The PostThis morning the Washington Post laid off more than 300 people, totaling a third of the organization. The paper has basically shut down its sports, books, and international sections. The metro section is down to roughly a dozen journalists. The Post as it existed last week, has ceased to exist. What happened? Most of the obituaries will blame environmental changes of technology and news consumption. These changes are real, but they are not why the Post is now in hospice. No, this is a story about incompetent leadership that destroyed the paper’s economic viability. It’s a story of self-mutilation. We’ve discussed the Post before and I’m not going to recapitulate the entire saga—you can read it here. The short version is that in 2023, Jeff Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher for the Post. As a business decision, the hire made no sense. Lewis was a disgraced Brit with no experience in American media and no track record of success in digital publishing. He was a reliable hack, though: He would do whatever he was told and clearly he had been told to make the paper friendlier to Donald Trump, no matter the cost. Lewis’s tenure has been an unbroken streak of failure. Every single initiative he has undertaken became a cost-sink: The “third newsroom”; the pivot to Trump; the remaking of the Opinion section; the creation of an aggregator called “Ripple”; and, finally, the restructuring of the paper. With each passing month, the Post’s financial losses snowballed under Lewis. And yet he is still at the Post.¹ If a newspaper’s publisher makes a bunch of decisions that lose money, and then the owner keeps the publisher while firing the staff who puts out the paper—none of this is really about the money, is it? Jeff Bezos is worth something like $250 billion. This past weekend he chose to lose about $60 million on a worshipful film about Melania Trump. In 2019 he spent $5 million on a 30-second ad for the Washington Post during the Super Bowl.² He has spent $40 million building a clock inside a mountain that will supposedly keep time for 10,000 years.³ A man like Jeff Bezos does not do anything because he has to. It has been decades since he was constrained by anything other than his own desires. What happened to the Washington Post over the last three years happened for one reason and one reason only: Because Jeff Bezos wanted it to be so. Because he gets off on civic vandalism. Share It would be nice if some other billionaire would buy the Post from Bezos. But that’s not going to happen as long as we live in an authoritarian context, because owning a media company is not safe unless you are a supplicant to the regime. All of which leaves us in a bad place. The free market will not save the Post, because its owner is immune to market signals. Politics will not save the Post, because so long as Republican voters demand authoritarianism, no one can own a media outlet without taking on outsized risk. As sad as it is to admit, the Washington Post is beyond help. Leave a comment 1 Lewis did not deign to join the Zoom call this morning where his colleagues were fired at his direction. What a coward. 2 The Post Super Bowl spot was vanity advertising at its worst. If you must spend money advertising your product, you want to max out ROI by reaching a high concentration of your total addressable market. You don’t want to pay to reach people who are never going to buy your product. And it’s not like the Post needed brand awareness. It’s already a household name. Running an ad for a newspaper during the Super Bowl was setting money on fire. 3 I love it when “rationalists” undertake unfalsifiable projects. |