Well, it looks like Jeff Bezos has decided to light the Washington Post on fire as he just can't seem to figure out how newspapers work. Josh Marshall, a 25-year veteran of online journalism, congratulates Bezos on getting to the "F this" part of the billionaire ownership lifecycle (also known as "Dunning-Krueger strikes again"):
Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.
But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them.
What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … The salient point is that now the operation has been turned over to the consultants and billionaire-speakers with their talk of innovation and multi-media, multi-platform scale and the seeds have been planted for a curdled and resentful attitude toward the people who write the stories. And why do they have a union? Seriously, fuck that. The billionaire starts to get maybe a bit of a different idea of what the “problem” is with this operation.
It’s dead and there’s no point is the thinking. It’s the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale, see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle.
Glenn Kessler, a 28-year veteran of the Post, agrees:
Under orders from the Post’s mega-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, one-third of the staff was laid off. Some entire newsroom departments — sports, books, audio — were eliminated. The metro staff, already decimated by reductions around the time of publisher Will Lewis’ arrival in 2024, was slashed even further. The foreign staff was also cut dramatically, with every correspondent based in the Middle East (Jerusalem, Cairo and Istanbul) laid off. The Post’s Ukraine correspondent was ditched in a war zone.
Not so long ago, during President Donald Trump’s first term, The New York Times and The Washington Post had about the same number of digital subscribers. But, wisely, the Times invested in expanding its offerings with acquisitions; readers could consume top-tier reporting or a range of other fare such as Wordle and The Athletic. Meanwhile, the Post cut back and shrank.
Now, the Post has roughly two million digital subscribers — maybe fewer — and the Times has 12 million. The Post’s travails were exacerbated by some Bezos decisions in recent years, such as canceling the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just 11 days before the 2024 election — a move that led more than 250,000 subscribers to cancel. A few months later, Bezos announced the opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” a turn to the right also intended to curry favor with Trump.
The number of substantial news outlets in this country has already dwindled to a handful, and Bezos has eliminated the attributes that made the Post so influential. The net result is that American journalism will be diminished — and too many revelatory stories and exposés now will never be written.
Let's not forget that it's in the interest of rich people that their fortunes not be scrutinized too closely, too.
This isn't confined to newspapers, of course. Look at Eddie Lampert's destruction of Sears, which I chronicled for years. Or just read Enshttification. The American economic system as popularized by the University of Chicago guarantees these outcomes.
Still, I'll miss the Post. But hey, at least I can still support some journalism directly.
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