On January 24, a couple of weeks before I installed the spanking-new industrial printer that would kickstart my own (albeit fictional) newspaper business in News Tower, The New York Times ran the following headline: "The News About the News Business is Getting Grimmer". A day later, CNN went with "News industry off to brutal 2024 start" and Axios promptly followed up in typically pithy style with a list of outlets in trouble, including layoffs expected to hit major publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Sports Illustrated, depressingly titled "Mainstream media bloodbath".
Games-adjacent media fare no better. At the start of 2023, The Washington Post's Launcher and Vice's Waypoint were widely respected hubs for in-depth criticism and vital reporting; neither survived the year. Some of those that did have slowly morphed into husks with identikit news snippets attributed to The-[insert-name-of-website-here]-Team but seemingly written by bored-out-of-their-mind chatbots. Things are looking rather bleak.
