I think I can say with little fear of contradiction that I know as much as anyone else in modern American journalism about the absolute, no-excuses necessity of operating in the black. In some ways, I know more because with big corporate operations there are lots of creative ways by which you can either hide from the public or hide from yourself that you’re operating at a loss or failing as a business. At least for a while, you can convince yourself that everything is great. You’re not losing money. You’re investing in growth. You’re focusing on quality. For this reason I’ve always seen news organization layoffs at least somewhat differently from many others who believe deeply in journalism. All the merit and great stories and hard work just melts into the background when you face the absolute necessity of making payroll. It’s a brutal taskmaster.
That’s not what’s happening at The Washington Post, and not simply because, of course, Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.
But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them. I’ve seen this a number of times up close. Eventually it’s too much.
What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … often it’s refocusing on the great underserved middle of the electorate. (Where’d that last part come from? Who do you think billionaires spend their days talking to?) The consultants and tech-adjacent efficiency and innovation bros are responsible for the rest. The guys who make this case are from a never-ending — life as spontaneous generation from the inanimate soil — list of consultants who speak billionaire.
If you’ve been in the news-publishing business over the last few decades you know the type. (Last year I did a post explaining this stage of the cycle.) Check out the guys Chris Hughes brought in at The New Republic after he got antsy. They often come out of the tech world or the parts of the media world adjacent to tech. But the key is they speak billionaire, a language rife in talk of innovation, scale, synergies, efficiencies. Moving fast and breaking things and also how hard can this really be? Have you seen the newspaper folks? We can do better and it won’t be hard.
So innovations and efficiencies get a go. With Jeff Bezos, he also had to get right with Trump. There was a critical failure to anticipate the major drop-off in news interest after the 2020 election. That’s on Bezos and whoever he had running the publishing side of the operation. Because that was an entirely foreseeable set of circumstances which they apparently did not foresee, did not plan for and did not react quickly to. For our purposes, the first thing to know is that the newspaper folks never take well to the innovation gospel. And it’s important to understand that the journalists and the editors seldom have any better idea of how to make the publication work as a business. Don’t assume that they do. It’s easy to valorize them. And you should valorize them. But don’t valorize them to the degree or in the way that it makes you think they know how to make the operation work as a business. Really, it’s not their job. Hiring good and dedicated people will not, alone, get the job of making the operation work as a business done. What those people can usually understand intuitively, though, is that the innovation and efficiency-speak has almost nothing to do with how you break news or why people read anything.
Still, the boss likes what he’s hearing. And he goes with it. And here’s the critical point. A seed has been planted: he really doesn’t like the guff he’s getting from the help. And why does he need this anyway? This was never going to be a moneymaker. That was never the point. The salient point is that now the operation has been turned over to the consultants and billionaire-speakers with their talk of innovation and multi-media, multi-platform scale and the seeds have been planted for a curdled and resentful attitude toward the people who write the stories. And why do they have a union? Seriously, fuck that. The billionaire starts to get maybe a bit of a different idea of what the “problem” is with this operation.
Now we come to the pivot moment of the cycle. It turns out the innovation and scale mumbo-jumbo isn’t really working. It’s not making any new people want to read your paper and you’re seriously bumming out your readership which, somewhat like your employers, you’re beginning to feel a certain level of resentment toward. That readership was already in at least longterm decline. Now you’re actually driving people away. And the new people, to the extent they exist and aren’t bought as commodity eyeballs, aren’t remotely filling the gap. Your staff meanwhile are increasingly angry and resentful. The ones who can are already leaving. And screw them anyway, right? If they want to self-cut, let them. That just helps with the bottom line.
At some point the billionaire realizes that as awesome as efficiencies and scale and serving the underserved middle is … well, this isn’t working. Who are we fooling? The billionaire can see that if he’s self-made. Give him his due. It turns out this is hard. And this is the kicker: He’s bored. This isn’t fun.
So the answer is: fuck this whole thing. The staff sucks. The readership sucks. This is when the self-immolation cuts start. If there’s one thing a local paper needs, one thing a metro paper needs, it’s sports. If you can’t do sports, which has a mass audience, you can’t do anything. Maybe you decided in a hard-headed moment that you can’t fund an international section. The Times and the Journal will do that. Not us. It’s not crazy. When you cut your sports section, it’s because you actually don’t want the paper to exist anymore.
Why not just sell?
Well, here’s why. If you sell, it means you failed. You’re a billionaire and somehow you couldn’t manage to be the owner of a storied newspaper. If you can cover the losses, how hard can that be? And if you’re not willing to cover the losses, how hard can it be? You’re already down on the people who run it. You’ve built Amazon. The burbling resentments play a role in forestalling this option. The key is that selling the thing is a kind of admission of failure. And personal failure isn’t an option. Institutional failure? Well, shit happens. That’s just a hardheaded business decision — something the newspaper business folks weren’t badass enough look at head on and not flinch.
My best sense, inferring from the decision to shutter the sports page, is that the near term-plan is to cut the Post’s grounding in metro D.C. and try to turn it into a Pulitzer mill. Hold on to the White House and Hill teams and get awards. Anyone who knows anything about the newspaper business knows this is a joke. But Bezos hasn’t been listening to actually newspaper folks for a few years.
It’s dead and there’s no point is the thinking. It’s the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale, see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle.