On Feb. 4 the Washington Post’s newsroom staff joined a Zoom call where they were informed that they would be facing a massive reduction in staffing in the coming days. They were told to expect an email with a subject line that would tell them their fate.
On that day, the entire sports desk, book section, most of the international desk and metro section were unceremoniously fired. In addition to those losses, the paper’s “Post Reports” podcast was suspended.
The Post’s owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper from the Graham family in 2013. Bezos, from the time he bought the paper up until the 2024 election, took a fairly hands off approach to running the paper, just as any newspaper owner should.
Since 2024 though, Bezos has become more and more involved with the day to day at the paper.
Bezos was once the gold standard for a newspaper owner, he used to brag that in his old age he would be proud of the time and money he spent on the paper to make it into an esteemed institution once again.
What he did not realize though was that he was buying into a regional newspaper that only due to its proximity to power was granted the reach it once had.
Bezos purchased the second largest paper in the United States, second only to the New York Times which is controlled by the Sulzberger family. It’s current publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, is a journalist by trade and has continually gone to bat for a strong and free press in this country.
Bezos by contrast has written, “increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.” In that same story, Bezos would go on to lament how the Washington Post used to have an “80% household penetration in the D.C. metro area.”
Bezos would say in the very next line, “While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance,” we now know what he meant when he wrote this. He would not allow the paper to keep taking his money and not expect anything in return.
Bezos has shown us what he really thinks of the paper. He once ran Super Bowl ads for and claimed to be proud to maintain it as the institution it truly is.
He does not care what happens to this paper and he has shown that he is perfectly willing to sit back and watch as the institution is ripped apart and sold for scrap to the next highest paying news rag around the corner.
The Washington Post will live on, but it will do so as a shell of itself. It will shed yet more subscribers and journalists and it seems its owner will do nothing to save it.
If “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” then Bezos will be the man who leads us into it.
Jeff, this is a message for you. Please turn the Post over to the people who it means the most to. Leave the paper to its experienced journalists and editors to run itself and maybe even bring in a little money on the side. Better yet, turn the paper into a non-profit and let it flourish serving the community that relies on it.
That is how you can save your legacy, that is how you can truly be the man who saved the Washington Post: Let it go.
