Labor

Key findings about the way Americans get news online – as well as how digital newsrooms in the US are faring:

In our most recent Internet Use Survey, conducted in 2017, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration included questions about participation in the sharing economy for the first time. The results show that a third of Internet users in the US reported selling goods or requesting or offering services from others through online platforms.

Political and economic power is shifting to the cities, and 20% of the population — 46 million people — is being left behind in rural America. These communities face increasingly difficult barriers to education, wealth and health. Technological advancements such as 5G and automated vehicles won't directly make life harder for rural America, but instead will fuel inequality by making life that much easier for urban America.

People of color made up nearly 40 percent of the US population, according to 2018 Census Bureau figures. In comparison, only 16.55 percent of journalists in US newsrooms in 2017 were people of color — down from 16.94 percent in 2016, according to the American Society of News Editors’ newsroom census. Knight Foundation’s $1.2 million investment in the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education is an attempt to help newsrooms rethink solutions to the diversity crisis.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-OR) sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer expressing their concerns regarding the export of language mirroring Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in trade agreements. “As you may know, the effects of Section 230 and the appropriate role of such a liability shield have become the subject of much debate in recent years.

Senators Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), members of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the TOWER Infrastructure Deployment Act (TOWER Act) to increase broadband deployment and close the workforce shortage in the telecommunications industry. The TOWER Act requires the Federal Communications Commission to improve and streamline workforce development programs to prepare for next-generation communications infrastructure.

Layoffs continue to pummel US newspapers. Roughly a quarter of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018. The layoffs come on top of the roughly one-third of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017. What’s more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before. Mid-market newspapers were the most likely to suffer layoffs in 2018 – unlike in 2017, when the largest papers most frequently saw cutbacks.

Thank you to OneWeb Satellites for inviting me to the opening of the world’s first facility to manufacture satellites using industrial-scale mass production techniques. I’m particularly pleased to be here this morning because the Federal Communications Commission under my leadership has been focused on promoting innovation in space.  Among other things, we’ve approved many proposals for low-Earth orbit, non-geostationary satellite orbit constellations. Indeed, in June 2017, OneWeb’s constellation was the first to receive the FCC’s signoff.

Newsroom employment across the US continues to decline, driven primarily by job losses at newspapers. And even though digital-native news outlets have experienced some recent growth in employment, they have added too few newsroom positions to make up for recent losses in the broader industry, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics survey data.

The news business is on pace for its worst job losses in a decade as about 3,000 people have been laid off or been offered buyouts in the first five months of 2019. The cuts have been widespread. Newspapers owned by Gannett and McClatchy, digital media companies like BuzzFeed and Vice Media, and the cable news channel CNN have all shed employees. The level of attrition is the highest since 2009, when the industry saw 7,914 job cuts in the first five months of that year in the wake of the financial crisis.