alt Hacker NewsHow Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
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It 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.
I 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.
We 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.
The 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.
To 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.
It'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.
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.
It'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!
I 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.
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The murder of the Washington Post has been ruled a suicide. Guess peddling a one sided world view is not very profitable.
Yes, _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.
I'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.