Tag Archives: #WashingtonPost

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A half-hearted defense of Jeff Bezos

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.

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The subscription losses at The Washington Post say more about the subscribers than the newspaper itself

As would be expected, the whole of the professional media have been reacting to the significant layoffs at The Washington Post. I do not normally read Frank Luntz, but, lazing in bed this frosty morning, and scrolling through Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — I clicked on the linked article from the BBC. It was not particularly different from dozens of others, until I got to the very last paragraph:

The Post’s financial woes and falling subscriber base stand in contrast to The New York Times, which reported on Wednesday that it added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025.

Thud!

Clearly, the Times had been doing something right, while the Post has been doing things wrong.

We have previously reported on how owner Jeff Bezos’ decision that The Washington Post not make any endorsement for President in 2024 cost the newspaper hundreds of thousand of subscriptions.

Since the newspaper started making presidential candidate endorsements in the 1970s, every time they have made one, it was an endorsement of the Democratic candidate. That includes Walter Mondale in 1984, who went on to lose every state except Minnesota, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and so on and so on. In 2016, while the Post listed her many failures, the editors expressed enthusiasm for the odious Hillary Clinton. The newspaper endorsed the semi-comatose Joe Biden in 2020; if conservative bloggers could see that Mr Biden was in serious decline even before the election, surely the reporters who covered him could see it up close, but they all kept it quiet. And while owner Jeff Bezos spiked it, there was an apparently already written endorsement of the inept Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024.

The Post’s subscribers simply expected an endorsement of Mrs Emhoff, and 250,000+ cancelled subscriptions later, everyone knew it.

Another 75,000 digital subscriptions were cancelled following an announced change to the opinion section to a more libertarian leaning.

To me, this says more about the subscribers the newspaper lost than it does about the Post. Over 325,000 now former subscribers wanted to read pablum that matched their political beliefs than the actual news. Mr Bezos apparently believed that the newspaper could stem its losses by becoming more appealing to normal people, but it has apparently not worked.

So, what has the Times been doing right? Part of it stems from their tremendous reputation as the newspaper of record for the United States. And part stems from the fact that while the newspaper editorially supports liberals, the news sections are mostly balanced.

While I regret that the Post lost so many subscribers, I take some schadenfreude satisfaction that the 325,000+ former subscribers were gnashing their teeth and screaming in apoplexy on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

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Can The Washington Post be saved? The newspaper industry has updated as much as possible, but it's still 18th century technology.

We have previously reported on how owner Jeff Bezos’ decision that The Washington Post not make any endorsement for President in 2024 cost the newspaper hundreds of thousand of subscriptions.

But now columnist Joe Concha of the New York Post says that Mr Bezos is doing what is necessary to save one of our nation’s newspapers of record:

Three cheers for Jeff Bezos, fighting to save The Washington Post from itself

By Joe Concha | Thursday, March 6, 2025 6:52 PM EST

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs — but making his Washington Post staffers face reality may be his toughest-ever career challenge.

A long time ago in a media galaxy that now seems far, far away, the Post was one of the most respected newspapers in the country, capturing 68 Pulitzers in the process. Continue reading →

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Karma comes to Taylor Lorenz!

Our regular readers, both of them, will remember Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Miss Lorenz most significant claim to fame was her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, the owner of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. The left hated LoTT, because Miss Raichik’s schtick was to find the idiocy that the left were posting to TikTok — and there was a lot of it — and expose it far more widely, to the ridicule of the libs. At the time, Miss Raichik was working as a real estate agent, and the exposure was designed to cost Miss Raichik her job.

In the end, it simply made Miss Raichik more popular and wealthy, but it also made Miss Lorenz more of a public figure as well, invited to some of the hoitiest and toitiest of Hollywood soirees.

Of course, despite her insistence that everybody wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — though she subsequently deleted it, she informed readers that she was at least somewhat immunocompromised — as late as August of 2023, she didn’t wear one herself.

Well, in a true sauce for the goose moment, it seems that Miss Lorenz has been outed for something. From NPR, not exactly an evil reich-wing site:

‘Washington Post’ reviews star columnist Taylor Lorenz’s ‘war criminal’ jab at Biden

by David Folkenflik | Thursday, August 15, 2024 | 7:55 PM EDT

Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.

The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”

I am thoroughly amused.

A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.

Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.

“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.

The Post has already been cutting staff, due to the newspaper losing a lot of money. If Miss Lorenz loses her job over this — something which is certainly not guaranteed — would it not be a delicious bit of karma for trying to cost Miss Raichik her real estate position?

Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.

If that is true, then yes, Miss Lorenz has admitted posting it on Instagram. Perhaps she thought it was a joke, but as a social media savvy reporter, she should have realized just what a stink this would cause, as well as understanding that once something goes out into the internet, it can be seen by the wrong people, and used against her. Using utter stupidity as an excuse isn’t a good look.

Perhaps Miss Lorenz is now learning about sauce for the goose!

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Journolism: How can we call the credentialed media actually credentialed these days? They deliberately concealed Joe Biden's descent into dementia because they hate Donald Trump so much

No, that’s not a typo in the headline! The spelling ‘journolism’ or ‘journolist’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity.

Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19th, she wrote:

President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.

Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops!

Trump has done Biden a favor over the past few months by painting the president as an infirm, doddering old man. If Biden appears even remotely sane, alert and engaged at the debates, he will have defied expectations. Moreover, Biden already accomplished an important component of a successful debate. In getting out in front to reach quick agreements with CNN and ABC, the president might have snagged, for the CNN-hosted June 27 debate in Atlanta, two of the most competent moderators available. Continue reading →

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I know how to save The Washington Post! Find a new billionaire owner who doesn't care if the paper is losing money!

I know how to save The Washington Post! Just have Jeff Bezos, net worth $196 billion as of June 4, 2024, owner of the newspaper, give it to MacKenzie Scott, net worth $33.3 billion as of June 4, 2024, Mr Bezos’ ex-wife and a noted philanthropist who has no problem in giving away her money. Just a straight-up reassignment! Mr Bezos stops losing $77 to $100 million a year on the Post, and Miss Scott, with five times as much money as Patrick Soon-Shiong, net worth $6.3 billion as of June 4, 2024, and who is finding the Los Angeles Times’ losses too much to bear, can easily handle losing money, because she doesn’t seem to care if she makes money or not. Continue reading →

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Maybe Jeff Bezos could spend some of those tax savings on The Washington Post?

I will admit it: I liked the way that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, to save it when the Graham family were running out of money. Full disclosure: I am a basic digital subscriber to the Post. I have previously said that I appreciated billionaires who bought newspapers, to fail an otherwise failing industry, as long as they understood that losses were inevitable. Sadly, Mr Bezos isn’t too happy with that last part. We have also noted that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire who bought the Los Angeles Times, with a piddling $5.9 billion to his name, might feel much more pressure than Mr Bezos, current guesstimated net worth of $194.1 billion, in taking $40-$50 million a year losses.

Well, perhaps Mr Bezos can put a little less pressure on the Post, now that he’s made this money-saving move:

Jeff Bezos will save over $600 million in taxes by moving to Miami

by Robert Frank | Monday, February 12, 2024

  • Last year, Bezos announced on Instagram that he was leaving Seattle after nearly 30 years to move to Miami.

  • In 2022 Washington state imposed a new, 7% capital gains tax on sales of stocks or bonds of more than $250,000.

  • Bezos plans to unload 50 million shares of Amazon before Jan. 31, 2025. Posting those sales in Florida will save him at least $610 million.

Jeff Bezos’ $2 billion stock sale last week came with an added perk: no state taxes.

Last year, Bezos announced on Instagram that he was leaving Seattle after nearly 30 years to move to Miami. He said the move was to be closer to his parents and his rocket launches at Blue Origin. The timing also suggested another reason: taxes.

In 2022 Washington state imposed a new, 7% capital gains tax on sales of stocks or bonds of more than $250,000. Washington state doesn’t have a personal income tax, so the new levy marked the first time Bezos would face state taxes on his stock sales.

Starting in 1998 Bezos sold billions of dollars worth of Amazon shares almost every year for more than two decades to fund his philanthropy, his space company Blue Origin, and more recently his $500 million mega yacht and a growing collection of mansions purchased with his fiancé Lauren Sanchez.

In 2022, when the tax took effect, Bezos stopped selling. He didn’t sell any Amazon stock in 2022 or 2023, gifting only $200 million of shares at the end of last year.

After his move to Miami, Bezos made up for lost time. Last week, a filing with the SEC revealed that Bezos launched a pre-scheduled stock-selling plan to unload 50 million shares before Jan. 31, 2025. At today’s price, that would total more than $8.7 billion.

Simply put, rapacious state governments trying to steal more money from the people who earned it wind up influencing the decisions of the people who earned that money. Mr Bezos had the freedom to move away from the left coast to the far more sensible Sunshine State, and did.

Florida has no state income tax or a tax on capital gains. So on the $2 billion sale last week, he saved $140 million that he would have paid to Washington state. On the entire sale of 50 million shares over the next year, he will save at least $610 million. And that’s assuming Amazon shares remain flat. If they continue to rise, the value of his shares — and his tax savings — will be even higher.

That’s some major bucks he doesn’t have to give to a left-wing state government, which would doubtlessly spend it on welfare and illegal aliens. Mr Bezos could, and should, spend some of those savings on the Post, to decrease the financial pressure on that august newspaper, at least if his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez doesn’t persuade him to waste more of it on yachts and mansions.

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The journolism of The Washington Post Why won't the professional media tell the whole truth?

No, I did not misspell journolism in the title of this article. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity, and boy, did The Washington Post demonstrate that today!

I normally use the headlines from articles in newspapers, with the hyperlink embedded in the headline, but today I am using a screen capture of the Post’s article, because I want to document for the reader the time it was published, at 12:28 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 4th, but updated at 7:03 PM. If you cannot see the image clearly enough, just click on it, and it will show up enlarged.

What we know about the mass shooting in Philadelphia

By Kim Bellware, Tamia Fowlkes, Kelsey Ables and María Luisa Paúl | Updated July 4, 2023 at 7:03 p.m. EDT | Published July 4, 2023 at 12:28 p.m. EDT

Five people were killed and two children were wounded in a Monday night mass killing in Philadelphia, authorities say. A man suspected of the shooting has been arrested after firing on victims “seemingly at random,” Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said during a Tuesday news conference.

“Let me crystal clear: What happened last night in our Kingsessing neighborhood was unimaginably disgusting and horrifying,” Outlaw said.

Here’s what we know about the shooting in the largely residential area in southwest Philadelphia.

The victims

The five who were killed are all male, Outlaw said Monday.

Police identified them as Daujan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 20; Dymir Stanton, 29; Joseph Wamah Jr., 31; and Ralph Moralis, 59. Brown’s address was unknown; the other victims all lived close to the scene of the shooting. The two wounded children, ages 2 and 13, were in stable condition late Monday, Outlaw said.

Two people were also injured by broken glass during the shooting, including the twin of the 2-year-old gunshot victim, Philadelphia Police staff inspector Ernest Ransom said Tuesday.

“The suspect fired at a vehicle being operated by a mother who was driving her set of twins home,” Ransom said. “One of the twins suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. Their sibling sustained injuries to the eyes from shattered glass.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: National Media Instantly Sends Philly Mass Shooter Down the Memory Hole

That’s all pretty unremarkable, standard journalism. But here’s where the Post veers off into the weeds:

Who’s the shooter?

Two people were in custody in connection with the shooting, authorities said: a 40-year-old man who is suspected in the killings, and one person who may have fired at the shooter.

The gunman was shooting as police pursued him on foot and was found wearing a bulletproof vest and magazines, police said. He had an AR-style rifle and a handgun, as well as a police scanner, according to Outlaw. Police found about 50 spent shell cases, Outlaw said.

Charges are pending for the 40-year-old man suspected in the killings, police said Tuesday afternoon.

“The suspect, while wearing body armor, a ski mask and holding a AR-15-style assault rifle was observed at several locations near 56th Street near Chester Avenue and Springfield Avenue,” Ransom said. He noted that the suspect began shooting “aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked.”

There’s more at the original.

Everybody who pays any attention to Philadelphia news had heard, hours before the Post’s article was time-stamped, that the (alleged) shooter has been identified as Kimbrady Carriker, a 40-year-old black male, and he has a history of posting photos of himself on Facebook in women’s clothing, including earrings, tank tops, and at least one in which the outlines of a bra are showing. It has not been reported that he somehow thinks he’s really a woman, whether he’s just a cross-dresser, or whether he’s just clowning around, but that’s part of what we do know, and have known since well before the Post updated this article, yet the newspaper has kept this information from readers, readers who are paying good money for their subscriptions, because, Heaven forfend!, it isn’t politically correct.

I’m waiting to find out if Mr Carriker left us a ‘manifesto,’ the way the ‘transgender’ Nashville murderer, Audrey Hale, did, a ‘manifesto’ that the authorities have thus far refused to release, and have managed to keep from being leaked.

At least The New York Times managed to include:

In initial reports, police described the suspect as a 40-year-old male, but authorities later clarified that they were unsure of the suspect’s gender identity and in a news conference on Tuesday used the pronouns “they/them.”

It wasn’t just the Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an article time-stamped “an hour ago” when I opened it at 9:29 PM, said absolutely nothing about Mr Carriker being black, or anything about him being ‘transgender,’ a cross-dresser, or whatever.

The New York Post, our nation’s second-oldest newspaper, one which does not shy away from sensationalism, but one which is also unafraid of publishing the truth regardless of political correctness, did tell us about the alleged shooter.

The professional media love to tell us how special they are, because the First Amendment mentions the press specifically. Of course, the First Amendment is protecting the right to publish, and not somehow glorifying individual publishers, but the people at the Post and the Times and the Inquirer sure don’t like to see it that way. To me, the best way for an individual media company to glorify itself would be to simply tell the truth, and tell us the whole truth.

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I take no joy in seeing Washington Post employees getting laid off

I’ve said it before: I really love newspapers! I delivered the Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader — now combined as the Lexington Herald-Leader — when I was in junior high and high schools, and, being hearing impaired, I find it much easier to read the news than to watch and listen to it on television. More, television news stations are in the business of presenting stories which happen right away, stories which have a strong visual component. Only newspapers have the capacity to dig more deeply, to present more information than people can get from a thirty-second story on television; that’s just the nature of the different media forms. With the switch to a mostly digital format, newspapers are no longer stuck with assigned story length, save in the actual print editions.

More, running a conservative blog as I do, I like to cite credentialed media publications with a liberal reputation as my sources; this insulates me from criticism that my sources are somehow untrustworthy because they are conservative themselves.

And this is why I have been discouraged to learn about the pending layoffs at The Washington Post, and why I don’t share in the schadenfreude of others like Breitbart:

‘Mood Is Really Grim’ at Imploding Washington Post

by John Nolte | Thursday, December 15, 2022

More bad news is coming from the imploding Resistance Force that calls itself the Washington Post.

On Wednesday, Breitbart News informed you that the Washington Post, a far-left propaganda outlet devoted to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, has lost 500,000 subscribers since January 2021. This drops its subscription base to just 2.5 million.

The Post also announced to its staff of entitled Resistance Babies on Wednesday that layoffs were coming to its 2,500-person workforce. No numbers were yet available on the layoffs. All we know is that it will be a single percentage (1 to 9 percent) of the current workforce.

The response from our journalist elites was exactly what you’d expect from entitled babies:

There’s a lot more at the original, and Breitbart is not behind a paywall, so I’m not asking anything big for you to check out the rest yourselves. The Post’s own story is behind the paywall, so if you aren’t a subscriber, you won’t get more than a couple of paragraphs, unless you haven’t tried to access Post stories recently; you do get a couple of freebies every month.

The Washington Post announces more job cuts next year

The announcement comes amid a season of layoffs throughout the media industry and weeks after the paper said it will eliminate its stand-alone magazine

By Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison | Wednesday, December 14, 2022 | 2:31 PM EST | Updated: 6:21 PM EST

The Washington Post will continue to eliminate jobs early next year, Publisher Fred Ryan said Wednesday, weeks after the paper announced it will shutter its Sunday magazine and lay off 11 newsroom employees.

Ryan said at a companywide meeting that the cuts will probably amount to a “single-digit percentage” of the company’s 2,500 employees but did not provide specifics. He added, though, that the company will add new jobs to offset the loss of positions that are “no longer serving readers,” and that The Post’s total head count will not be reduced.

Later, in an email to staff, Ryan said that the plan to cut jobs “in no way signals that we are scaling back our ambitions” but that “like any business, The Post cannot keep investing resources in initiatives that do not meet our customers’ needs.”

The publisher walked out of the meeting after dozens of employees raised their hands and peppered him with questions. Plans for job cuts will be finalized “over the coming weeks,” Post spokeswoman Kathy Baird said in a statement.

The development comes during a difficult season for media workers, as companies across the industry have laid off workers and instituted hiring freezes. Citing “economic head winds” as a factor last month, The Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, announced the newspaper will end its weekly stand-alone magazine, along with the jobs of its 10 staffers. The magazine’s last issue will publish Dec. 25. The company also eliminated the job of Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman. None of those employees were offered new roles at the paper.

During Wednesday’s employee meeting, Ryan cited a difficult economic environment, particularly for companies reliant on advertising, and he acknowledged that “for those people whose positions will be eliminated, this will be a difficult time.”

There’s more at the original.

In this, I think of my favorite reporter, the Post’s Heather Long. I became familiar with her work when she was an economics reporter for CNN, and appreciated it for one simple reason: I could not tell, from her reporting, whether she was conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. And if I couldn’t tell, that meant she wasn’t pushing an agenda in her reporting; that’s the kind of thing that, for me, distinguishes between a journalist and a journolist.[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading

I’m not too worried about Miss Long’s job: she has, in a fairly brief time, worked her way up from being an economics reporter to one of the Post’s columnists and Editorial Board members. But she left CNN, and CNN later experienced layoffs, and now she’s with the Post, and they, too, are seeing layoffs.

So, what’s up? Miss Long, along with data analyst Andrew Van Dam, reported in June of last year that a lot of different types of businesses had responded to the panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it exactly the way I believe it should be spelled — by offering subscription services, for all sorts of things:

Subscriptions boomed during the coronavirus pandemic as Americans largely stuck in shutdown mode flocked to digital entertainment and signed up for regular home delivery of boxes of items such as clothes and chocolate. But what really set the past year apart was the increase in subscriptions in the hard-hit services sector. Owners of restaurants, hotels, home-repair companies and others upended their traditional business models to try subscriptions and often found more interest — and revenue — than they anticipated.

“This was really about flipping the business model for restaurants: paying before eating instead of eating before paying,” said Vinay Gupta, a winemaker who spearheaded the Summerlong Supper Club in Washington and New York City.

Upon reading that, my first thought was: if people are paying restaurants before eating, how are the restaurant employees who depend on tips going to survive? But, further down:

The typical U.S. consumer now has two to three subscriptions, according to user data from budget app Mint and research by Tien Tzuo, author of “Subscribed” and chief executive of subscriptions platform Zuora.

There’s a growing trend of “power subscribers” with 10 or more recurring payments, according to budgeting app Truebill. The app’s users average 17 subscriptions and typically spend $145 a month, according to an analysis Truebill did for The Washington Post. Last spring during the shutdowns, Truebill users averaged 21 subscriptions, as people tried different entertainment, home workout and delivery services.

Perhaps, just perhaps, with inflation having spiked, and even with it coming down recently, has outpaced the average weekly earnings of Americans, some Americans are starting to dump some of those subscriptions? The Post had more than three million digital subscribers at the end of 2020, but were down to 2.7 million by October of 2021, and around 2.5 million now. Maybe the Post needs to find a way to make it more valuable to customers than Hulu?

Me? Miss Long turned me on to a $99.00 per year subscription in 2017, which increased to $104.94 in 2020, a 6.00% increase, and I’m now scheduled to be billed $120.00 next August, a 14.35% bump. Yeah, I’m still going to pay it; it’s still a lot cheaper than my subscription to The New York Times, at $17.00 every four weeks, or $221.00 a year, $5.49 a week, or $285.48 a year to The Philadelphia Inquirer, — which also wants federal government subsidies to support the newspaper industry — or the utterly hideous amount I pay for The Wall Street Journal.

Still, a question has to be asked: why is The Washington Post, one our nation’s premier newspapers, and one of the four listed ‘newspapers of record,’ starting to lose subscribers, and money? What must the Post differently to attract more readers, more paying readers, so that the newspaper starts to make money again? John Nolte blamed it on the liberal bias he sees in the Post, and their continued bias against Republicans and supporters of former President Trump. The New York Times said, “As the breakneck news pace of the Trump administration faded away, readers have turned elsewhere, and the paper’s push to expand beyond Beltway coverage hasn’t compensated for the loss.” Nevertheless, the Times also noted, “two of The Post’s top competitors — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — have added subscriptions since Mr. Trump left office.”

There are real differences between the two New York newspapers and the Post. A city of 8½ million people is a heck of a lot bigger market from which to draw, and The Wall Street Journal is a specialty publication which meets different needs, and appeals to a different customer base. But when the Post, supposedly the number one newspaper for reporting on our federal government, returns zero relevant returns on a site search for Sam Brinton, the ‘gender fluid, non-binary’ former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy who was fired for stealing suitcases from airports, it starts to look as though the newspaper either has a truly pathetic search engine, or is covering up for the utter embarrassment that Mr Brinton has brought upon the Biden Administration.

CNN’s online content is free, as is content from Fox News and MSNBC. Print newspapers, as they transition to a digital subscription medium, have to find ways to compete with free. The New York Times seems to be doing so, even if few other newspapers are, so the Post should be able to as well.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.