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The 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 enormo
by dmix 9mo ago
The 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.
- mc32 9mo agoFew if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.
- UncleMeat 9mo agoThen Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump. "Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
- mc32 9mo agoLots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways. He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
- kenjackson 9mo agoDepends on the industry and work. They are still paying top dollar for AI talent.
- no_wizard 9mo agoBubble money is paying that out, much like in the past
- elorant 9mo agoHe allegedly spent $70M to market that dreadful documentary about Melania Trump. Surely he could afford spending that much every year to keep an historic paper afloat.
- delaminator 9mo agoThe one breaking box office records? > Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
- ryandvm 9mo agoShow me some full theaters. Various GOP organizations have a well documented history of buying books to get them onto the best sellers lists.
- myvoiceismypass 9mo agoYup, RNC bought up Don Jr's books (both - Triggered and Liberal Privilege) in an attempt to boost it to best seller status
- delaminator 9mo agoif your TDS continues for more than 4 hours, seek medical attention
- afavour 9mo agoEh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.
- dmix 9mo agoAmazon hasn't done any theater stuff like this before, this is the first year they are putting multiple streaming movies into theaters as an experiment. They usually spend money on marketing just for the platform. This was likely a big success because it was double the projected box office everyone was expecting. Even bad PR is good for business sometimes.
- TheOtherHobbes 9mo agoIt lost a lot of subscribers because of its changed politics. And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
- atonse 9mo agoI know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate. I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
- nemomarx 9mo agoI think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
- atonse 9mo agoHaving an endorsement isn’t normal either. We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post. I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
- tw04 9mo agoBecause the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.
- michaelt 9mo ago> 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, Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees. 'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc. So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro
- kccqzy 9mo agoAnd just a few paragraphs below, it described why it was losing subscribers like crazy at that time. > He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers. This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.