I came to The New York Times in 1992, 29 years ago this summer, as the first intern in its graphics department. I arrived in Manhattan, a Black boy from a hick town in Louisiana, and it blew my mind.
In those first months I saw how one of the best newsrooms in the country covered some of the biggest stories of the era, and it shaped me as a journalist and my reverence for the invaluable role that journalists play in society.
Newsroom employment was at a high, and throughout the 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, a slight majority of Americans still had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” according to Gallup.
In 1992, there was no MSNBC or Fox News, no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. Also, there weren’t many, if any, mainstream news organizations online. The Times didn’t start online publication until 1996.
Since the 1990s, newsrooms have seen tremendous, truly terrifying, contraction. Pew Research Center issued a report earlier this month that found “newsroom employment in the United States has dropped by 26% since 2008.”