Lately, I keep picturing my colleagues in media rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. When I mentioned this to a friend, he replied paraphrasing Fredric Jameson — he’s always good for such things — noting that all glimpses of the utopian horizon have the apocalyptic about them.

It’s hard to spot the utopian amidst the apocalyptic. Two thousand newspapers have shuttered in the past fifteen years; by February 2 of this year, the Guardian could already write of two thousand journalism jobs lost in 2019.

I was on a labor panel with one such journalist two weeks ago, and we fielded questions about how we, collectively, can sustain labor journalism. It was hard to find a response that didn’t feel like a lie. What was there to say when my co-panelist, Kim Kelly, had recently been forced into full-time freelancing (in her case, thanks to a mass layoff at Vice)? Kelly and I had spent the moments before the panel comparing notes on health insurance, sharing descriptions of how we respectively cobbled together a living (answer: very carefully).