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How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
- onetokeoverthe 9mo ago[dead]
- gamache 9mo agohttps://archive.is/1CsCQ https://archive.is/1CsCQ
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoTo be fair, it's social media and search engines that killed The News. Every news outlet has been gutted by the need for profitability, and editors have always clashed with the interests of their benefactors.
- porise 9mo agoJust say Google. The need for keywords plastered everywhere (often hidden in the HTML) was their invention.
- AceJohnny2 9mo agoNah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.
- tvink 9mo agoSure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)
- diego_moita 9mo agoMore like a death by a thousand cuts. In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
- mc32 9mo agoThis is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits. Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
- axus 9mo agoI still check all the news sites who's biases aren't too obvious. But my views aren't paying their bills. Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
- Legend2440 9mo agoThe real value of newspaper was never the news; it was the paper. The moneymaker is the platform, not the content. Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it. Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
- dmix 9mo agoThe part about financials > The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in ~~2013~~ 2023 [WaPo fixed this after posting], another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors.
- yearolinuxdsktp 9mo agoSeventy-seven million in *2023
- epistasis 9mo agoIt's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means. All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
- mc32 9mo agoUnfortunately execs will pay for an expected ROI and the news business doesn't offer tremendous ROIs. If it did you'd see investment in it. It's only been able to float because of ads/classifieds and as venues for propaganda.
- epistasis 9mo agoMy impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner. If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well. However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem. It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.
- coldpie 9mo ago[flagged]
- AlfredBarnes 9mo agoWhile I don't disagree, that is unrealistic.
- coldpie 9mo agoI'd love to hear more ideas for how we can reduce these peoples' power to control our society!
- quantummagic 9mo agoAll you're doing is giving the power to someone else. Giving way more power to politicians like Donald Trump. The reality is, there will always be powerful people, with outsized control and dominion over others; it's baked into the fabric of reality. Thinking otherwise is a utopian fantasy.
- EricDeb 9mo agowell ideally more power should be distributed amongst normal people
- quantummagic 9mo agoWishing it could be so, flies in the face of everything we know about human nature, power dynamics, and game theory.
- SJC_Hacker 9mo agoSupport locally owned, small businesses
- manuelmoreale 9mo agoThe French have a tool they used quite successfully during the revolution back in the late 1700s. Jokes aside, unless we go through major societal reforms (that would likely involve a lot of chaos) I don’t see this problem being fixed anytime soon.
- andytratt 9mo agoright, the internet didn't play any part
- guywithabike 9mo agoThe New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
- gordian-mind 9mo agoInternational prestige and internet-centered strategy (online games, lifestyle...).
- snarf21 9mo agoAs the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
- Exoristos 9mo agoThere is more to the New York Times Company than meets the eye [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_New_York_Times_Company?wprov=sfti1#Investments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...
- mbesto 9mo agoThat's the parent's point...
- teachrdan 9mo agoThis is an ignorant take. The New York Times made a profit last year of $550 million. Clearly the problem isn't the internet -- nor should it be for a paper bought by JEFF BEZOS, the man arguably who did more to revolutionize selling stuff on the internet than any other individual. Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
- rootusrootus 9mo agoIt seems to me that the only mainstream newspaper to figure out a workable solution so far is NYT. And their solution was games. One of these days that will be all that remains and people will forget what the NYT acronym stands for aside from Wordle.
- reliabilityguy 9mo agoNYT makes money from games?
- snapcaster 9mo agoI work with many people who pay for the subscription to play the games
- rootusrootus 9mo agoI don't have numbers in front of me, but yes, NYT has basically said exactly that. Their games portfolio is a major driver of digital subscriptions.
- shimman 9mo agoI wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
- barkerja 9mo agoTheir recipe and cocktail repository is excellent. It's a large part while I'm a subscriber.
- bigstrat2003 9mo agoI'm really confused. What is a "no recipe recipe cookbook"?
- 9mo ago
- openasocket 9mo agoI genuinely don't get it. I just don't understand how billionaires think. Everyone knows why he bought the Washington Post: it was for clout and prestige. Just like how the titans of industry built opera houses and libraries in centuries past. You aren't buying it to make a profit. You take care of something valued by society, and you win some respect from society. Conversely, if you burn that thing to the ground, society will hate you. So why is the profitability of the Washington Post such a concern all of a sudden? Sure, they lost $100M in 2024, but Bezos didn't buy the Post to make money! And it's not like money is tight. Bezos is worth over $250B; in the last few days alone the jump in AMZN stock increased his net worth by over $5B. If he were to hand that $5B over to the Washington Post, they could keep on losing money at that rate for another half of a century! The article makes this exact point in the last few paragraphs. If Bezos was genuinely concerned about alienating Trump or whatever, why not just sell the Post? Why try to undermine it like this? You are pissing off the people who like the Post, and I don't think the people who hate the Post are really going to care.
- Afforess 9mo agoPower + Control >> Money. That’s it.
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago100M burns seems a little excessive?
- UncleMeat 9mo agoBezos could burn this amount every year for 2,500 years before exhausting his current wealth.
- eudamoniac 9mo agoWhat is your point? I could burn $400 in my fireplace every year for 2,500 years before exhausting my current wealth. That doesn't mean it's not stupid.
- 9mo ago
- manesioz 9mo agoYes, _Bezos_ brought down WaPo. Surely there's no other reason... Seeing as traditional news outlets are all doing so well across the board and trust in them is at all-time highs. It's the Billionaire.
- miltonlost 9mo agoHe bought the company, changed the editor in chief, forced the editorial board to not make an endorsement in 2024. That decision alone helped drop thousands of subscribers due to its overt spiking from the Billionaire. So yes. He is to blame entirely for tanking the reputation of the WaPo to be nothing more than billionaire trumpet. That's going to turn off the vast majority of people who had subscribed to what the WaPo had been.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoThe local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets are bare bones operations barely limping along. Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
- earlyriser 9mo agoI'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
- palmotea 9mo ago> I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore? You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP: > The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
- input_sh 9mo agoIt's not a 0 or a 1. They had more staff doing it, now they have less. That means they now do 0.2, which is not 0 as you're implying, but it's still significantly worse than back when it was 1.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoWashington Post has always been very strong covering US Politics in DC. That’s probably what drives subscribers more than anything. Reporters there have a lot of access to decision makers in Congress, White House, etc A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
- tptacek 9mo agoThe outside force you're referring to is Facebook Marketplace.
- wellwelloctober 9mo agoIt's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription. Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on. I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved. It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
- ribosometronome 9mo ago>c. 2017 4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
- fluidcruft 9mo agoIt's just so odd that he chose to move back to DC some time after the Bezos acquisition! It's almost as if these are unrelated events...
- ribosometronome 9mo agoBezos didn't buy DC, he bought a newspaper. The commenter was saying that the decline in quality was potentially unrelated to the acquisition and then immediately compared pre and post acquisition quality. That seems like a strange way to make that point and like it might suggest that the acquisition perhaps was related to its decline in quality.
- fluidcruft 9mo ago
- tptacek 9mo agoI'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often. In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them. The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops. Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business.
- breakyerself 9mo agoNYT is good for games and cooking. Their news editors are garbage.
- tptacek 9mo agoWhen did you last subscribe?
- testdelacc1 9mo agoNot the other commenter, but I subscribed till November 2024. Am I allowed to say that they're garbage?
- tptacek 9mo agoYou can say whatever you'd like! It's just a useful data point. Current subscribers, former subscribers, and non-subscribers have different takes.
- 999900000999 9mo agoI feel the Internet makes legacy media less relevant. In DC we had a hyper local free paper, the Express published by the Washington posts. These papers were passed out by beloved members of the community. Made for good small talk while riding the metro. Then the express was ended, the folks who passed out the papers were left without income. I don't blame anyone in particular. Maybe newspapers are obsolete.
- mingus88 9mo agoNewspapers seem to clock in anywhere between a 7th grade to 11th grade reading level. That’s just too much to ask of people these days. Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely. I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
- afavour 9mo agoIt's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration. Fast forward and he's blocking the paper from endorsing presidential candidates (that alone lost 250k subscribers), he's reforming the opinion section to match the views of the current administration... and now he's just straight up destroying half of it. A lot has happened in his personal life too (divorced, remarried) and I'm curious what he'd actually say if he was to look back and reflect on the path taken. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
- mudil 9mo agoThe murder of the Washington Post has been ruled a suicide. Guess peddling a one sided world view is not very profitable.
- pluc 9mo ago1. He bought it That's it, that's how he did it.
- kccqzy 9mo agoThe article clearly said that in the first few years after Bezos the newspaper was doing very well and even expanded. It was also very successful during the first Trump administration. It just didn’t know what to do after the end of the first Trump presidency. > Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.
- hybrid_study 9mo agoWe can rationalize the newspaper business all we want, but WaPo's downward spiral started with what's been described as a "gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days" before the election. That's when many cancelled their subscription.
- dmix 9mo agoThe article says they lost -$77M in 2023 and -$100M in 2024. That predates the endorsement thing.
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoNo, the endorsement was in 2024.
- jakubmazanec 9mo agoNate Silver concurs and has some data on it [1]. [1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decline https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decl...
- inquirerGeneral 9mo ago[dead]
- hnburnsy 9mo agoWhen looking at the bylines of many of those laid off, I noticed that many had written about 2-3 articles per month. I don't know how journalism works but it seems to me that low of productivity cannot be sustainable. Example, an 8 year tech columnist had about 15 articles since August and one was a black Friday article. With all the tech news happening today, this output feels low.
- tptacek 9mo agoThose aren't comparable jobs. Reporters report; they go to locations, they develop sources, they make phone calls. Columnists opine, or synthesize other people's reporting. I'm not bullish on the future of newspapers generally but this is the thing you're afraid of when you think about how they're receding: people conditioned to think that random Substacks or Engadget or whatever were ever doing serious first-draft-of-history journalism. A huge percentage of everything people read online is based on reporting work that's done at a pace of 2-3 articles per month. You'll definitely miss it when it's gone!