At least 995 jobs at English-speaking news media businesses have been cut or put at risk in January 2023.
The job losses accelerate a trend that began in the second half of 2022, when media companies cut more than 1,000 editorial roles across four months.
Recessionary fears have prompted a drop in adspend, which combined with spiking energy and material prices have left many news outlets in a difficult financial position.
The first major media cuts of 2023, at Reach, came on 11 January – meaning the almost 1,000 job losses have taken place in the space of just over two weeks.
On Thursday Daily Mail parent company DMGT announced the restructuring of its ad sales department and major cuts at its free commuter newspaper Metro, which has been hit hard by rising energy and newsprint costs alongside the advertising downturn.
DMGT has not announced how many staff it proposes to make redundant, so our estimate of the total redundancies does not include these proposals. Any job cuts not yet reported by the media would also be missing, making it an underestimate.
Most of the January news media cuts are accounted for by four companies: Reach, Dotdash Meredith, Vox Media and Smart News.
Entertainment Weekly owner Dotdash Meredith laid off 274 staff "across nearly all departments" on Thursday (26 January), according to Axios.
Vox Media, which publishes titles including The Verge, Eater and New York Magazine preceded it with a cut on 20 January of approximately 130 staffers in its revenue, editorial, operations and core services departments.
English-language Japanese news aggregator Smart News cut 120 people globally - 40% of its workforce - a week earlier on 13 January. And Reach announced 200 redundancies across its business on 11 January, targeting cost savings of at least £30m in 2023.
Other news redundancies came at NBC News and MSNBC, where 75 cuts were "scattered across the NBCU News Group divisions" according to Adweek, and at Adweek itself, where ten staff were cut from the newsroom and four from the rest of the business.
Also reported have been about 71 layoffs at Canada's Postmedia Network Corp; 22 cuts at Dow Jones; 16 planned at Daily Kos, which remain the subject of Newsguild negotiations; 50 at Fandom; and 20 at The Washington Post.
The Post announced the hiring of seven new contributors to its Opinion section the next day, however, and has said it plans to end the year with at least as many staff as it began.
In December Press Gazette counted more than 1,400 job cuts to editorial departments in the UK, US and Ireland across 2022.
The same day as the DMGT and Dotdash Meredith layoffs were announced, Insider reported that Bloomberg has approved the hiring of 1,000 people over the course of 2023. The hires are to be "in data, product and engineering. Other hires are expected to take place across the company, including news arm Bloomberg News".
Earlier in the month Reuters said it would create 100 new editorial roles around the world as part of a plan that would also see the relaunch of its paywall.
In December Press Gazette counted at least 373 new editorial jobs created over 2022 alongside the more than 1,000 cuts. The new jobs are at the likes of Pink News, ITV News and ITVX, Ladbible, Semafor, Bloomberg, Forbes, Linkedin News and Reach's planned US operation.
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