A Sad, Angry Day at the Washington Post

Jeff Bezos doubles down on bad decisions.

Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash

The hard-working readers of Drezner’s World are probably aware that prior to this newsletter, I was a “Postie” — i.e., someone who wrote for the Washington Post.¹ Adam Kushner hired me at PostEverything to write online opinion pieces. We called my column Spoiler Alerts and it started soon after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. I wrote Spoiler Alerts for eight years, and felt pretty good about it most of the time, honored to be affiliated with WaPo. I occasionally got to participate in some really fun group projects at the paper.

It’s worth remembering that initially, Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post injected real energy into the newspaper. He empowered his executive editor Marty Baron. This 2021 New York Times writeup of Baron and Bezos jus before Baron retired speaks to how Bezos’ ownership was viewed only a few years ago:

In the days between hearing about the sale and the public announcement, Mr. Baron had realized that Mr. Bezos, who built Amazon by giving it years of “runway” to lose money in the name of long-term growth, had not bought The Post to continue shrinking it.

Mr. Bezos, who declined to be interviewed for this article, supplied resources as perhaps only one of the world’s wealthiest men operating a newly private company could. He appointed a new publisher and turned The Post’s business strategy — and, by extension, its journalistic one — upside down, stipulating that its outlook would change from local to national, even global. Since 2013, the newsroom head count has nearly doubled — it is expected to reach 1,010 this year — with 26 locations around the world, according to a spokeswoman.

That was then.

Yesterday the news was much grimmer.

Semafor’s Max Tani reported on the carnage within WaPo’s newsroom:

The Washington Post is making significant cuts in a bid to usher in the biggest strategic shift since being bought by billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2013.

The paper is beginning “a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray said in a call with staff on Wednesday morning.

Today is about “positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives, and what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has struggled to do that,” Murray said, according to Post staff who shared Murray’s remarks on the call under the condition of anonymity.

Murray announced a series of major changes to the storied newsroom: It’ll end sports coverage “in its current form,” close its book section, suspend its Post Reports podcast and shrink its international footprint. Murray said the Post will retain several of the sports reporters to join features and cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.”….

Murray said that politics and government remained the largest desk and would remain central to the paper, alongside national news. It plans to emphasize coverage of so-called futures, or “areas like science, health, medicine, technology, climate and business — advice and health and wellness, investigations and national features, especially with a focus on culture and online and daily life.”

While the Post was clearly in financial trouble, there is simply no way that mass layoffs enable a newspaper to, how you say, position themselves to become more essential to render’s lives. Furthermore, the Post’s losses amounted to less than a rounding error of Jeff Bexos’ net worth. His outlay for the Melania documentary would have covered a significant fraction of WaPo’s annual operating deficit.

Ashley Parker, a former Postie who jumped to the Atlantic last year, was savage in her assessment of yesterday’s bloodletting:

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer….

The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.

The Post journalists I know have shown a genuine willingness—even an eagerness—to evolve, a spirit of creativity and innovation at a time of transformation in the media. But its executives seem not to know where to lead it. Among the many failures here—of leadership, management, business, imagination, courage—the actual journalism stands strong.

So what or who is to blame for yesterday’s decision? The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last blames Bexos’ hand-picked publisher Will Lewis:

This is a story about incompetent leadership that destroyed the paper’s economic viability. It’s a story of self-mutilation….

Lewis’s tenure has been an unbroken streak of failure. Every single initiative he has undertaken became a cost-sink: The “third newsroom”; the pivot to Trump; the remaking of the Opinion section; the creation of an aggregator called “Ripple”; and, finally, the restructuring of the paper.

With each passing month, the Post’s financial losses snowballed under Lewis. And yet he is still at the Post.

Of course, Lewis was a (controversial) Bezos hire. And it’s difficult to underestimate just how catastrophic Bezos’ decisions over the past 18 months have been for the newspaper. As Tani notes in his story:

Bezos decided to adjust the publication’s political position – moving its editorial posture from being a strident voice of Washington’s old democratic order to a Trump-curious muted centrism – at precisely the moment when it could have capitalized on an upswing in Washington interest with the return of Trump and his radical overhaul of the federal government. The move – and more, its blunt public announcement – may have pleased Trump world, but turned out to be disastrous for the Post’s business. The non-endorsement infuriated the paper’s left-leaning local and national audience who felt betrayed by a paper that just a few years earlier had rolled out its slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Subscribers jumped ship, as did journalistic and business talent, many of whom left for the Times, independent new media ventures on Substack, and the resurgent Atlantic magazine, which seems to editorially mirror the approach to covering Trump that the Washington Post took during his first term.

Nate Silver was equally unsparing in his assessment of Bezos’ recent decisions:

In October, 2024, Bezos quashed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. While I’m sympathetic to the idea that news outlets should not endorse political candidates — much of the audience doesn’t understand the firewall between news and opinion pages — the timing was poor, and it understandably played into concerns about the increasing assertiveness of billionaires seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration and protect their financial interest. Around 250,000 people cancelled, about 10 percent of the Post’s digital subscriber base. Since then, the Post has also fired or let go many of its liberal columnists (some of whom wound up on Substack), replaced its leadership team with a goal of championing “personal liberties and free markets,” and has also seen a massive exodus from traditional news reporters.

There’s nothing wrong with personal liberties and free markets; I’m a fan of these things myself. Perhaps an explicitly centrist or center-right outlet could be a good business if it were starting from scratch; this is arguably something of a blind-spot even as the center-right has been hollowed out, either joining Team MAGA or Team Democrat. But it’s understandable that many subscribers felt betrayed. The Post rebuilt its brand from subscribers who wanted unflinching coverage of Trump, and then it pulled the rug out. And it doesn’t provide as much coverage in areas ranging from culture to real estate to Wordle that have long been profit centers for the Times.

And now it’s paying the price for that.

The truly odd thing is that Bezos seems content to just let the paper wither on the vine. In a separate report, Semafor’s Tani writes that there are plenty of folks interested in buying and running the newspaper, but Bezos ain’t selling: “According to multiple senior media executives, plenty of media companies and wealthy individuals would be interested in acquiring the Post if it ever goes up for sale, but people who have spoken to Bezos say they remain unconvinced he wants to sell it.”

The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis provides a obituary for the Post’s sports department, while also offering up a warning against the temptation of nostalgia: “we ought to resist nostalgia for two reasons. First, nostalgia does little to polish the circulating résumés of the Post sportswriters who lost their jobs. Second, nostalgia is liable to make you wistful. What happened today should make you angry.”

I tend to agree. It’s infuriating to watch a guy who seemed to avoid the traps that frequently ensnared new media moguls wind up as the living embodiment of an SNL fake ad:

I wish all the Washington Post reporters laid off today the best of luck finding new places of employment. And I wish Bezos and Lewis could engage in some honest self-reflection before making more catastrophic decisions.

1. I wrote opinion pieces, not news pieces. Remember, I’m not a journalist.