The cuts at The Washington Post are brutal.
They are brutal for the paper’s readers, who lose crucial coverage like sports and international reporting. And they are brutal for hundreds of Post employees, including lots of people whose work I pay to read with my Post subscription.
The Post’s cuts have also led lots of people to point out the obvious — that Post owner Jeff Bezos, who is currently the world’s fourth-richest man, worth an estimated $261 billion, could easily fund the paper’s losses … forever, without ever noticing the tab.
For the record: I also wish that Bezos would take his loose change and spend it on journalism.
Note that I didn’t say “journalism instead of” because when you are talking about Bezos-level wealth, you don’t have to choose: You can pay for journalism and rockets and superyachts and Venetian weddings and parties in St. Barts. (And yes, I realize that Bezos’ Amazon expenditures on things like the “Melania” doc are different from Bezos’ personal spending. The point is, he can afford it. In the same way that I can afford to buy a fancy coffee now and then.)
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I’m also not weighing in on how much of the Post’s problems are the same problems facing every news organization, versus ones Bezos exacerbated by pivoting toward Trump. Or whether the new Post plan — focus on a handful of topics it thinks will resonate with a national audience, like politics and wellness — makes sense or is simply a too-late move already made by many Post competitors.
But the focus on Bezos underscores the problem the Post has been facing for years: It was a money-losing operation that relied on a billionaire’s goodwill. First, to buy it from its previous owners, who let it go for the price of a Joe Rogan podcast deal, and then to fund its losses for years.
Maybe Bezos really is sick of paying for the Post’s losses. Maybe funding the Post no longer syncs with a turns out, Donald Trump is actually good now, worldview. The point is that the Post has been in the can’t-win position of hoping Jeff Bezos would continue to fund those losses for years. Now he doesn’t want to. (Bezos has yet to comment publicly on the cuts; Matt Murray, the Post’s top editor, told his staff that the cuts are meant to help “reinvent The Washington Post for this new era. This work is difficult, but is essential.”)
Which, again, points out how precarious a position just about every news organization in the US is in right now.
There are a handful of really excellent publications, which are controlled by billionaires or very wealthy families — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News — that are aimed at an upscale, national audience, and they are doing well. There are some thriving startups and niche publications that tend to focus on topics that rich people — or their employers — will pay to learn more about. (Several of them, it turns out, are focused on power and Washington, DC — a sector the Post should have owned.) And there are various forms of aggregators that make a living by repackaging news other people generate, like newsletter publisher 1440.
And that’s … kind of it. The local news market is so bad we routinely use the word “desert” to describe it. There have been many attempts to solve that, and people keep trying new ways to tackle the problem. I wish all of them well because we really, really need local news. TV news is contracting because TV is contracting. Magazines are now frequently “brands attached to hotels or travel agencies.”
Faced with this grim reality, it’s natural to look at Bezos and think: Just pay for it. And again — I wish he would. But relying on billionaire goodwill is a hope, not a plan.
Journalism — no matter how much we right-size, automate, and innovate — is expensive. And up until the internet, journalism usually existed in the US in spite of those costs because it was bundled with other things people (subscribers, advertisers) were willing to pay for.
Now that bundle has been torn apart, so we need both new models that support what we have today — and ownership structures that will be satisfied with self-sustaining businesses, not ones with huge profit expectations. If I knew how to do that, I’d be doing it. I just know that hoping a billionaire will fix it isn’t the answer.
