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The Washington Post, one of America’s three national newspapers, has just laid off some 30 percent of its staff, following two previous rounds of layoffs and buyouts. The stripped-down Post will have a staff of under 600, compared to 2,800 people at The New York Times. The firings are on orders of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men.
The Post lost about $77 million in 2023, another $100 million in 2024, and even more last year. For Bezos, that’s petty cash. But having purchased one of American journalism’s crown jewels for $250 million in 2013, Bezos has decided to trash it rather than strengthen it, killing its independent editorial page and then cutting back the newsroom.
There are several superb extended articles, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and in our friend Matt Stoller’s Substack, explaining in detail why Bezos did what he did. We don’t need to rehash the details here. Bottom line: The Post turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, given Bezos’s other business interests with Trump.
It’s axiomatic that a strong and independent press is a pillar of democracy. Freedom of the press requires a press. So what is the remedy?
For decades, America’s three great national papers were sheltered by families with an ethical sense of the larger place of journalism in a democracy. The Grahams cherished the mission of the Post; the Sulzberger family kept faith with the Times. Even at The Wall Street Journal, the Bancroft family maintained the integrity of the news department.
Then in 2007, the Bancrofts sold the Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Long before Murdoch bought it, the Journal’s editorial page had been ludicrously far right. But its reporting on the corruptions of capitalism was first-rate. Murdoch, realizing the value of the franchise, left the newsroom largely intact.
The Graham family, meanwhile, brought the Post to new heights, defending the pursuit of the Watergate story against both the crude threats of the Nixon administration to destroy the paper and an extremely fearful corporate Post board.
Despite occasional lapses and blunders like paying far too much for The Boston Globe, the Sulzberger family continued to defend the integrity of the Times newsroom, and successfully invested in the conversion of a great legacy paper to a mixed-media product for a digital age without giving up print. But the Post bungled this transition. The Grahams could not decide whether and how to make the Post into a true national paper or how to maximize its reach on digital as well as print. Despite its virtuoso journalistic performance under Bezos’s first executive editor, Marty Baron, the Post lost money while the Times and the Journal each ran a profit.
Bottom line: We can’t rely on legacy families and their successors to keep great newspapers independent and financially strong. We need a different model.
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