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.
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/arts/music/ye-kanye-west-...
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?
Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP:
> The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
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.
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
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.
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?
4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
> 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.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
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.
And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
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_.
Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
> they refused to endorse a candidate.
> for them choosing not to endorse Harris
There was no "they" or "them" involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
> 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.
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.
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
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!
That's it, that's how he did it.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.
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.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
> Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists
Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
> How do you expect that to go?
Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better.
> Better than what we have now, hopefully.
We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse.
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right?
Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor.
Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason.
There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations.
In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.
This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.
We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
I can’t think of a better policy suggestion for folks who have more than $100mm than this. Sort of like “corporate death penalty” mostly serves to distract from fines, “no more billionaires” conveniently distracts from e.g. adding tax brackets to pay for increasing the ones we have.
If that environment/framework has been unjust, how could you remedy it? A taking seems deeply problematic to me. That said, a renewal of our nation's antitrust laws might be a more effective and palatable approach.
The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
Jokes aside, unless we go through major societal reforms (that would likely involve a lot of chaos) I don’t see this problem being fixed anytime soon.
If someone says a valued family heirloom of mine is worth $110M I would be forced to sell it?
You're allowed to keep $100M of it! That's seriously a lot of money!
Also the slogan is a Marxist alternative theory of wealth and power which conflicts with some basic premises of being interested in startups and is debunked in pg readings.
Bezos was able to purchase one of the nation's most important news outlets because he is a billionaire. If his wealth was capped at $100M, he would have had to pool resources with many other ultra-wealthy individuals to effect the same purchase. These people would have competing interests, and would also themselves be open to being bought out because their ownership stake in the company would be small. This would be good for the country, because one person being able to turn an important news outlet into his personal propaganda machine is bad, as the article describes.
does his newspaper put out influential pieces which differ from the rest of the media? It looks identical to me - the people writing are all from the same pool.
Then $100k.
And then you live in Cuba.