The Washington Post Disaster is an Indictment of Both Publishers and Society

AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke

The shocking diminishment of The Washington Post, which has just announced it is cutting a third of its staff, is not just another story of a great paper succumbing to algorithms, social media, and the march to idiocracy. In their zeal to be seen as fair and evenhanded, journalists tend to accept the common criticism that they failed to adapt — that, basically, they didn’t produce enough viral TikTok videos.

There’s some truth to that, but the main problem lies elsewhere. This disaster is an indictment of the business side of journalism: its inability to understand what remaining readers value, its mistaking novelty for strategy, its cowardice about insisting the product has economic value, its refusal to collaborate as an industry, and its refusal to get out of the way of the product it exists to serve.

Of course, there is also a failure of society. 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.

To understand the collapse of the paper that once exposed the full dimensions of the Watergate scandal, you have to zoom out — and then zoom back in. Since roughly 2000, the American media has been living through a slow-motion trauma. Print advertising collapsed as Craigslist and Google stripped away classifieds. Display ads migrated to platforms that offered targeting, scale, and metrics newsrooms could not match. Social media then rewired distribution, training publishers to chase traffic rather than loyalty. Each phase came with a promise that technology would save journalism if only it adapted fast enough.

What followed instead was a managerial culture obsessed with pivots: pivot to video, pivot to social, pivot to newsletters, pivot to creators, pivot to AI. Every pivot carried a cost, usually paid by reporters. McKinsey types pushed change as a panacea. News organizations began acting as if the core product — original reporting and authoritative analysis presented with some style — were less important than format, packaging, or distribution.

The result was a generation of media companies endlessly “innovating” around a shrinking journalistic core. At the Associated Press, we were self-flagellating over the “fire hose” (too many stories) and the “mushy middle” (again, too many stories) and setting up “test kitchens” for new ideas (read: snippets for iPad and short videos) in bureaus that didn’t have the staff left to cover the basic news.

The results were catastrophic before The Washington Post began imploding. In 2000, US newspapers took in $73 billion in print advertising revenue. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to just $6 billion—a 92 percent plunge. In 2008, American newspapers employed about 71,000 newsroom staff. By 2020, only 31,000 remained. There were now news deserts all over the US and other countries, but at least there was some hope that major media brands would thrive.

Into this landscape stepped Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, when he bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. At first, it looked like a rescue. Bezos promised patience, independence, and investment. And for several years, he delivered. The Post hired aggressively, expanded foreign coverage, and rode the Trump era to surging subscriptions and influence. Bezos tolerated the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline after Donald Trump’s first election win, to his credit. But there followed a series of terrible mistakes.

Quite impressively at first. The Post built Arc XP, a sophisticated digital platform that grew out of its (jargon alert!) “tech stack” and turned it into a technology vendor for other publishers. It became, briefly, the proof that serious journalism could scale digitally. But Arc and its successors were always a means, not an end. Somewhere along the way, that distinction blurred. Modernization became a goal in itself. Video units multiplied. Social-first strategies took hold. Personality-driven “creator” experiments proliferated. Newsroom restructurings reorganized coverage around products rather than beats.

None of this was inherently foolish. Visuals matter. Distribution matters. Technology matters. What does not matter—what readers do not pay for—is digital cleverness for its own sake. 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.

There is no denying that videos play a huge role in the modern communications ecosystem – but sadly they are also a massive cesspool of propaganda and disinformation, “influencers” and talking-head podcasts in the best-case scenario. Serious information-oriented high-quality journalism remains overwhelmingly text-driven. Video can enhance it. Graphics can clarify it. Technology can amplify it.

The value proposition is judgment, depth, and originality. This is where the Post, after Marty Baron departed as executive editor in 2021, missed the point — and certain comparisons are devastating. The New York Times is the obvious one, but it is problematic because of the political complications, perhaps unique to the United States. The more clear example, The Economist – which faced the same internet, the same platforms, the same ad collapse. It modernized too — but it did not gut its core. It doubled down on distinctive voice, intellectual coherence, and deeply reported analysis. It added podcasts, apps, data tools, and visuals without pretending these were substitutes for reporting.

The result? The Economist is thriving. It remembers what it sells. The Post did not. And when financial pressure returned—as it has for nearly all media—the response was not to recommit to journalism, but to cut it. Because the Post is privately owned, exact figures are not public, but credible reporting paints a stark picture: losses of roughly $77 million in 2023 and around $100 million in 2024, after years in which Trump-era subscription gains evaporated.

Management set a goal of breaking even by late 2026. The path chosen to get there was massive staff cuts, which came this week, when more than 300 workers were laid off in a single wave. Sports and books were effectively shuttered. Foreign and local coverage were slashed. Journalists were locked out of systems after filing their final stories.

This is an institution losing precisely the capabilities that made it worth saving.

There was, of course, another failure — moral rather than managerial. By 2024, it became clear that Bezos had decided the Post’s overwhelmingly anti-Trump readership was either insufficient or undesirable. The decision to abandon presidential endorsements — killing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris — and to drag the opinion pages rightward permanently sent a signal that caution, not conviction, would guide the paper’s civic posture.

There are only two plausible explanations for this shift. The first is incompetence: 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.

The second explanation is darker. It is that Bezos calculated that currying favor—or at least reducing hostility—with the second Trump administration was more valuable to his broader business interests than preserving the Post’s role as a fearless watchdog.

Yes: Amazon, Blue Origin, and Bezos’s wider commercial empire face regulatory, contractual, and political pressures that dwarf the newspaper’s balance sheet. In that context, the Post becomes expendable — a brand asset to be managed, not a civic trust to be defended.

That interpretation is impossible to ignore when set against the broader context. Bezos’s personal wealth has grown from roughly $30 billion in 2013 to around $250 billion today. While the Post was pleading poverty, Bezos’s corporate ecosystem spent tens of millions on prestige projects, lately including a lavishly funded film centered on Melania Trump (which almost no one wants to see).

You do not need to allege a conspiracy to grasp what that juxtaposition does to morale — and to credibility. If the first explanation is true, the result is a catastrophic miscalculation.

If the second is true, it is something worse: the deliberate sacrifice of one of the greatest journalistic institutions in American history to marginally reduce risk or increase access elsewhere. That a man already worth a quarter trillion dollars would make that trade is one of the most damning indictments of human nature available in public life today. There is fierce competition for that title – but this sad spectacle competes very strongly for the title of top disgrace.

Dan Perry is the former London-based Europe/Africa editor and Cairo-based Middle East editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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