Layoffs at The Los Angeles Times, the end of the road for Pitchfork, and an uncertain future for Sports Illustrated illustrate how digital media is architected to collapse the middle of the media business, leaving a precious few scaled players and many scrappy outfits.

• Troy Young's People vs Algorithms newsletter
• Brian Morrissey's The Rebooting newsletter
• Alex Schleifer's Universal Entities
• Follow Alex, Brian and Troy on Twitter

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.peoplevsalgorithms.com