• by Tony Silber , Staff Writer, June 8, 2022

I noticed the other day how Hearst Connecticut Media is moving its printing operation to Albany, New York. The Bridgeport, Connecticut, facility would be closed, and according to a press release, 20 jobs would be "impacted" by the move.

Albany is three hours from Bridgeport, best case, so the impact on deadlines for Hearst’s daily print newspapers in Southwestern Connecticut will be substantial. Seems like moving to Albany can’t be good for that part of the business.

But put that aside for now.

I was struck by how some sectors of media are contracting and others seem to be growing. Jobs, as the Hearst press release put it euphemistically, are being “impacted.”

You don’t need to look far to find layoffs in traditional media. Last month, Axios reported “huge” layoffs at the newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises. When Dotdash Meredith killed the print editions of six iconic magazines in February, it said it would lay off 200 people. Outside Inc. laid off nearly 100 employees last month, most of them related to a transition away from print. Poynter keeps a list of newsroom layoffs by state.  It was last updated in February, but the list is long.

And then I recalled some recent stories I’ve done that touch on digital media companies. Gizmodo recently hired several new editors. So did the Root. Recurrent Ventures just raised $300 million. Just this week, I got several releases from digital-media companies announcing new hires.

Admittedly, none of this is empirical. Plenty of high-profile digital-media companies have had layoffs, and some layoffs are related to the normal course of the media business, portfolio shifts and the like. Not everything is related to secular decline.

But still, there’s an old journalistic rule of thumb: Three examples makes a trend. And right now there seems to be more dynamism in digital media and increasingly less in print.