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.

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.

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.

I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.

FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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. But alas, we probably won't know. And there aren't many places left to report on it!

> 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, 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_.

> they refused to endorse a candidate.

> for them choosing not to endorse Harris

There was no "they" or "them" involved.

Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness

It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.

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.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro

> 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...

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.

That’s it.

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.

Then $100k.

And then you live in Cuba.

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.

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!

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.

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.