Nearly two years after COVID-19 first brought the U.S. to a standstill, the Tow Center is releasing data on news organization layoffs that shows the scale of an industry further devastated by the pandemic. By our count, 6,154 news workers have been laid off from at least 343 individual news outlets with an additional 35 news media chains that implemented chain-wide layoffs from March 2020 through August 2021.
