alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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It 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.
> 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.
And 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.
Seventy-seven million in *2023
He 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.
It'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!