I would also mention the collapse of specialty mailing lists, newsletters, and forums. People moved to reddit, facebook, and twitter, but those jumble different things together, drive away experts in a crowd of demanding ignoramuses, and are searchable at the whim of the centralized owner which can and does alter the deal at their pleasure.
I also see creative people who feel obliged to attend what feels like an excessive number of far-away, expensive conferences and conventions to me. Maybe they are lonely from working at home in unwalkable country though?
The journalists are in the same trap as all other creative people: chasing a constantly changing sets of rules, chosen by liars, in hope of a pittance of money. My decision was not to play the game, but instead to start from the assumption that I am never going to make serious money from free online writing and photos, and
model an Internet which is healthy for me and for society: decentralized, searchable, slow (a regular weekly post), with links from centralized proprietary sites to the real Internet not vice versa, and presenting a specific persona not everything that is happening in my life. If you start from the assumption that birdsite is never going to deliver amazing rewards to compensate for the distraction and the serious personal risks, you make different choices (and I don't actually know anyone in person with a birdsite account, except for one ex-professor and a friend's brother who has one for work).
We need both individual action and collective activism towards structural changes, but the 2010s internet is the wrong place for me to be doing the later, and an hour a week of action is worth ten hours a day of talking about what someone somewhere should do. Most of my face-to-face friends have never heard of patreon, they don't need to be lectured not to be demanding of their creators.
I have my real friends who I see in person, and what cannot go on forever will not go on forever: eventually the investors will wise up to
investor storytime, and the creators will realize that they are being conned like Orwell's lottery players and pterry's mystics ("keep putting in time and effort! one day you could get rich and all your problems will go away! the goal you seek is just out of reach if you keep learning today's rules.")