An interview with Kaila Philo, a journalist recently laid off legal reporter
By Adriana Rivera, Kenady Farwell, and Jacob Walcott
The layoff notice Kaila Philo received on a normal Thursday in July 2021 while working as a reporter for a legal news website blindsided her. Having gotten no prior feedback or warnings that her job might have been in danger, Philo never saw it coming.
“It was a very unorthodox way to do it,” Philo said. “Usually, if your job is in some kind of danger, they at least give you some kind of negative feedback or some kind of constructive criticism.” She said there can be an exception when layoffs are related to drastic budget cuts. She said the reason behind her layoff is still unknown.
Philo’s story is one of thousands. According to the Pew Research Center, from 2008 to 2019 over 27,000 jobs as journalists were lost. In the year 2020 alone, around 16,160 jobs were lost, surpassing the previous record of 14,265 jobs lost in 2008 by 13 percent. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that in the year 2029, there will be an 11 percent decline in newsroom jobs from the year 2019.
“It’s definitely disappointing and nerve-wracking,” Philo said about the increasing unemployment rate in journalism. “I don’t think there’s gonna be a point in time that there just aren’t journalists anymore, I think that would be really bad for democracy,” she said.
However, this does not change the fact that since COVID-19 initially hit and caused an economic crash in 2020, news outlets have struggled with severe budget cuts that directly impact the amount of positions available. The New York Times estimated a total of 37,000 news workers were either laid off, furloughed or on reduced pay by the end of April 2020, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
“I do think that there are going to have to be drastic changes in how journalism is funded,” Philo said. “A lot of outlets are just existing from billionaires, and it’s not very safe. There has to be a more sustainable way to fund journalism.”
“[Independent news outlets] have to get creative with how they fund and advertise, how they hire and who they hire,” Philo said. “But there is room for glaring gaps in media coverage that independent outlets can fill.”
When asked if she had any advice for young journalists who may be in a similar position to hers, she advised that journalists don’t take a job offer without formal commitments.
“If the job is offered to you on a whim, reconsider and go elsewhere because it can be taken away on a whim,” Philo said. “Even though I was doing fine, according to my manager, there wasn’t a plan. So […] always go into a job with a plan, something in place to support you.”