If you work in a creative industry or media, you probably don’t need anybody to tell you how bad things have gotten.
Still, even the most intimate first-hand knowledge can’t prepare you for the sheer scope of the devastation. As data journalist Joseph Politano found in a new Substack post, the US has lost more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries over the past four years — the period since the first version of ChatGPT became available to the public — with almost 50,000 of those losses coming in the last year alone.
The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, the trustworthiness of which has been repeatedly undermined since Donald Trump’s return to office. Still, it remains one of the most robust and widely-used indicators of macroeconomic job data, for analysts trying to make sense of the increasingly bleak job market.
“That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history,” Politano observes, “with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008.”
