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.
Also, it seems there are a lot of paid posts on NYT.
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
This sort of nearly open corruption at NYT is worthy of a Trump operation, to be honest.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
You get that the economics underlying these claims about buying articles don't make much sense, right? The whole point of the NYT is that the newsfeed isn't the core business.
The newsfeed doesn't need to be the core business for NYTimes to sell full-page advertisements, nor does it need to be the core business to sell stories on preferred topics.
Sure. They could sell a lot of things that aren't core to their business. But why would they? Their next marginal dollar doesn't come from squeezing the news organization; in fact, the way things are trending, news is basically looking like it'll be a loss leader for them.
They are already selling ads, why would you think they wouldn't be raising revenue on the news side? Your argument that they wouldn't take money if it's not coming from the "core business" does not make sense economically. If your argument is that they wouldn't sell editorial selection of article topics, well, they did it publicly when they decided to report on the sale of a full page ad. Placement of articles on topics selected from the outside is usually far more discreet, with the proper PR firms mediating the selection, but the NYTimes is notorious for doing this.
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?
It's not a reason I myself would rely on to end a subscription but I'm glad for the data point and don't see the point in cross-examining. I'm thankful they took the time to answer my question.
> 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.
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
After subscribing for a decade I canceled NYT last yr because I felt it was leaning more into social media bait (which I dont blame them for business reasons). That plus they kept blocking Firefox with an unpassable captcha even though I was logged in.
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
>It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
While not made specifically for that purpose, this extension[0][1] does a nice job without a lot of hassle, and it makes such pages accessible to others with a URL you can share. The downside is that dynamic content isn't supported.
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.
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
> Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
Yeah I'm hooked on it for the moment. The previous games are entertaining once a day, and we share results amongst our family for fun, but the Crossplay game is a lot of fun head-to-head.
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.
Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
That the Post's predicament is a consequence of Bezos partisan editorial decisions. I don't like those decisions either, but I don't think they get close to the core problem the Post faces.
Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!
> 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.
What's the other national American newspaper --- not newsmagazine, 95% of what the Atlantic runs isn't reported --- besides the WSJ that's doing well right now?
Other than the NYT and WSJ, the only national example I can think of is The Guardian's US operation, but that one is supported by a trust plus recurring donations from readers.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.
Which is, in and of itself, a problem: I feel like we're trending towards a US news landscape where the NYT and their editorial board are the only ones setting the tone and discourse of print media.
It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on.
I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved.
It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
Bezos didn't buy DC, he bought a newspaper. The commenter was saying that the decline in quality was potentially unrelated to the acquisition and then immediately compared pre and post acquisition quality. That seems like a strange way to make that point and like it might suggest that the acquisition perhaps was related to its decline in quality.
The commenter said they moved back to DC in 2017 and noticed the change then.
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
Elementary reading skills would also make it obvious that I'm not talking about their move from and back to DC. Them moving back and forth from DC is certainly irrelevant to WaPo's quality.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
To be clear, my main point here is that people seem to be in total denial that The Washington Post has been in decline for a while. Of course I don't wish being fired on anyone, but I don't think that it really has much value as a journalistic periodical at this point. Perhaps it happened while Bezos was in charge, perhaps it didn't, but I don't think all the staff there and who just got laid off have been producing a great product.
The local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets are bare bones operations barely limping along.
Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
Washington Post has always been very strong covering US Politics in DC. That’s probably what drives subscribers more than anything. Reporters there have a lot of access to decision makers in Congress, White House, etc
A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
It's not a 0 or a 1. They had more staff doing it, now they have less. That means they now do 0.2, which is not 0 as you're implying, but it's still significantly worse than back when it was 1.
Newspapers seem to clock in anywhere between a 7th grade to 11th grade reading level. That’s just too much to ask of people these days.
Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely.
I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
To be fair, it's social media and search engines that killed The News. Every news outlet has been gutted by the need for profitability, and editors have always clashed with the interests of their benefactors.
The real value of newspaper was never the news; it was the paper. The moneymaker is the platform, not the content.
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
This is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits.
Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
Nah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.
Sure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)
We can rationalize the newspaper business all we want, but WaPo's downward spiral started with what's been described as a "gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days" before the election. That's when many cancelled their subscription.
> The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election
and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in ~~2013~~ 2023 [WaPo fixed this after posting], another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors.
It's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
Unfortunately execs will pay for an expected ROI and the news business doesn't offer tremendous ROIs. If it did you'd see investment in it. It's only been able to float because of ads/classifieds and as venues for propaganda.
My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.
If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.
However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.
It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.
Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.
Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.
"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.
He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
People definitely don't need a subscription service that pivots to reinforcing the owner's beliefs. Even that is probably giving Bezos too much credit, since it falsely suggests principles beyond "what will make me richer."
I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate.
I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?
We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.
I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.
"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.
But why are people ok with the fact that a newspaper was going to pick a candidate to begin with? Doesn’t that undermine their claims of non-partisanship?
Editorial boards publish opinion pieces. That is the function of the editorial page. Is "we believe that X will be a better president than Y" so different than "we believe that corn ethanol is bad policy" or "we believe that you should send your kids to public universities?"
> the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred,
Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.
'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.
So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.
And just a few paragraphs below, it described why it was losing subscribers like crazy at that time.
> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.
This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.
He allegedly spent $70M to market that dreadful documentary about Melania Trump. Surely he could afford spending that much every year to keep an historic paper afloat.
That movie will be quite case study in media bias. Depending who is reporting on my social media feed, it was either the most successful movie of all time with every single showing at capacity, the run being extended, and gen z girls being the main demographic for a movie certain to clean up awards. Or it was a flop that lost money.
It can be both! You can fill up the seats with people that you pay to watch it!
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
Instead of both-sides-ing this, you can look at objective data. Here's BoxOfficeMojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4287397889/. Right now it says $8.1M in the US, $75k worldwide. Not bad for a movie that cost $40M to make and about as much to market, huh?
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
Eh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.
Amazon hasn't done any theater stuff like this before, this is the first year they are putting multiple streaming movies into theaters as an experiment. They usually spend money on marketing just for the platform. This was likely a big success because it was double the projected box office everyone was expecting. Even bad PR is good for business sometimes.
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!
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
This is an ignorant take. The New York Times made a profit last year of $550 million. Clearly the problem isn't the internet -- nor should it be for a paper bought by JEFF BEZOS, the man arguably who did more to revolutionize selling stuff on the internet than any other individual.
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
It's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration.
Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
I genuinely don't get it. I just don't understand how billionaires think.
Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you.
So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs.
If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.
Is he going to login to etrade to market sell 100 mil of Amazon stock every year? 20% cap gains and then whatever additional tax the gross amount incurs? That will also lower the price.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
What is your point? I could burn $400 in my fireplace every year for 2,500 years before exhausting my current wealth. That doesn't mean it's not stupid.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
Yes, _Bezos_ brought down WaPo. Surely there's no other reason... Seeing as traditional news outlets are all doing so well across the board and trust in them is at all-time highs. It's the Billionaire.
He bought the company, changed the editor in chief, forced the editorial board to not make an endorsement in 2024. That decision alone helped drop thousands of subscribers due to its overt spiking from the Billionaire. So yes. He is to blame entirely for tanking the reputation of the WaPo to be nothing more than billionaire trumpet. That's going to turn off the vast majority of people who had subscribed to what the WaPo had been.
The article clearly said that in the first few years after Bezos the newspaper was doing very well and even expanded. It was also very successful during the first Trump administration. It just didn’t know what to do after the end of the first Trump presidency.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.
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.
Also, it seems there are a lot of paid posts on NYT.
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
This sort of nearly open corruption at NYT is worthy of a Trump operation, to be honest.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/arts/music/ye-kanye-west-...
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
You get that the economics underlying these claims about buying articles don't make much sense, right? The whole point of the NYT is that the newsfeed isn't the core business.
The newsfeed doesn't need to be the core business for NYTimes to sell full-page advertisements, nor does it need to be the core business to sell stories on preferred topics.
Sure. They could sell a lot of things that aren't core to their business. But why would they? Their next marginal dollar doesn't come from squeezing the news organization; in fact, the way things are trending, news is basically looking like it'll be a loss leader for them.
They are already selling ads, why would you think they wouldn't be raising revenue on the news side? Your argument that they wouldn't take money if it's not coming from the "core business" does not make sense economically. If your argument is that they wouldn't sell editorial selection of article topics, well, they did it publicly when they decided to report on the sale of a full page ad. Placement of articles on topics selected from the outside is usually far more discreet, with the proper PR firms mediating the selection, but the NYTimes is notorious for doing this.
It’s either a crossword or a religion.
When did you last subscribe?
Not the other commenter, but I subscribed till November 2024. Am I allowed to say that they're garbage?
You can say whatever you'd like! It's just a useful data point. Current subscribers, former subscribers, and non-subscribers have different takes.
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.
Same
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?
It's not a reason I myself would rely on to end a subscription but I'm glad for the data point and don't see the point in cross-examining. I'm thankful they took the time to answer my question.
You’re right, tptacek, I probably should’ve stayed out of this.
> 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.
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
After subscribing for a decade I canceled NYT last yr because I felt it was leaning more into social media bait (which I dont blame them for business reasons). That plus they kept blocking Firefox with an unpassable captcha even though I was logged in.
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
I've been debating a WSJ subscription for years; it helps that they have a very strong paywall, so there's a big convenience factor.
It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
>It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
While not made specifically for that purpose, this extension[0][1] does a nice job without a lot of hassle, and it makes such pages accessible to others with a URL you can share. The downside is that dynamic content isn't supported.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/
[1[ https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page
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 financial times is doing well and has a better model IMO: expensive with a professional audience, not the general public.
> professional audience, not the general public.
Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
Sadly, I fully expect to see the cover price of The Economist reach twice the federal minimum wage.
If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
Access to information is not a solution to that. You can’t educate people who refuse to learn.
Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
You mean Epstein confidant, Cambodian genocide denier Noam Chomsky? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the paper.
Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
The Noam Chomsky who told Epstein "I’m really fantasizing about the Caribbean island.", or a different one? /s
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
This Guardian article from yesterday gives a complete overview of all the links found: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-file...
I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
> for a "paper of record" model like the NYT
NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
Business news still has paying customers, its everyone else that is flailing
I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.
This is the modern media criticism equivalent of "I don't even own a television."
How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
Not a good analogy
> I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.
That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
> so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing.
Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?
Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.
Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
> You're stuck in the past
Am I? I'm not the one claiming that
> the newspaper industry... was a ... lot better than [that which]'s come to replace it.
I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
Exactly why should I read a paper that I find is flawed. The editorial board lost my trust.
they are not an unbiased news source, they profit from being biased toward what elites with money for a subscription want to hear
> And their solution was games.
For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.
NYT makes money from games?
I work with many people who pay for the subscription to play the games
I don't have numbers in front of me, but yes, NYT has basically said exactly that. Their games portfolio is a major driver of digital subscriptions.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
Their recipe and cocktail repository is excellent. It's a large part while I'm a subscriber.
I'm really confused. What is a "no recipe recipe cookbook"?
It's this one:
https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Cooking-No-Recipe-Recipes/...
Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.
Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)
Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.
> Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
There's a joke in the news industry that the NYT is a games company with a loss-making news organization attached to it as a side-project.
Like Harvard is a hedge fund with a school as a side project.
They have a games-only subscription option: https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/games/
Their recently shipped scrabble clone is excellent! One of the cleanest scrabble / words-with-friends implementations I've played.
Yeah I'm hooked on it for the moment. The previous games are entertaining once a day, and we share results amongst our family for fun, but the Crossplay game is a lot of fun head-to-head.
I'm not sure about all of the ones they host, but for the crossword app you need to subscribe for full access.
The modern NYT has been described as a games company that occasionally engages in journalism
Who has described them this way?
I mean, why not? Sometimes it seems to me that airlines make their money not on flights but on branded Credit Cards.
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.
Agree, if Bezos hadn’t alienated the readership, they’d probably be doing well.
I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.
Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
What seems false?
That the Post's predicament is a consequence of Bezos partisan editorial decisions. I don't like those decisions either, but I don't think they get close to the core problem the Post faces.
Seems false.
Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!
> 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.
What's the other national American newspaper --- not newsmagazine, 95% of what the Atlantic runs isn't reported --- besides the WSJ that's doing well right now?
Other than the NYT and WSJ, the only national example I can think of is The Guardian's US operation, but that one is supported by a trust plus recurring donations from readers.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: ~200 newsroom staff, roughly $220M annual revenue, solidly profitable, seven Pulitzers.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
Of those only the journal is a newspaper. The Atlantic is a magazine and economist/politico are focused on a single news sector
The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.
Which is, in and of itself, a problem: I feel like we're trending towards a US news landscape where the NYT and their editorial board are the only ones setting the tone and discourse of print media.
Also The Guardian and The Economist.
The Guardian has turned into Gawker with better spell checker. Everything I have read from them is culture war and extremely shallow lately.
in the English speaking world...
FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.
Subscribing to FAZ is closer to getting a new phone line or a gym membership than paying for a newspaper. Do they accept credit card now?
It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on.
I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved.
It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
>c. 2017
4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
It's just so odd that he chose to move back to DC some time after the Bezos acquisition! It's almost as if these are unrelated events...
Bezos didn't buy DC, he bought a newspaper. The commenter was saying that the decline in quality was potentially unrelated to the acquisition and then immediately compared pre and post acquisition quality. That seems like a strange way to make that point and like it might suggest that the acquisition perhaps was related to its decline in quality.
The commenter said they moved back to DC in 2017 and noticed the change then.
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
Elementary reading skills would also make it obvious that I'm not talking about their move from and back to DC. Them moving back and forth from DC is certainly irrelevant to WaPo's quality.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
... because they left DC before the acquisition ... and moved back to DC after the acquisition ...
To be clear, my main point here is that people seem to be in total denial that The Washington Post has been in decline for a while. Of course I don't wish being fired on anyone, but I don't think that it really has much value as a journalistic periodical at this point. Perhaps it happened while Bezos was in charge, perhaps it didn't, but I don't think all the staff there and who just got laid off have been producing a great product.
I don't think I would trust a newspaper where the journalist did NOT leak proceedings of company meetings!
Oh, so its the workers who are to blame!!!! Your timeline of the paper after 2017 is when bezos acquired...
The local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets are bare bones operations barely limping along.
Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
The outside force you're referring to is Facebook Marketplace.
I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
> I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP:
> The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
Washington Post has always been very strong covering US Politics in DC. That’s probably what drives subscribers more than anything. Reporters there have a lot of access to decision makers in Congress, White House, etc
A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
It's not a 0 or a 1. They had more staff doing it, now they have less. That means they now do 0.2, which is not 0 as you're implying, but it's still significantly worse than back when it was 1.
I feel the Internet makes legacy media less relevant.
In DC we had a hyper local free paper, the Express published by the Washington posts.
These papers were passed out by beloved members of the community. Made for good small talk while riding the metro.
Then the express was ended, the folks who passed out the papers were left without income.
I don't blame anyone in particular. Maybe newspapers are obsolete.
Newspapers seem to clock in anywhere between a 7th grade to 11th grade reading level. That’s just too much to ask of people these days.
Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely.
I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
https://archive.is/1CsCQ
To be fair, it's social media and search engines that killed The News. Every news outlet has been gutted by the need for profitability, and editors have always clashed with the interests of their benefactors.
The real value of newspaper was never the news; it was the paper. The moneymaker is the platform, not the content.
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
More like a death by a thousand cuts.
In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
This is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits.
Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
I still check all the news sites who's biases aren't too obvious. But my views aren't paying their bills.
Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
Nah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.
Sure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)
Just say Google. The need for keywords plastered everywhere (often hidden in the HTML) was their invention.
We can rationalize the newspaper business all we want, but WaPo's downward spiral started with what's been described as a "gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days" before the election. That's when many cancelled their subscription.
The article says they lost -$77M in 2023 and -$100M in 2024. That predates the endorsement thing.
The part about financials
> The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in ~~2013~~ 2023 [WaPo fixed this after posting], another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors.
It's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
Depends on the industry and work. They are still paying top dollar for AI talent.
Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past
Unfortunately execs will pay for an expected ROI and the news business doesn't offer tremendous ROIs. If it did you'd see investment in it. It's only been able to float because of ads/classifieds and as venues for propaganda.
My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.
If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.
However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.
It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.
Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.
Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.
"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.
He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
It lost a lot of subscribers because of its changed politics.
And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
People need a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs?
People definitely don't need a subscription service that pivots to reinforcing the owner's beliefs. Even that is probably giving Bezos too much credit, since it falsely suggests principles beyond "what will make me richer."
Billionaires need to own a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs
I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate.
I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.
To add a little clarity, here's a link to (perhaps ironically) the Post's own reporting on the event.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/10/25/washin...
https://archive.is/2rJgD
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?
> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step
Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
Having an endorsement isn’t normal either.
We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.
I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.
My point is that isn’t there a difference between “we had to endorse Trump because Bezos made us do it” and “we were forced to not take a side”
My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?
Why are newspapers picking sides at all?
You misunderstand what occurred. The paper prepared an endorsement and Bezos killed it.
> they refused to endorse a candidate.
> for them choosing not to endorse Harris
There was no "they" or "them" involved.
My point is that why were they picking a candidate to begin with, even before Bezos got involved. Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?
I don’t like the idea of a paper taking sides (even if, in this case, their endorsement aligned with my side).
It seems antithetical to the ideas of independent and non-partisan journalism.
> Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.
Washington posts tag line was “Democracy dies in darkness”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.
But why are people ok with the fact that a newspaper was going to pick a candidate to begin with? Doesn’t that undermine their claims of non-partisanship?
Editorial boards publish opinion pieces. That is the function of the editorial page. Is "we believe that X will be a better president than Y" so different than "we believe that corn ethanol is bad policy" or "we believe that you should send your kids to public universities?"
> the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred,
Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.
'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.
So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro
And just a few paragraphs below, it described why it was losing subscribers like crazy at that time.
> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.
This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.
Seventy-seven million in *2023
He allegedly spent $70M to market that dreadful documentary about Melania Trump. Surely he could afford spending that much every year to keep an historic paper afloat.
That movie will be quite case study in media bias. Depending who is reporting on my social media feed, it was either the most successful movie of all time with every single showing at capacity, the run being extended, and gen z girls being the main demographic for a movie certain to clean up awards. Or it was a flop that lost money.
It can be both! You can fill up the seats with people that you pay to watch it!
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
Instead of both-sides-ing this, you can look at objective data. Here's BoxOfficeMojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4287397889/. Right now it says $8.1M in the US, $75k worldwide. Not bad for a movie that cost $40M to make and about as much to market, huh?
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
The one breaking box office records?
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
Show me some full theaters. Various GOP organizations have a well documented history of buying books to get them onto the best sellers lists.
Yup, RNC bought up Don Jr's books (both - Triggered and Liberal Privilege) in an attempt to boost it to best seller status
Eh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.
Amazon hasn't done any theater stuff like this before, this is the first year they are putting multiple streaming movies into theaters as an experiment. They usually spend money on marketing just for the platform. This was likely a big success because it was double the projected box office everyone was expecting. Even bad PR is good for business sometimes.
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!
right, the internet didn't play any part
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
There is more to the New York Times Company than meets the eye [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...
That's the parent's point...
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
International prestige and internet-centered strategy (online games, lifestyle...).
This is an ignorant take. The New York Times made a profit last year of $550 million. Clearly the problem isn't the internet -- nor should it be for a paper bought by JEFF BEZOS, the man arguably who did more to revolutionize selling stuff on the internet than any other individual.
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
The post getting less liberal and more conservative seemed to harm its reputation in many circles, like CBS is getting now
The Good Billionaire? He buys journals to call other billionaires "evil".
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
It's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration.
Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
I genuinely don't get it. I just don't understand how billionaires think.
Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you.
So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs.
If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.
100M burns seems a little excessive?
Bezos could burn this amount every year for 2,500 years before exhausting his current wealth.
Is he going to login to etrade to market sell 100 mil of Amazon stock every year? 20% cap gains and then whatever additional tax the gross amount incurs? That will also lower the price.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
Why not? 100m is two days of AMZN trading volume.
The idea that billionaires are not actually billionaires because they cannot possibly sell their shares is not real.
What is your point? I could burn $400 in my fireplace every year for 2,500 years before exhausting my current wealth. That doesn't mean it's not stupid.
Power + Control >> Money.
That’s it.
Never attribute to vanity that which is adequately explained by despotism.
> I just don't understand how billionaires think.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
It wasn't for clout and prestige. It was to protect Amazon and Blue Origin from news critical coverage and from policy advocacy for regulations.
The murder of the Washington Post has been ruled a suicide. Guess peddling a one sided world view is not very profitable.
Yes, _Bezos_ brought down WaPo. Surely there's no other reason... Seeing as traditional news outlets are all doing so well across the board and trust in them is at all-time highs. It's the Billionaire.
He bought the company, changed the editor in chief, forced the editorial board to not make an endorsement in 2024. That decision alone helped drop thousands of subscribers due to its overt spiking from the Billionaire. So yes. He is to blame entirely for tanking the reputation of the WaPo to be nothing more than billionaire trumpet. That's going to turn off the vast majority of people who had subscribed to what the WaPo had been.
1. He bought it
That's it, that's how he did it.
The article clearly said that in the first few years after Bezos the newspaper was doing very well and even expanded. It was also very successful during the first Trump administration. It just didn’t know what to do after the end of the first Trump presidency.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.