More WaPo Thoughts
It's bad business to alienate key customers.
James Joyner beat me to posting about the current lay-offs at WaPo, but let me add to the conversation.
One key thought keeps rolling around in my head about the paper’s current situation: pissing off one of your core customer segments was a bad business move. And among the many things that Bezos is responsible for, that is a central part of this story.
Look, I thoroughly understand the problems facing journalism these days, and newspapers in particular. I understand the Post was already in trouble when Bezos bought it, and that the paper’s current business ills are not all his fault.
But.
But there is little doubt that one of the core constituencies within the paper’s subscriber base was college-educated, likely liberal-leaning voters who were concerned about the direction of the federal government under Trump and who wanted serious, forthright journalism that would hold a possible second Trump term to task. You know, the kind of people who liked the adoption of the phrase “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
However, Bezos sent a number of signals as Trump 2.0 was approaching that the paper was not going to be a forthright defender of democracy. For example, the decision 11 days before the election to issue a policy that the paper would not issue endorsements for elected office any longer, even as the editorial board had drafted a Harris endorsement, was a signal to that end.
I will readily agree that there might well be some logic to stopping the tradition of endorsements, which rarely seem to matter in any event. Having no endorsement was not the issue; the issue was the timing of the decision and the signal of taking a pro-Trump stance on the issue. Or, perhaps more to the main point I am making, if some of your subscribers think that a second Trump administration would be an assault on democracy, then the move on endorsements at that moment came across as a signal about Bezos’ shifting attitudes on Trump. At the time, it certainly felt like a Bezos obeying in advance, which was also the vibe of his and other techbros’ contributions to Trump’s inauguration.
Then came a number of high-profile resignations, with editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes’ resignation being one that really sticks in my mind (linked to the techbros contributions noted above). But I would note also Robert Kagan’s resignation over the endorsement issue and
All of this was soon followed by the shift on the editorial page to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” which, in turn, led to Ruth Marcus’ resignation. Certainly, my interpretation at the time was that Bezos wanted to turn away from discussions of Trump’s assault on democracy and good governance. And it was clearly what a lot of subscribers at the time thought, given the round of cancellations that followed.
Somewhere in all of that mess in early 2025, I decided to cancel my subscription as well, and have only occasionally noticed since.
I am not saying that all of this is the reason for the predicament the paper is in. Again, I understand, as well as a non-expert can, the challenges facing newspapers. Further, I am not trained in business, but I know enough to know that a struggling business should avoid pissing off a core part of its customer base. This was obvious to me a year ago.
By the way, I can certainly understand things like cutting sports, among other cuts. But I think that the core problem, and why this feels a bit like a death spiral to me, is that Bezos has damaged the paper’s reputation to the kinds of people he needs to subscribe. Not only does he need college-educated, left-of-center readers who value good journalism, but it also isn’t like he is going to make up the difference with MAGA types, as they will continue to hold the “mainstream media” in contempt.
I just remain more than a bit amazed at how stupid the last year or so has been in terms of the moves he has made with the paper.
I guess being a billionaire doesn’t mean you are a genius about everything after all.
Who knew?
I would also recommend this morning’s edition of The Daily: Bezos Guts The Washington Post.
What’s happening to the Post is what Bezos wants to happen.
The federal government, headed by Trump, is a big Amazon customer, also involved in regulations etc. that affect Amazon.
My guess is not pissing off Trump is a higher priority than staying popular with Washington Post core customers.
Come on. The Broligarchs are always right. Otherwise they wouldn’t be so rich.
Why, Adolf Muxk himself was so successful in alienating his core customers, that he no longer even needs to make cars in his Texla car factories!
Possibly worth noting that operating a newspaper catering to degreed left-of-center subscribers these days comes with a bigger business risk than a $100M normal operating loss: defending, and possibly losing, billion dollar lawsuits from Trump. While Bezos owns the paper through a limited-liability holding company, that may not be adequate protection to avoid being on the hook personally.
@Steven
I fully agree with that. Like it or not, there’s always capture of some sort. When the paper was subsidized by ads, it couldn’t piss off advertisers too much. Now, they can’t afford to piss off the ideological cohort that buys subscriptions.
But@charontwo: @Michael Cain really get at this pretty well:
The paper is, at best, a hobby. Amazon—and AWS—are core businesses. In the current atmosphere, he can’t afford to alienate the Trump administration.
Why he capitulated before the election even happened, though, I can’t explain.
I like to think that if I was worth $250B I would maintain my set of core values and do something to benefit society, even if it meant it cost me $100M a year. Heck, I would do it even if I was worth a measly $1B. I guess that’s what separates today’s filthy rich from the ones 100+ years ago who built libraries and charitable foundations.
@James Joyner:
This just doesn’t ring true to me. The man is worth $250B. And just what possible price could the Trump admin make his businesses pay? It just sounds like you’re justifying his pathetic capitulation and his greed.
ETA:
BTW, I understand that the government is a big customer of AWS. Yes, losing that contract would be huge. Is it really not worth the fight to take them to court because the contract might be canceled because of Trump’s pettiness? (I’m sure it would not be easy to outright cancel all government contracts at this point, though.)
Bezos runs more than one business. The WAPO is not the important to him. He understood that for his other businesses to do well, to avoid bogus DOJ investigations and lawsuits, he needed to at least not be on Trump’s bad side and then he went whole hog and made the Melania movie. From my POV it’s hard to blame the guy as it certainly looks like sucking up to Trump mostly works.
Steve
This is somewhat backwards given that China is eating America’s lunch on building data centers. Bezos has the power over Trump since the new economy is all about data centers and electricity. Great article in this weeks Wired about all the Chinese investments going on in America right under our noses.
@reid:
There’s a strong correlation between getting rich and having no core values except greed and solipsism.
@gVOR10: That certainly seems to be the case anymore. As I mentioned, at least the old robber barons did a lot of good with their wealth.
This is yet another result of Trump’s enshittification of our society from the very top.
I suppose I’m part of the core constituency subscriber base Dr. Taylor is talking about. Almost 50 years ago (God I’m old) I had a poli sci professor who required us to read a national newspaper every day. No Kansas City Times or KC Star, he made a point of saying–if you absolutely insisted you could read the St. Louis Post Dispatch, but really he wanted something comparable to the NY Times, The Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal, and he made it clear that he didn’t think there was anything else comparable to those three. Those were the glory days of All the President’s Men, so the Post was an easy choice for me.
My fond feelings for the Post remained after graduation, much more so than for the Times. (Although I subscribe to the digital edition of the Times, I’ve never really been a fan–the idea that it was liberal always seemed like a bad joke to me when it so clearly seemed to be corporatist, not truly left wing. I generally respected it, but never loved it.) I was disappointed with the changes Bezos made to the Post since the Trump reboot, but kept my subscription because I thought the journalism outside of the editorial page was still worth reading and supporting. But the most recent round has proved too much for me to stomach, so this week I canceled my Washington Post subscription. I can’t imagine cancellations make any difference to Bezos but I just couldn’t see any reason to send money to a news organization that didn’t want to pay reporters.
I wish I thought the loss of business from people like me mattered, or that there were enough of us to make someone else pick up the baton and give the kind of support to real reporting that the Post used to give. But I don’t.
What’s really hilarious about the Bezos Post is that just about every day sees a new editorial on some subject, the real message of which is “no one must ever ever ever ever ever tax billionaires.”
It makes me wonder if Bezos is as thin-skinned as Trump, or if he just hired a publisher who thinks he is.
Oh, and three times a week they publish an editorial slamming Mamdani for some new reason, because obviously the government of New York City is of prime interest to readers of the Washington Post…
No one in either Dr. Joyner’s post or Dr. Taylor’s has mentioned much about Bezos’s other interests. Kathy mentioned the Artemis Project as an aside but Blue Origin and SpaceX are in a competition on developing the lunar lander to be used if and when there really is a flight and a landing. Right now SpaceX has the contract but there have been a lot of delays in development and Blue Origin is working on a lander. Sean Duffy, acting NASA administrator said in October that NASA may use Blue Origin’s lander for Artemis III if SpaceX’s lander is too far behind schedule. Keeping on the good side of the Trump administration at this point is good business and shutting down or damping down a newspaper that Trump & Co. doesn’t like might help with the space business.
@Mr. Prosser:
Workload just landed on me with the trust of a Saturn V. I’ll try to post more extensively tomorrow. For now, Blue Moon (by guess who) is slated for a future Artemis mission, should more than the second one come to pass some year.
Meantime, Adolf’s lander requires an insane amount of launches for one trip, relies on technology and techniques not yet developed, and I’m unclear how they plan to refuel in lunar orbit (if they don’t, it will be good for 1 landing only).
The most amazing thing about Apollo is that it was studied, designed, built, tested, and launched in the space of eight years or so. It’s one advantage, compared to today, is that the system was far less complex than current rockets, computers, avionics, etc. A computer with like 64 K RAM uses, by necessity, short programs that are far less time consuming to write, test, debug, and deploy.
The space broligarchs expect someone else to pay for their pie-in-the-sky ventures like going to Mars. In 2025, XpaceS launched about 165 falcon 9 missions. impressive! About 125-130 were to loft Xtarlink satellite constellations. Which is why I call XpaceS an Internet Service Provider with a rocket factory.
To be clear and FWIW: I understand that Bezos a) doesn’t care about the paper, 2) has other business interests to protect, and 3) isn’t engaging in much introspection on any of this.
My point was simply to note that one of the reasons the paper’s problems are accelerating is that Bezos made a series of bad business decisions. Whether he cares or not doesn’t change the fact that those policy choices led to subscribers fleeing.
My 10,000 foot view is that the Washington Post was dead 10 years ago, but Bezos kept it alive for that long. Don’t take this as a defense of him, though.
Yes, he made decisions that drove away subscribers, but I am not sure it was viable before that. The internet has fundamentally wrecked the business model for newspapers, and only those organizations that can adapt will survive. I thought he would be able to lead the Post to adapt, but maybe not.
For instance, the San Jose Mercury-News, which I once upon a time read quite faithfully, has not adapted. Their online offering includes images of their printed pages. The crossword puzzles cannot be done online. The other word games, too. The comics are small and hard to read (the printed page is much higher resolution than a screen). And there’s no link to follow a story to a different page.
I considered them once the newspaper of record for the tech industry worldwide. Their business pages told me what I needed to know about computing around the world. I don’t know if that’s true any more, probably not.
(By the way, as a child of the West, I have a stubborn reluctance to have anything to do with the NYT. What has that got to do with me?)
And yet, I know that the internet has done this more than Gannett or Jeff Bezos. In some sense, being a guy that helped create the internet, I did it.
We are in a time of chaotic change in many ways. There are demographics that drive this. There is the internet. There is the imminent collapse of the fossil fuel industry. There is climate change.
It’s going to be a rough time.
@Jay L. Gischer:
WaPo’s old media editor Marget Sullivan wrote an article in The Guardian this week reminding that WaPo was profitable ten years ago. The New York Times turned a nice profit and added subscribers in 2025 apparently.
The booming print business of 80 years ago is forever gone, yes. But it’s not as if every outlet in the country had to cut their sports sections and 30% staff this week. WaPo wasn’t destined to shed millions of subscribers in less than two years; this level of financial struggle was not inevitable for a paper of that power, reach, and prestige.
It doesn’t ring true that Bezos bought WaPo intending to kill it — like Peter Thiel deliberately set out to destroy Gawker — or that Bezos is indifferent. Bezos has owned WaPo for nearly 16 years. If he needed to shut it down to curry favor with Trump, he could’ve dove that in 2017-2018.
Seems more like Bezos fell for the “vibe shift realignment election” scam, thinking he’d get a Trump II twofer: favorability for Amazon and Blue Origin + strengthen WaPo’s standing in the alleged pro-MAGA national zeitgeist. Like many who bet badly in 2024, Bezos is probably not thrilled about Trump’s struggles, which are related to WaPo’s accelerated troubles. They may be insulated from financial backlash, but seems these billionaires care about their reputation as competitive decision-makers.
FWIW, I emailed WaPo again in November, for the umpteenth time, to stop spamming me resubscribe offers. This time I blind copied higher-ups whose contacts were obtained from people who know people. The only WaPo email I’ve gotten since was a rare, human-authored “sorry to see you go blah blah blah.” Finally. Only took a year.
There’s a self-evident contradiction between mass cancellations of subscriptions by liberals and their demands to keep the Post viable. If it’s not worth subscribing to, why worry about its demise? Berating Bezos for not behaving how liberals think he ought to is tilting at windmills.
What liberals should be doing is establishing an independent funding mechanism for NPR and PBS that allows them to become America’s premier news networks immune from political or corporate pressure and able to attract top quality staff. It would be a much more effective use of the billions wasted every four years on TV campaign commercials.
@Ken_L: I don’t shop at or like Wal-Mart very much, but I’d worry if it went bankrupt. I’d worry about the health of the American economy and also about the well-being of its employees, for starters.
Worries about WaPo’s demise and how it happened are worries about the 1st Amendment and the state of American journalism, about the current information environment, about the loss of a brand once defined by its exposure of Nixon’s crimes, and about oligarchy in the 21st century. These seem like valid concerns. I presume liberals any demanding Bezos stop killing WaPo are not hoping for the status quo, but also demanding he sell it to someone else.
I see far more liberals who’ve given up on WaPo. Not gonna stop them from grieving Bezos’s corruption.
@James Joyner: “Why he capitulated before the election even happened, though, I can’t explain.”
Because some people from Heritage had lunch with him.
@Ken_L: “There’s a self-evident contradiction between mass cancellations of subscriptions by liberals and their demands to keep the Post viable. If it’s not worth subscribing to, why worry about its demise? Berating Bezos for not behaving how liberals think he ought to is tilting at windmills.”
Nobody is doing that; they are complaining about news taking a back seat to techbro lobbying.