WASHINGTON (CN) — As one of Washington’s biggest sources of local news on Friday became the latest casualty in the spiraling U.S. media industry, the district’s lone congressional representative said that the loss of community journalists will make it even harder to shed light on issues facing the capital city and beyond.
WAMU, Washington’s National Public Radio affiliate station, has said it would lay off 15 staffers and completely close its community-focused publication DCist. The move, station leadership told Axios Friday morning, is part of its plan to shift toward audio content such as podcasts and events.
Shuttering DCist and paring down WAMU’s staff of journalists is “a double loss,” Washington Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton said in an interview with Courthouse News on Friday.
Norton, the capital city’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, said she was a DCist reader herself, and the publication’s loss stripped the community of a resource “to find out news before you can find it anywhere else.”
The lawmaker also pointed out that several of the journalists reportedly cut from WAMU were covering topics important to both the D.C. community and the broader population.
“They’re cutting criminal justice when crime has been going up in places like D.C.,” Norton said. “They cut reporters on immigration, when immigration might be the top issue in the country, and they’re cutting reporters on the environment. That’s a loss that will be felt in this region in a number of different ways.”
Reporters who had covered criminal justice, immigration and the local environment for WAMU all confirmed via social media Friday that they had been laid off from their positions.
Norton added that gutting local newsrooms in Washington would take away avenues to alert people about efforts in Congress to clamp down on the capital city’s self-governance.
“It is a trying time for the district,” she said, “when they’re doing everything they can to take away even what little home rule we have.”
In Congress, which has oversight over Washington’s budget and municipal policies, Republicans have for months led the charge to roll back municipal criminal justice and police reform laws, which they say are contributing to rising crime in the nation’s capital. City leaders have argued that congressional meddling makes it harder for Washington to address criminal justice shortcomings.
Unfortunately, Norton said Friday, there’s not much she can do in her position to respond to the WAMU layoffs — funding for the station doesn’t come from Congress.
WAMU is, however, funded by American University, the Washington university which has owned the station’s license since 1961. The university will now “have to do much more to get funds from their own listeners,” Norton said.
The news of layoffs at WAMU comes just days after American University student media publication The Eagle reported that the school had hired Huron Consulting Group to audit its workforce. The firm has in the past worked with universities and recommended laying off staff, the student paper said.
In a statement provided to Courthouse News, a spokesperson for American University said that Huron Consulting was not involved in the WAMU layoffs, which they added were "the result of a long period of work that included market research, engagement with staff and support from industry experts."
The contractions at WAMU are just part of a national phenomenon of hemorrhaging local news organizations, Norton said.
“It really is shortsighted, because more people look at and listen to local news than to national news,” she observed. “So, of all places, this is the worst place you could cut for local communities.”
As of Friday morning, the DCist website has been purged, with its homepage now redirecting users to the WAMU site. Previous reporting from the publication, acquired by WAMU in 2018, is almost completely inaccessible.
The U.S. is suffering from a worrying dearth of local news. According to a recent report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the country lost an average of 2.5 local newspapers per week in 2023. The U.S. is on track to lose a third of all of its newspapers by the end of 2025, the report said.
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