How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
I mean if their reporting about everything but this one topic is good, perhaps their “Zionist pro-war bias” and “genocide whitewashing” only seem that way to you because you’ve assumed an extremist position on the issue?
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/arts/music/ye-kanye-west-...
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
It has nothing to do with Trump anf more to do with the 3 letter agencies control of the media. This sort of stuff is going on since a long time.
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
While not made specifically for that purpose, this extension[0][1] does a nice job without a lot of hassle, and it makes such pages accessible to others with a URL you can share. The downside is that dynamic content isn't supported.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/
https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Cooking-No-Recipe-Recipes/...
Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.
Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)
Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
All their partners hand over real cash for points to give their customers, that often either expire or are never redeemed. I think it was the Economist that stated that airlines operate as unregulated banks. Flying people around is a secondary thing they do.
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.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: ~200 newsroom staff, roughly $220M annual revenue, solidly profitable, seven Pulitzers.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.
For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.
NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.
If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
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.
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
This Guardian article from yesterday gives a complete overview of all the links found: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-file...
That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
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.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
Am I? I'm not the one claiming that
> the newspaper industry... was a ... lot better than [that which]'s come to replace it.
Sure, dwell on Manufacturing Consent in the 90s when journalism was strong and better resourced. But nowadays it seems quaint, like a picky review of a fancy 5-star restaurant when the restaurant industry is collapsing and people may not be able to afford food.
Journalism is collapsing, to be replaced by something worse, not better.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?
Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.
Not yet, but if you've looked at the trends, that's a real possibility. The New York Times doesn't have any problems not shared by other organizations like it, and I think it's important for such journalism organizations to exist.
It also provided tremendous access to the NYT, but most of those outlets are unhealthy or dying at this point ... because of the internet.
> I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
Who cares about them? Anyone can write an opinion column. That's not what we need newspapers for.
"I thought CBS news was crap so I stopped watching it for NBC News"
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.
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
A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decl...
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.
Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
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.
Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely.
I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
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.
4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
That there is a personal reason for why their two datapoints are before and after acquisition doesn't change that their two datapoints are before and after acquisition such that it's hard to use those two datapoints to exclude that the ownership had major effects on the quality of the paper's reporting, if anything, it seems extremely suggestive that it did.
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?
You have no more evidence that it declined before the acquisition than after it. It reads as some weird defense of Bezos and then you doubled down by saying management wasn't happy with employee backlash.
Anyways, I agree that the decline did start before the acquisition, like it started for all newspapers. The Internet killed the newspaper. Bezos was supposed to save 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~~ 2023 [WaPo fixed this after posting], 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.
"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
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_.
Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.
I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
> they refused to endorse a candidate.
> for them choosing not to endorse Harris
There was no "they" or "them" involved.
I don’t like the idea of a paper taking sides (even if, in this case, their endorsement aligned with my side).
It seems antithetical to the ideas of independent and non-partisan journalism.
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?
Why are newspapers picking sides at all?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/10/25/washin...
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
Nobody is claiming neutrality or specific issues like corn subsidies which cross party lines.
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.
> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.
This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
People don't like overt control of editorial by a billionaire owner obviously seeking to curry favor with the WH (and not just any WH but unquestionably the most overtly corrupt WH in history since the Pendleton Civil Service Act)
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
I'm not bullish on the future of newspapers generally but this is the thing you're afraid of when you think about how they're receding: people conditioned to think that random Substacks or Engadget or whatever were ever doing serious first-draft-of-history journalism. A huge percentage of everything people read online is based on reporting work that's done at a pace of 2-3 articles per month. You'll definitely miss it when it's gone!
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. I wonder how reflective it is of the rich retreating into bubbles in the COVID era and never emerging from them. Alas, we probably won't ever know. There aren't many places left to report on it!
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.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
The idea that billionaires are not actually billionaires because they cannot possibly sell their shares is not real.
In principle, Bezos could be in this because he values journalism and wants to promote it. There is no reason why this couldn't be a patronage system where one of the richest people in the world spends their money on something good for society.
Sure I suppose anything could be someone’s passion and that could explain why any amount of money would be spent.
But according to the article he is actually concerned about the amount, and I’m agreeing it’s a justified concern.
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.
That’s it.
That's it, that's how he did it.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.