The leadership at liberal media outlet ThinkProgress has told its staff to look for other jobs, as advertising revenue and online contributions have fallen from the past year.
The Daily Beast reports that, according to a budget document, the site is short $3 million between revenue and expenses for 2019. ThinkProgress operates under the Center for American Progress and is editorially independent, although the nonprofit parent organization has provided some funds to the site.
Advertising revenue is projected to fall $350,000 short of what was budgeted, and online contributions are expected to fall short by nearly $180,000. A number of staff members have also left the site or are about to leave, including Managing Editor Tara Culp-Ressler.
Navin Nayak, the executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that, as with many other news sites, ThinkProgress was negatively affected by algorithm changes on social media sites such as Facebook.
“Unfortunately, ThinkProgress has had a large and growing budget gap for going on two years now. Like most media organizations, ThinkProgress has relied on advertising revenue as a major source of funding, increasingly subject to the behavior of social-media platforms and their decisions on news distribution. As with many other digital media organizations, 2017 and 2018 were particularly challenging years in this regard, as ThinkProgress experienced a 40 percent drop in ad revenue over just one year, creating an inevitable budgetary strain,” he said.
Sources told the Daily Beast that Nayak had to have “blunt” conversations with ThinkProgress staffers about their job security. The site had a hiring freeze early in 2018, which was a stark reversal from the hiring frenzy just two years earlier.
“Indeed, in fall of 2018, we shared with the ThinkProgress union that the situation was so concerning that actions of some kind would be needed. The budget situation has only grown worse since,” he said.
