thmHow Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
It seems to me that the only mainstream newspaper to figure out a workable solution so far is NYT. And their solution was games. One of these days that will be all that remains and people will forget what the NYT acronym stands for aside from Wordle.
The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable.
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
> They historically had the best political coverage of DC
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.
I don't know how to quantify "national appeal", but the Post had about 2.5 million paid subscribers in 2023 and ~800 newsroom staff, while The Atlantic had about 1.1 million paid subscribers and ~200 newsroom staff.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.
In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them.
The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops.
Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business.
NYT is good for games and cooking. Their news editors are garbage.
I was a subscriber until last year. They produce outstanding journalism with the exception of their Zionist pro-war bias, which I was ok ignoring until my disgust with their genocide whitewashing became too much.
Have you considered, and hear me out here, that the bias is yours?
I mean if their reporting about everything but this one topic is good, perhaps their “Zionist pro-war bias” and “genocide whitewashing” only seem that way to you because you’ve assumed an extremist position on the issue?
When looking at the bylines of many of those laid off, I noticed that many had written about 2-3 articles per month. I don't know how journalism works but it seems to me that low of productivity cannot be sustainable. Example, an 8 year tech columnist had about 15 articles since August and one was a black Friday article. With all the tech news happening today, this output feels low.
Those aren't comparable jobs. Reporters report; they go to locations, they develop sources, they make phone calls. Columnists opine, or synthesize other people's reporting.
I'm not bullish on the future of newspapers generally but this is the thing you're afraid of when you think about how they're receding: people conditioned to think that random Substacks or Engadget or whatever were ever doing serious first-draft-of-history journalism. A huge percentage of everything people read online is based on reporting work that's done at a pace of 2-3 articles per month. You'll definitely miss it when it's gone!