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.
Is there any truth to the rumor that Kara Swisher is trying to build a consortium to buy WaPo?
Neil: Swisher thinks that Bezos has lately shown no interest in the Post, and she seems an unlikely person to purchase the Bezos issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsMaoSRmROM
I wonder if he’s interested in a football team.
David, thanks for providing a nicely sketched outline of where the Washington Post could possibly go in the future. Now Bexos needs to be read. your piece to give him some guidance.
There is no excuse, and no rationalization, for this filthy rich prick, who left his foreign correspondents stranded in war zones with no way home, and their co-workers had to start a GoFundMe to get them out of harm’s way. The only thing about him we might duly “underestimate” is his rottenness to the core.
https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/02/09/washington-post-reporters-stranded-in-war-zone-after-layoffs-474770/
Preach!
I think calling him a “filthy rich prick” is being kind.
Can you imagine? You’re a reporter in the middle of a war zone and you get an email saying you’re fired.
‘I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,’ Lizzie Johnson wrote on X.
And then your newspaper doesn’t even bother to get you in some kind of transportation to get you home?! You have to gofundme to get home?
JFC he’s so much more than pathetic. I despise him.
I kind of thought we were done giving tech titans the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his ex wife can buy the paper instead.
I think David’s idea for the Washington Post is right on. The paper needs a national and international audience of online subscribers, and it’s not going to get that with coverage of Maryland and northern Virginia, or with reviews of books and restaurants. It is going to get that by being the best place to find out what’s going on in the halls of Washington, D.C. Bezos has been a tolerant owner. It’s not his fault that the Post can’t support 800 journalists — and not his job to feed them all just because he’s rich.
Brewster’s fantasy for Bezos reviving the Post is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. It really depends on whether institutionalist wing of the liberal oligarchy can regain its footing after the initial Trump onslaught and possesses some core values other than simply doing whatever it takes to make money. So far rank opportunism has been trouncing high principles. It’s a complete slaughter. The tech giants have been fawning shamelessly over Trump and stroking his ego. Everybody feeds at the federal funding trough. Their main priority is to maintain access to it.
For Bezos the Post was just a plaything. Absorbing its losses was not an issue so long as the rest of his empire was thriving. The message from Trump to Bezos was that your hobby newspaper is threatening the wellbeing of your principal economic interests. Bezos has fallen into line gloriously. “Melania”, anyone?
If Trumpism suddenly collapses spectacularly, guys like Bezos will surely adapt to whatever regime comes next. They now clearly understand the survival value of political flexibility. If we are accorded some sort of heartwarming restoration of the neoliberal elite order, then maybe the Post regains its former cultural cache and experiences another burst of life under Bezos. Trump’s name will be dropped from the Kennedy Center, and all the tacky gold leaf will be scraped from the White House walls. Maybe not exactly Camelot, but at least Camelittle.
That might happen. But I wouldn’t bet all my bitcoins on it. Too many eggs have been broken. This omelette is unlikely to get unscrambled.
“For Bezos the Post was just a plaything. ”
Yes, it was. We wanted to delude ourselves that there was some sort of high-minded noblesse oblige civic duty involved. Hah.