WARN Feed · layoffs by industry

US media, newspaper, publishing and telecom layoffs — the actual WARN Act filings, rebuilt every day

846 media, publishing and telecom layoff and closing notices filed with state labour agencies under the WARN Act, from 1989 to 2026, covering 101,859 reported workers at 265 employers in 45 states. Free, CC BY 4.0, rebuilt every morning from the agency portals — no login, no key, no email.

Download every sector-tagged notice (CSV) This industry as its own dataset on Hugging Face

Who is in this cut

Included: newspapers and newspaper chains, broadcasters and TV station groups, film and game studios, magazine and book publishers, commercial printers, advertising and marketing agencies, and wireless, cable and telephone carriers and their call-centre contractors.

What counts as media or telecom here: the employer name reads as broadcasting, newspaper, publishing, communications, radio, television, studios, printing, advertising, marketing, telecom, wireless, cable, magazine or press, or is one of ~70 named companies (Gannett, McClatchy, Lee, Hearst, Condé Nast, Nexstar, Sinclair, Tegna, Scripps, iHeart, Audacy, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, T-Mobile, Sprint, Lumen, Frontier, Windstream, Altice, Cox, DISH, DirecTV, Warner, Paramount, NBCUniversal, RR Donnelley, Quad and others). Three boundaries to know: (1) studios catches video-game studios (Arkane, and others) as well as film studios — game-industry layoffs are in this cut, not in tech; (2) communications is a broad word and pulls in some firms that are really contact centres or electronics makers; (3) commercial printers and sign makers are here because the rule treats printing as publishing. sector_rule marks every case. A paper trading under its city name alone ("The Post") reveals no sector and is not here; it is in the unclassified remainder of the sector dataset. Every row keeps the sector_rule that fired.

Why this file exists

Newsroom and studio layoffs are reported by the trade press from memos and tweets, usually without a headcount or a site. The filings behind them — which plant or office, which town, how many workers, notice date, effective date, closure or layoff — sit on 48 separate state portals and are never assembled as one media-and-telecom series. This file is that series, with the closure/layoff split the states themselves recorded.

The employers with the most media, publishing and telecom notices on record

Counted per notice, not per event: a company that files in four states files four notices. Employer names are the resolved spelling — the raw agency spelling is kept in the download.

The 15 most recent media, publishing and telecom notices

Date is the notice date where the agency publishes one, otherwise the layoff date. 197 of the 846 notices in this cut are recorded as a closure rather than a layoff.

How the industry is decided: no state WARN portal publishes an industry field, so there is no NAICS column to filter on. The sector here is assigned from the resolved employer name by a published rule table (19 sectors, 3,152 patterns, first match wins), and every row carries the pattern that fired in its sector_rule column so you can audit or re-cut it. The archive holds 61,428 notices; 61,232 of them carry a usable date and are in the sector file (196 have no date in either column), 32,168 come out with a sector, and 29,064 stay unclassified — and are still counted in every total shown anywhere on this site. Manual audit 2026-09-12: 4 of 60 sampled rows were assigned to the wrong sector. Rebuilt 2026-09-24.

How to check any of this

Every number on this page is computed at build time from notices_by_sector.csv (one row per notice, with the sector and the rule that assigned it), and the yearly series from sector_by_year.csv. The free HTTP API serves the whole archive as JSON, NDJSON and per-state CSV with no key. This industry is also published as its own Hugging Face dataset, and the full sector cut as one file. If a number here disagrees with the file, the file is right and it is a bug — tell us and it is fixed the next morning.

WARN Feed · free API · coverage by state · privacy & terms · contact · data CC BY 4.0