The largest single workforce action in book publishing this year landed in late July, when Penguin Random House confirmed it was folding its Riverside, New Jersey distribution operations into merged facilities at Crawfordsville and Westminster. Estimates put the affected positions between four hundred and four hundred and fifty.

Not editors. Warehouse and distribution staff.

That detail rearranges the usual conversation about publishing contraction, which fixates on editorial because editorial is the part with a public face. Editors have bylines in acknowledgements and accounts on the platforms where the industry talks to itself. Nobody writes a thread about a distribution hub. But the trade runs on physical logistics to a degree that its own self-image barely acknowledges, and a distribution network is a fixed-cost asset sized to a volume assumption. Revise the assumption downward and the network gets consolidated. Four hundred jobs is what that arithmetic looks like when it lands.

The publisher proposed its second round of redundancies of the year on August 20. The stated cause was a change in how a platform distributes publisher content: Snapchat is retiring its Shows and Publisher Stories formats as part of a broader shift in how it handles broadcasters and publishers. A large majority of Pink News revenue came from that platform.

A spokesperson noted that many major publishers had already transitioned to the new model and that Pink News, as one of the larger publishers on Snapchat, is realigning its business accordingly. That is a fair description and it also contains the whole problem. Being one of the larger publishers on a platform means being one of the more exposed publishers on a platform.

The April announcement covers between eighteen hundred and two thousand positions, roughly one in ten of a workforce of about twenty-one and a half thousand, aimed at saving around five hundred million pounds. The news division alone sheds about two hundred roles. It is the corporation’s largest restructuring in fifteen years.

The stated causes are license fee income in decline, inflation, and streaming competition. All three are true. Only one of them is interesting.

In February the Post eliminated roughly a third of its workforce, including more than three hundred of about eight hundred newsroom positions. Sports, books, podcasts, foreign, and national desks were gutted. The executive editor told staff the decision was driven in large part by the collapse of organic search traffic, down nearly half in three years.

That explanation deserves more attention than it received, because it is not the usual one.