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.
To be clear, my main point here is that people seem to be in total denial that The Washington Post has been in decline for a while. Of course I don't wish being fired on anyone, but I don't think that it really has much value as a journalistic periodical at this point. Perhaps it happened while Bezos was in charge, perhaps it didn't, but I don't think all the staff there and who just got laid off have been producing a great product.
I don't think I would trust a newspaper where the journalist did NOT leak proceedings of company meetings!
Oh, so its the workers who are to blame!!!! Your timeline of the paper after 2017 is when bezos acquired...
> 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.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> 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.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?