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.

Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

That's it, that's how he did 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.