Everything that got me here is gone.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:12:49 -0500

I am very concerned about the state of local news in Tulsa. I’d guess that if I’d stayed the course in journalism, I’d have been laid off at least once or twice by now. That’s a guess, not a fact, but it’s an educated one. I’ve watched the market change enough in the six years since I left to feel fairly confident in that.

Three out of Tulsa’s four legacy news stations have been radically reduced to a shadow of their former selves over the past few years, and it’s accelerated fast this year. In May, Sinclair Broadcast Group consolidated KTUL’s newsroom with KOKI’s, moved KTUL to a “reporter-driven” format, and retired the “Tulsa’s News Channel 8” identity the station had carried for decades. A few months earlier, FOX23’s affiliation, which had lived on KOKI since the 1980s, got sold off to Sinclair and folded into KTUL as a digital subchannel, 8.2. Then just this week, word spread across social media that major layoffs hit the E.W. Scripps Company, which made a significant impact on Tulsa’s NBC affiliate, KJRH “2 Works for You.”

I left FOX23 in early 2020 for a better opportunity and watched, from the outside, as new owner after new owner made painful changes to the team I left behind. There were very long hours. We were reassigned from the digital team to the assignment desk, but still expected to do both. Then finally, the management position was eliminated completely. At the time leaving felt like dodging a bullet. Now I think I was just early to what is happening now.

Television is far from the only corner of the news industry impacted. The Tulsa World was owned by a local family for over 100 years. It was one of the largest independent newspapers in the country at the turn of the century with more than 160,000+ subscribers in 2000. As of 2023, that number has dwindled down to around 32,000. And it’s not only the readers who have disappeared, so has a lot of the journalism. Over this past July 4 holiday, the holiday edition of the Tulsa World was a mere 6 pages long. Ten years ago, it was 32 pages long. Twenty years ago, in 2006, the July 4 edition was 48 pages. You get the picture. This is not an indictment of the Tulsa World or Tulsa’s local journalists but an indictment of the corporate consolidation that has squeezed the last bit of juice out of them.

But here’s what sticks out to me: it isn’t just local news. It’s happening at every job I’ve ever worked.

The movie theater I worked at in college closed over a decade ago after Cinemark eliminated film projectors and focused their investment on digital theater. The Blockbuster Video store I worked at is long gone. The local radio station where I pulled part-time night shifts covering local sports has changed owners so many times it’s not recognizable to me. And now the industry I trained for, spent my earliest career years in, and still care about, is disappearing in the same way, for what looks like the same two reasons every time: digital disruption made the old format optional, and corporate consolidation made sure whatever survived stopped being local.

It’s not a coincidence and it’s not bad luck. It’s a major sign that behaviors in our community have shifted dramatically. Movie theaters, video rental, local radio, local TV news and newspapers all come from the same local information and entertainment economy. I’ve spent so much of my working life inside it, and I’ve watched every single piece of it get hollowed out by the same forces, in roughly the same order, for roughly the same reasons.

I don’t know what to do with that, exactly, except notice it. My whole life sometimes feels like it’s been chasing the last remaining wisps of something that was already leaving the room by the time I got there. What is done is done. What is now is where we have power. Right now, what’s in my power is naming the pattern clearly, so I stop mistaking it for bad luck.

People crave community. The industries built to help facilitate that community keep getting bought out from under them. I don’t have a clean answer for what replaces that. I just know I’ve watched it happen too many times now, and I’m done pretending the next one will be different.

Josh Gammon

Everything that got me here is gone.