

For years, we have seen that being good at journalism is not enough to keep a job in...journalism.

It's never a journalist's job to sell ads, raise subscriptions, or keep conferences going, but if the business side doesn't do that, then it's journalists who lose their jobs.

Media executives will tell you over and over again how maintaining a newsroom is so expensive, how they can't pay journalists fairly for their labor -- and at the same time turn around and pay an ad salesperson up to $500K a year PLUS commissions.

There is a common belief that benevolent billionaire owners will step in when newsrooms are struggling. That *never* happens. David Bradley especially has been trying to unload parts of The Atlantic (QZ, etc) for years. Murdoch invests only shareholder money.

This disconnect between the high quality of journalism and the weakness of business models is stark.

It also means journalists are being held responsible for things they can't control.

As a reporter, your job is to tell the truth, not please people so they buy papers.

Every journalist should be completely sick of media executives crying crocodile tears about how there's "no money" to pay people.

I've written this before: If the place is in business, there's always money.

It's just distributed to people at the top, especially in sales.

This is a long way of saying the media business, as it is currently constructed, is complete and total bullshit. It is run by gormless executives intent on saving their own salaries and completely careless of the quality of the journalism product.

We need co-operatives, IMO.

Whenever you hear media executives of a long-running business talking about how they can't find the money to pay journalists:

Those are lies. They are just not distributing the money where it needs to go.