Mapping the Relationship Between Journalistic Discourse, Tech Industry Layoffs, and Artificial Intelligence.

Herfurth, A. & Jessica Maddox (accepted, forthcoming). “Mapping the Relationship Between Journalistic Discourse, Tech Industry Layoffs, and Artificial Intelligence.” New Media & Society.  Abstract: The tech industry’s 2023-2024 mass layoffs represented a critical moment in which an infallible industry seemed to suddenly lay bare its weak spots. Big Tech and the American press have had a complementary relationship in the past, with the latter upholding the ideologies undergirding an industry that has largely understood itself–and been presented to others–as too big to fail. Through a textual analysis of long-form journalistic coverage of the tech layoff crisis, we find three predominant themes. First, even in the face of layoffs, Big Tech is continuously presented as too complex and important to regulate, with the press making sense of the layoffs as necessary to sustain the industry’s health. Furthermore, layoff coverage emboldened other CEOs to engage in their own, demonstrating how the topic’s visibility had a snowball effect. Second, AI plays a sizeable role, being presented as both a positive and a negative factor in layoffs, though it remains unchallenged. Finally, there was a paucity of attention to how these layoffs disproportionately affected women and racial minorities, and the lack of coverage contributes to upholding gender and racial imbalances in Big Tech. Taken together, the press coverage of the 2023-2024 Big Tech layoffs doesn’t just make the layoffs make sense to the American public in a way that upholds the industry’s ideology; they become an active stakeholder. Future research can and should continue to interrogate this relationship as American media conglomerates and Big Tech executives concede further to political agendas.