The WaPo Dies In Darkness
It’s a sad day at the WaPo:
The Washington Post told staffers today that it was moving forward with a sweeping round of layoffs that was part of a “broad strategic reset” of the storied newspaper, which will include eliminating the sports desk, severely cutting back on its international coverage, dismantling its books section, and restructuring its local news team.
The WaPo had a sports desk?
More:
However, after emails were sent to staffers on Wednesday morning, it is expected that roughly one-third of staff — about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom — will be laid off, with some staffers saying that this was a “bloodbath”.
“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” the Post’s former executive editor Marty Baron said Wednesday. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”
Now more than ever we need the WaPo’s propaganda, Baron seems to think. After all, the NY Times, The New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the AP, and about a thousand other pro-left news outlets can hardly be expected to go it alone.
Speaking of the AP, here’s a sorrowful meditation by Dan Perry, a former editor at the AP, on what’s going on at the WaPo and why:
We faced a test over the past thirty years: Did we educate ourselves to value truth (and civility and justice and progress)? Do we care enough to pay enough to keep the machinery of reliable information going — the way we do for beer and sneakers? And guns in dumb places and guaranteed healthcare in smarter ones? Turns out that we did not.
“Reliable information” – he’s referring to the WaPo as a purveyor of reliable information. The irony could not be greater.
More:
People did not subscribe to The Washington Post because it was “digitally savvy.” They subscribed because it was authoritative, relentless, surprising, and serious. They subscribed because it had foreign correspondents who knew their regions, investigative reporters who knew their institutions, and editors who knew when to say no.
Actually, people subscribed to the WaPo because it told them what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear was that Trump was evil and ultimately that he was in prison. The latter never happened, Bezos tried to make the paper slightly less leftist, and it lost some of the audience to which it had been catering – and began cratering.
Perry adds:
… [Bezos seemed to have] a belief that enforced “even-handedness” would broaden the audience and stabilize revenue. It did the opposite. Subscribers left in droves and trust eroded, with nary a Trumpist jumping on board. The Post lost identity at the moment it most needed clarity. People do not subscribe to legacy institutions for timid neutrality; they subscribe for intellectual confidence and moral seriousness.
As I said, they subscribe for confirmation of their already-existing belief system. But I think Perry is right that becoming a bit moe fair and balanced was never going to increase the WaPo’s revenue.
Maybe Bezos sensed that a large percentage, maybe even a majority of the WaPo’s employees hated their employer. As a business owner, I can tell you that when times are tough, the first people you consider letting go are the ones with an attitude problem.
Good riddance to bad rubbish people.
WaPo used to have one of the very best sports sections. Columnists like Thomas Boswell and Tony Kornheiser were among the greatest sportswriters ever but people like that have long gone and it had apparently become the same old thing as every where else obsessing about race all day every day.
Sportswriters in general seem to actually hate sports nowadays which is really wild.
“Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe/Africa editor and Cairo-based Middle East editor of the Associated Press”
I suspect Perry’s idea of “moral seriousness” is palming off “Gaza health authorities” – ie Hamas propagandists – as credible sources of information.
“about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom”
What about the other 500? It’s a shame they are not now “learing” to code. LOL
Assuming the WaPo dies, it should be classified as a murder by liberal DMVers. They couldn’t stand the idea of a balanced newspaper, and thus worked tirelessly to suffocate the paper.
And the Babylon Bee delivers again.
Haven’t paid much attention to newspapers since The Rocky Mountain News went under (2009). But I miss them as they once were.
I would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh!
Well . . . Bye.
I think Perry is right that becoming a bit mo[r]e fair and balanced was never going to increase the WaPo’s revenue.
The NYT seems successful going in the other direction, essentially playing to its base. It’s market cap is $11.25 billion, and its stock price has more or less doubled in the last three years. So it does seem that there’s no market for “fair and balanced” in the newspaper world. Maybe there is in television, since CNN and MSNOW do terribly in the ratings compared to Fox.
Sadly you are right Jimmy. Of course the NYT and WaPo always leaned left but there used to be at least some attempt at objectivity. Eventually a tipping point came as conservatives became increasingly mistrustful of and alienated by the “legacy” media, it was more profitable for those outlets to play up to their base of leftist subscribers.
Well, someone had to cover the Washington
RedskinsGeneric Football Team, after all. They probably wrote occasional articles concerning D. C. United, too.I’m glad that this waste of dead trees and electricity is circling the drain!
500-800 “journalists” turning out that piece of guano?!
DT, yeah me too. I only take a local paper, it is a weekly. However, it now has a new owner, younger woman. I can see a tilt to the Left. Guess I will have to cancel it too.
To bad AP can’t be bought out and most of their staff fired.
Sixty-five years ago I had a strong interest in The Washington Post – as a kid growing up in D.C. I delivered it to front porches for about a year and a half, along with The Evening Star (long since reincarnated into The Washington Times) and The Daily News in the afternoon (the Star was “the conservative paper” (not that anything in 20th century D.C. has ever been even remotely “conservative”) and the News was a rougher version of The NY Post).
IIRC, the Post’s peak daily circulation was about 675K and if one could read past the bias there was some usefulness in parts of it. A couple years ago I visited a friend who still lived there and, in the honoring of some sort of ancient ritual, still subscribed to the Post; I noted that the small daily local paper for his burg had about the same number of pages and for someone who lived outside the D.C. Bubble the Post’s Op-Ed pages were unreadable.
It’s interesting that Bezos’ attempt to balance the Post’s position resulted in mass subscription cancellations, which accelerated the paper’s doom. That should tell one all they needed to know about D.C and the burbs.
I cancelled my subscription to the WAPO years ago when I couldn’t see any difference between the front pages and the editorial pages.
I forgot to mention, I now read the Babylon Bee, they claim “fake news you can trust”.
The online environment has eliminated local markets and the loony-left segment can all converge around the New York Times… what the hey, they view themselves as cosmopolitan cognoscenti anyway…
I haven’t been back to NYC for decades but I doubt anyone under 40 still lugs home the heavy printed-on-paper Sunday Times as we used to.
So apparently this market segment can only sustain one news site. Like the Grauniad in the UK.
So where will the CIA and other deep state players go to get their propaganda laundered and disseminated?
“Journalists”
There might be a market for reportage without editorializing, but the Sulzbergers have spent > 30 years offending that market segment and Bezos and the Grahams have put some time into offending it as well. Building a paper on reportage means recruiting people quite different from those who work in contemporary journalism and recruiting a readership from among those who gave up on the papers some time ago or never acquired the habit.
Nearly all of the CAGW “reporters” were laid off. I’ve seen conflicting numbers.
I call them skydragon worshipers, because they believe in an arcane cult,
some will default to substack, like jen rubin and matt yglesias before them
Re: Democracy Dies in Darkness
Every now and then I check to see if WaPo has quietly pulled that line from just beneath the paper’s logo on their web page.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
IMO it comes in below Arbeit Macht Frei [Work sets you free], the welcoming message to Nazi concentration camps, but still in the same vein of evil sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Answer: No, they have not.
“That’s a shame” – Seinfeld.