Last week The Washington Post Co. laid off 30 percent of its staff (chopping 300 from the newsroom), and the chorus of woe wrote off The Post as a national leader. I wonder if that sells short Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner. After all, Bezos is known for smart new ideas, such as founding Amazon and quickly jettisoning business ideas (and employees) that don’t work. I note that The Post has sent packing the CEO Will Lewis, so the deck is clear for reinvention.
Among the ideas was one to have Bezos, with a net worth of $235 billion, just to keep pouring money into The Post. Bezos probably doesn’t work that way, and it would tie The Post to an owner who has squandered the public trust. A better idea — again a concession to the free market that Bezos fetishizes — would be to emulate The Guardian and set up a nonprofit trust. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see what the wily Bezos cooks up to stem the losses of The Post ($100 million in 2024, and more last year).
The Post was purchased by Bezos in 2013 for $250 million, and at first he spent heavily to keep up the standards of the paper and make it competitive digitally. Recently, among a hodgepodge of new ideas, the paper seemed to become a regional paper like The Seattle Times, investing heavily in building up metro reporters. That strategy implies strong regional advertising support, which has evaporated with the decline of department stores, once mainstay advertisers.
Previously The Post slighted the town and its suburbs by focusing on national politics. Interestingly, The Post in its Watergate prominence, had a newsroom of only 600 (the current size is 800, now cut down to 500). That national focus created room for some hyper-local free weeklies such as The City Paper, edited by Jack Shafer and owned by the Chicago Reader.
Meanwhile The Post prided itself on its inside sources in the government, whether that was Democratic- or Republican-led. It was, before the toppling of Nixon, a classic “insider paper,” like The New York Times, as opposed to “outsider media” like The Village Voice or The Nation. Bezos tried to steer a course akin to his free-market politics that disrupted the leftward drift of the Trump-obsessed newsroom. That lead to his decision to veto an endorsement of Kamala Harris, which labeled Bezos fatally as a Trump suckup.
My advice would be to position The Post as a non-ideological, post-Trump national and international paper, relying on upscale advertising like The New Yorker or Atlantic, and leveraging its location as the world capital, as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal do with New York — or as The Financial Times or The Economist exploit their London connections. It may also be that The Post, like its London-based counterparts, could be better written than the good, gray Times.
That outcome, headed by a distinguished editor such as the ideologically-heterodox Ezra Klein or Andrew Sullivan, could be the formula for an important publication. Is it maybe too predictable for the entrepreneurial Bezos? We shall soon learn.
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Prior to the cuts, WaPo had the third-largest newsroom among US newspapers, behind the New York Times (~1800) and the Wall Street Journal (not disclosed) and ahead of the LA Times (<400). After the cuts, still third. For purposes of comparison, the Guardian's newsrooms globally employ about 900, and The Economist carries about 100. I was struck, as you were, by where the axe fell: local news, sports, books, some overseas bureaus, etc., apparently they intend to focus on their core areas of competence, centered around politics, government, technology and national news. Bezos has previously said he wants the Post to gain readership in the rest of the country outside the Acela zone. Although it's clear that he wants to protect his other interests from Trump's vindictive attention, you might be right about where the Post is going. With 500 reporters focused on the national and international consequences of American politics and government, WaPo would still be a substantial primary news source, both feeding and dwarfing The Bulwark (~20…) and other Substack upstarts which primarily field pundits not show leather reporters.
What you don’t say, and what should be obvious, is that Bezos cut overhead as his minions try to negotiate a sale of the Post to anybody. The Post assisted Bezos, but now it is both a monetary and ideologically a drag that Bezos wants to end.