The context for the crisis: A Q&A with Penny Abernathy

For years, Penny Muse Abernathy—the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism—has been studying the disintegration of journalism’s traditional business model, mapping losses of physical newsrooms across the United States. The current financial crisis, brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic, is an acceleration of the crisis Abernathy has been researching for years, and The Journalism Crisis Project depends on the work of collaborators like her. 

For this week’s newsletter, I talked with Abernathy about the context for the current crisis—how the media landscape arrived at this low point, how journalism leaders have failed to mitigate the industry’s vulnerabilities, and how newsrooms and policy-makers need to look beyond band-aid solutions to plan for the future.

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