Across the pond, hundreds more have fallen in the past year. The Washington Post cut 10% of its staff, the LA Times 20%. The people behind the Panama Papers, The Center For Public Integrity, have lost half their staff.

Three years ago, the future of lengthy, journalistic investigations was meant to be in multi-part podcasts like Ronan Farrow’s Catch And Kill (on Harvey Weinstein), or Wondery’s Who Killed Daphne? (on Maltese corruption).

But since 2023, those kinds of shows have gone extinct. Gimlet, formerly a market leader, has entirely disappeared, Malcolm Gladwell’s company got rid of a third of its employees, while Britain’s biggest investigative long-form podcast company has culled half its workforce.

What do all these layoffs have in common? The answer, intriguingly, is less than one might think. openDemocracy is funded by grants from other NGOs. Newsnight is technically gold-plated by the license fee. Vice was a new media model that was always a heavier-than-air machine. The podcast business was another, more recent, speculative bubble. Yet all of it — all the journalism that requires legwork — is going away in 2024.

Newsnight’s case is the most instructive. Its audience had dwindled from a million people to 300,000, giving it about as many viewers as your average Paul Joseph Watson video on YouTube. Did the Beeb believe in reviving the kind of intellectual salon that Newsnight once represented? Possibly. Could they justify the salaries for those numbers? Absolutely not. The programme couldn’t have survived even if it had all the funds. And as our attention fractionates, the tension between what we want and what’s good for us is not going away.

Because the truth is that proper investigative journalism is a trudge with an uncertain outcome. Supporting it requires an industry that is confident enough in itself to imagine that, at the end of many months of cracking heads and opening FOIs, you might not find something.  And to be okay with that.

The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb once joked that if an economist designed you, he would give you “one lung, one eye, one kidney”. Today’s newsrooms are run by these economists, streamlined to within an inch of their life, so that up and down the chain there is no longer a culture that is prepared to justify important, if occasionally decadent, spending.

Even when investigation does truffle up something remarkable, it’s often initially pretty fibrous matter. For proof, look no further than Private Eye — which was talking about PFI scandals for a decade before the mainstream got near the case, and which had hammered even something as relatively glamorous as the Post Office Scandal for just as long before Fleet Street took an interest.

Of course, there are endless schemes to turn the oil tanker around — Australia is implementing a news tax on Facebook et al, with the proceeds going to traditional papers. In New York, newly retrenched hacks are forming their own “media collectives”, which seems rather too much like rushing into a burning building.

But the truth is that we are entering a world of known unknowns. As the quantity of deep journalism shrinks, we will doubtless sense the world growing a little colder, a little duller, much as it did at the closure of the News of the World. The end of that particular style of sting has left a red-topped hole in the gaiety of the nation, for better and worse.

Today, any reward from a big exclusive rapidly drains away, as it’s cannibalised by secondary sources. No one has yet solved that central problem: how can any one news organisation monopolise the rewards from breaking a big story, such that they’d be incentivised to hunt more big stories?  Until we crack that, we’re wandering in a starless night.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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