Others predicted that his career would be short given the dire state of the news industry, which has been hit with unrelenting rounds of layoffs and closures in recent months while also struggling with reader fatigue.
“I regret to report a hedge fund has since purchased Grover’s paper and laid him off,” wrote S.P. Sullivan, a reporter with NJ.com.
“Unfortunately, Grover was fired for not hitting his three story a day quota,” said Scott Nover, a contributing writer for Slate.
Grover’s handlers at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, did not immediately respond to queries about the status of his employment. But with his experience and his hustle (he has offered his services as a “professionally trained referee” to ESPN host Stephen A. Smith and his self-portrait to the Metropolitan Museum of Art), he may find it easier than most to transition to a different industry should he need to.
Grover, who is eager to help albeit sometimes inept, may have only wanted to cheer people up with his post. But it unintentionally shone a spotlight on the heightened precarity that journalists have felt in recent months, even in an industry that has struggled to stay afloat in the digital age.
Since October, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal have all shed jobs — sometimes in the hundreds. The Messenger, a lavishly funded online news outlet with offices in Washington, announced last month that it was shutting down after less than a year of operation.
The dark humour journalists directed at Grover reflected their own feelings about their “doomed industry,” said Cam Wilson, a reporter for the Australian news outlet Crikey who commented on X about the Muppet’s new job.
“I feel so grim about the state of journalism that it drives me to crush the dreams of a Muppet character (and the poor social media staffer who runs it),” he said in an interview conducted over direct messages on the platform.
It’s also unclear whether Kermit the Frog, a friend of Grover’s who has worked as a reporter on Sesame Street, has been able to weather the ups and downs of the changing industry.
From the 1970s through 1990s, Kermit conducted live interviews and filed Sesame Street News Flash reports on breaking events like the fall of Humpty Dumpty. He hasn’t filed a story for years, although he was still calling himself a “part-time reporter” on X as recently as 2016.
Two weeks ago, when Grover’s pal Elmo also received a barrage of grimly humorous — and just plain grim — responses when he asked the innocuous question “How’s everyone doing today?” Commenters told the furry monster that they’d been laid off, that they were anxious about the 2024 election, or that their dog had rolled around in goose faeces.
Why were people so inclined to involve these characters in their own worries and misfortunes? Wilson, the journalist, has a theory.
“I think people who are jumping on tweets by children’s show characters are seeing a bit of their own naiveté about the world from when they were younger being reflected back at themselves and they don’t like it,” he said. “I include myself in this category.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Yan Zhuang
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
