I have frequently said that I appreciated billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for buying The Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013. The family didn’t really want to sell the newspaper, but the Post was losing money every year, and they just couldn’t afford to keep it going. We don’t know when the Grahams would have had to declare bankruptcy, but it couldn’t have been much longer.
Mr Bezos, for his part, mostly kept his hands off the newspaper. But losses continued to mount, reportedly $100 million in 2023, $77 million in 2024, and $100 million again in 2025. The owner could afford to keep things going the way they were, but finally decided that enough is enough.
Naturally Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — was full of sob stories about the poor, poor laid off journalists, and I have sympathy for them as well: I hate to see anyone who hasn’t broken the law lose his job. But then I saw this from WUSA CBS Channel 9:
The situation we are in right now is entirely up to the abysmal mismanagement by The Washington Post leaders,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter with The Washington Post.
Kaplan says she takes issue with the positioning that the publication is losing subscribers because of the quality of work of her colleagues. She says the layoffs are going to have a profound impact on the already empty newsrooms. “I don’t know how I go back to work and do my job without all the people who were laid off yesterday,” she added.
To judge from the way she phrased it, Miss Kaplan is one of those who was not laid off. But this brought to mind another story, from my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach:
From that Climate Colored Goggles link in the first tweet
The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.
Everything changed on Wednesday morning.
The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.
The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’s climate page here.
But, what are they really producing? How many articles? Anything of consequence? I rarely use the WP for my climate posts, and I rarely see any other Skeptics using their articles. Sounds like they are cutting a lot of bloat and dead weight. The WP is a business meant to make money, but are losing a ton because the product is bad.
If Phil Kerpen’s chart is correct, between 2020 and 2022, the Post’s global warming climate change reportorial staff increased six-fold in size. The department was cut back to 19 by 2025, so I suppose Miss Kaplan had plenty of friends, and is understandably distraught that 14 of them are now unemployed.
From Miss Kaplan’s biography:
Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. Her job has taken her to a research camp atop the Greenland ice sheet, a shrinking glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Indian Ocean islands threatened by sea level rise and disaster-struck communities across the United States. She was part of the team of Post journalists recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s human and environmental toll. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe at The Post.
Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, islands in the Indian Ocean? That sounds like a lot of money spent by a company which has lost $277 million over the last three years. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Bezos hasn’t really seen much of a return on the newspaper’s spending on this.
Then I saw this thanks to the tweet shown at the left by Streiff from RedState.
Just seventeen bylines — I assume that’s how Streiff researched it — in three months does not exactly seem like top productivity to me. If you were looking to cut costs, wouldn’t the least productive employees be the ones you’d lay off first?
There was my good friend Heather Long, who got out when the getting was good thanks to getting other job offers, who was sent several times to the cover the hoitiest and the toitiest at the World Economic Forum in the ski resort town of Davos in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect the newspaper to cover, but it was still an expensive trip to an expensive event. Perhaps the new Post will rely on Associated Press coverage?
But, as I said, this would be a half-hearted defense of Mr Bezos. Where, I have to ask, were the editors and managers who should have been seeing the less productive employees all along, the bosses who should have known, after the long series of business losses, that the fat needed to be trimmed, that economy and efficiency measures needed to be taken? That such wasn’t happening all along is directly on Mr Bezos, and the people he put in place to do that very thing.
Then there was the idiocy of canceling the endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024. Upon resuming editorial endorsements of Presidential candidates in 1976, the newspaper had always endorsed the Democratic candidate if they endorsed anyone at all, and the endorsement editorial was (supposedly) already written when Mr Bezos spiked it. Yes, Mrs Emhoff was as big a doofus as Mike Dukakis, the last Democratic presidential nominee the newspaper didn’t endorse — no endorsement was made in 1988 — but in the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome atmosphere in Washington and among the newspaper’s subscribers, it should have been allowed to go ahead, because it would have made exactly no difference in the outcome of the election, and the Post would not have lost a quarter million subscribers over the endorsement being spiked. Had Mr Bezos taken that decision in May, using as he did a return to the tradition of the newspaper not making any such endorsements, it would have been accepted, or after the election, in which it could have been easily accepted.
Then came the announcement of a change in editorial positions, to a more libertarian philosophy, and another 75,000 digital subscribers said, “See ya!” The change could have been made without the announcement, and without running off 75,000 subscribers.
At my old digital subscription rate of $129.00 per year, losing 325,000 subscribers means a loss of $41,925,000 in revenue. That’s a fairly substantial part of the reported $100 million loss for 2025.
So the newspaper is now offering new digital subscribers a first year for $40, which renews at $140 a year subsequently. I even made the “subscribe” button active for readers. But the newspaper would have lost a lot less money if Jeff Bezos hadn’t run off a bunch of current subscribers.
