Saturday’s abrupt announcement that Will Lewis was stepping down as publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post acted as a bookend to a week in which the troubled newspaper itself became a major news story.
In the United States, reaction to the layoffs of more than 300 staff, more than a third of the newsroom, split predictably along ideological lines. The Atlantic framed the cuts as “the Murder of The Washington Post”, presenting them as a deliberate dismantling of a democratic institution. A New Yorker piece by Ruth Marcus traced the chain of ownership decisions that led to this point.
Conservative publications such as National Review took a different view: Jeff Bezos, they argued, is not obliged to subsidise perpetual losses, and the outrage from journalists reflected an entitled assumption that billionaires should bankroll journalism indefinitely.
Some will regard the widespread mourning over the loss of a few hundred jobs at a single company as excessive. Others may see it as another example of the media’s fondness for navel-gazing. They may have a point. Still, this being a media column, a little more introspection is probably unavoidable.
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Both perspectives contain some truth. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted in its postmortem, losing a third of your staff does not simply mean doing the same work with fewer people; it fundamentally alters what coverage is possible. Yet, as New York Times media reporter and former Washington Post staffer Erik Wemple observed on Peter Kafka’s Channels podcast, the cuts merely return editorial headcount to where it stood when Bezos bought the paper 13 years ago.
One fact remains undeniable: Bezos has made a mess of running the Washington Post as a business. Conservative critics are right that newspaper owners cannot be expected to absorb losses indefinitely. But the reason the Post is now haemorrhaging money is that Bezos failed at the task he was supposedly brought in to perform. When he bought the paper from the Graham family in 2013, he was welcomed not just as a wealthy benefactor but as a figure who understood how to build digital businesses in an era of technological disruption.
For a time, that optimism appeared justified. The company upgraded its technology and significantly improved its website and apps. It invested in journalism and data analytics alike. It spun out Arc, its proprietary content management system, to other publishers, becoming a market leader (The Irish Times is among its users). These changes coincided with a surge in subscriptions and traffic during Donald Trump’s first term, and its newsroom headcount expanded to roughly 1,000. According to the then executive editor Marty Baron, Bezos largely stayed out of editorial decision-making, concentrating instead on digital strategy and growth.
The foundations of that success, however, were shakier than they appeared. The so-called Trump bump ended with Joe Biden’s election. Traffic fell, advertising revenue declined and subscriptions softened. It became increasingly clear that the Post had been outmanoeuvred by its great rival, the New York Times. Both organisations were pursuing the same ambition: to turn themselves into truly national media companies. The New York Times did so not only by expanding its journalism but by investing heavily in non-news products such as games and cookery, and by acquiring Wirecutter and the sports outlet The Athletic.
By the time Lewis arrived in 2022, cutbacks were already under discussion, but the Post seemed strategically adrift. How, exactly, would it distinguish itself? The answers were curious. Lewis announced plans for a social-media-focused “third newsroom” alongside news and opinion. There was talk, too, of moving from subscriptions to micropayments, with users paying per article. Such schemes have been proposed for two decades without ever working at scale. That Bezos’s team pursued them at all suggested a lack of strategic clarity.
For all the melodrama of a famous newspaper, a capricious tech billionaire and the daily theatrics of Trump-era Washington, much of what has happened at the Post is unexceptional. Across the US, once-great metropolitan newspapers have been hollowed out, their assets stripped by private equity and their newsrooms gutted
Then came the 2024 election. The decision not to endorse either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump infuriated readers, prompting 250,000 cancellations. That does not look like a sound commercial decision for the Washington Post, though it may have seemed prudent from the perspective of Amazon, or Bezos’s Blue Origin space venture.
Further decisions followed, including a rightward shift in the Opinion section. Perhaps this reflected a calculated response to the election’s much-discussed “vibe shift”. More plausibly, it was aimed at an audience of one, now resident in the White House.
One of the most consequential changes in the move from print to digital has been the transfer of power from advertisers to audiences. In the old model, advertising accounted for roughly 80 per cent of revenues. Today, subscribers make up the largest share of a much smaller pie. Actively alienating them is not an obvious strategy.
For all the melodrama of a famous newspaper, a capricious tech billionaire and the daily theatrics of Trump-era Washington, much of what has happened at the Post is unexceptional. Across the US, once-great metropolitan newspapers have been hollowed out, their assets stripped by private equity and their newsrooms gutted. In some cases, as at the Los Angeles Times, proprietors have imposed editorial lines aligned with their ideological preferences. That is hardly new, though the power of the platforms has complicated it further. Elsewhere, titles such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Salt Lake Tribune have survived by converting to non-profit models supported by philanthropy. That route may yet prove viable.
Still, only a small number of American newspapers ever had a realistic chance of becoming truly national institutions. Until last week, that number was three: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Now it is two.
