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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The part about financials

> 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.

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It's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means.

All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!

Unfortunately execs will pay for an expected ROI and the news business doesn't offer tremendous ROIs. If it did you'd see investment in it. It's only been able to float because of ads/classifieds and as venues for propaganda.

My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.

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.

Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.

Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.

"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.

Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.

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.

Depends on the industry and work. They are still paying top dollar for AI talent.

Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past

It lost a lot of subscribers because of its changed politics.

And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.

I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate.

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_.

I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?

> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step

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

Having an endorsement isn’t normal either.

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.

Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.

Washington posts tag line was “Democracy dies in darkness”.

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

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

You misunderstand what occurred. The paper prepared an endorsement and Bezos killed it.

> they refused to endorse a candidate.

> for them choosing not to endorse Harris

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

My point is that why were they picking a candidate to begin with, even before Bezos got involved. Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?

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.

> Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?

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.

I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.

My point is that isn’t there a difference between “we had to endorse Trump because Bezos made us do it” and “we were forced to not take a side”

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?

That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.

To add a little clarity, here's a link to (perhaps ironically) the Post's own reporting on the event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/10/25/washin...

https://archive.is/2rJgD

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.

"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.

But why are people ok with the fact that a newspaper was going to pick a candidate to begin with? Doesn’t that undermine their claims of non-partisanship?

Editorial boards publish opinion pieces. That is the function of the editorial page. Is "we believe that X will be a better president than Y" so different than "we believe that corn ethanol is bad policy" or "we believe that you should send your kids to public universities?"

Yes it is different. Because they go out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan. If you endorsed one candidate and the other one wins, how can we trust your reporting about the winning candidate for the duration of their tenure?

Nobody is claiming neutrality or specific issues like corn subsidies which cross party lines.

Editorial boards have never gone out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan.

People need a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs?

Billionaires need to own a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs

People definitely don't need a subscription service that pivots to reinforcing the owner's beliefs. Even that is probably giving Bezos too much credit, since it falsely suggests principles beyond "what will make me richer."

> 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,

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

And just a few paragraphs below, it described why it was losing subscribers like crazy at that time.

> 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.

Seventy-seven million in *2023

He allegedly spent $70M to market that dreadful documentary about Melania Trump. Surely he could afford spending that much every year to keep an historic paper afloat.

The one breaking box office records?

> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade

Show me some full theaters. Various GOP organizations have a well documented history of buying books to get them onto the best sellers lists.

Yup, RNC bought up Don Jr's books (both - Triggered and Liberal Privilege) in an attempt to boost it to best seller status

if your TDS continues for more than 4 hours, seek medical attention

Eh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.

Amazon hasn't done any theater stuff like this before, this is the first year they are putting multiple streaming movies into theaters as an experiment. They usually spend money on marketing just for the platform. This was likely a big success because it was double the projected box office everyone was expecting. Even bad PR is good for business sometimes.

That movie will be quite case study in media bias. Depending who is reporting on my social media feed, it was either the most successful movie of all time with every single showing at capacity, the run being extended, and gen z girls being the main demographic for a movie certain to clean up awards. Or it was a flop that lost money.

It can be both! You can fill up the seats with people that you pay to watch it!

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.

Instead of both-sides-ing this, you can look at objective data. Here's BoxOfficeMojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4287397889/. Right now it says $8.1M in the US, $75k worldwide. Not bad for a movie that cost $40M to make and about as much to market, huh?

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.

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