I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.
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.
breakyerself 1 days ago [-]
NYT is good for games and cooking. Their news editors are garbage.
profsummergig 1 days ago [-]
Also, it seems there are a lot of paid posts on NYT.
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
This sort of nearly open corruption at NYT is worthy of a Trump operation, to be honest.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
You get that the economics underlying these claims about buying articles don't make much sense, right? The whole point of the NYT is that the newsfeed isn't the core business.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
The newsfeed doesn't need to be the core business for NYTimes to sell full-page advertisements, nor does it need to be the core business to sell stories on preferred topics.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Sure. They could sell a lot of things that aren't core to their business. But why would they? Their next marginal dollar doesn't come from squeezing the news organization; in fact, the way things are trending, news is basically looking like it'll be a loss leader for them.
epistasis 19 hours ago [-]
They are already selling ads, why would you think they wouldn't be raising revenue on the news side? Your argument that they wouldn't take money if it's not coming from the "core business" does not make sense economically. If your argument is that they wouldn't sell editorial selection of article topics, well, they did it publicly when they decided to report on the sale of a full page ad. Placement of articles on topics selected from the outside is usually far more discreet, with the proper PR firms mediating the selection, but the NYTimes is notorious for doing this.
groundzeros2015 23 hours ago [-]
It’s either a crossword or a religion.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
When did you last subscribe?
testdelacc1 1 days ago [-]
Not the other commenter, but I subscribed till November 2024. Am I allowed to say that they're garbage?
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
You can say whatever you'd like! It's just a useful data point. Current subscribers, former subscribers, and non-subscribers have different takes.
guelo 1 days ago [-]
I was a subscriber until last year. They produce outstanding journalism with the exception of their Zionist pro-war bias, which I was ok ignoring until my disgust with their genocide whitewashing became too much.
g8oz 1 days ago [-]
Same
diffs 22 hours ago [-]
Have you considered, and hear me out here, that the bias is yours?
I mean if their reporting about everything but this one topic is good, perhaps their “Zionist pro-war bias” and “genocide whitewashing” only seem that way to you because you’ve assumed an extremist position on the issue?
tptacek 22 hours ago [-]
It's not a reason I myself would rely on to end a subscription but I'm glad for the data point and don't see the point in cross-examining. I'm thankful they took the time to answer my question.
diffs 22 hours ago [-]
You’re right, tptacek, I probably should’ve stayed out of this.
kmote00 11 minutes ago [-]
I'm glad you didn't. Your reasoning was perfectly sound. The fact that your answer got downvoted is simply further evidence that there are those who want to hold a position without genuinely considering the arguments in favor of the alternate position.
ilamont 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
compsciphd 5 hours ago [-]
the washngton post was a media business. The Graham family kept the rest of the media business and sold off the newspaper.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
After subscribing for a decade I canceled NYT last yr because I felt it was leaning more into social media bait (which I dont blame them for business reasons). That plus they kept blocking Firefox with an unpassable captcha even though I was logged in.
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I've been debating a WSJ subscription for years; it helps that they have a very strong paywall, so there's a big convenience factor.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
nobody9999 19 hours ago [-]
>It is much easier to get by not paying for NYT by using stuff like https://periscope.corsfix.com/ for sure. But it is a big inconvenience. WSJ is much more aggressive with it.
While not made specifically for that purpose, this extension[0][1] does a nice job without a lot of hassle, and it makes such pages accessible to others with a URL you can share. The downside is that dynamic content isn't supported.
It seems to me that the only mainstream newspaper to figure out a workable solution so far is NYT. And their solution was games. One of these days that will be all that remains and people will forget what the NYT acronym stands for aside from Wordle.
keiferski 1 days ago [-]
The financial times is doing well and has a better model IMO: expensive with a professional audience, not the general public.
TheCraiggers 1 days ago [-]
> professional audience, not the general public.
Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.
boondongle 1 days ago [-]
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
thinkharderdev 11 hours ago [-]
> Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
kemitchell 1 days ago [-]
Sadly, I fully expect to see the cover price of The Economist reach twice the federal minimum wage.
If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
learingsci 1 days ago [-]
Access to information is not a solution to that. You can’t educate people who refuse to learn.
culi 1 days ago [-]
Financial Times has shocked me many times over on the quality of its reporting compared to other outlets. Even media critic Noam Chomsky says FT is often an exception in western biases
abcxyz1234 1 days ago [-]
You mean Epstein confidant, Cambodian genocide denier Noam Chomsky? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the paper.
culi 1 days ago [-]
Yes, Chomsky, the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
1over137 1 days ago [-]
The Noam Chomsky who told Epstein "I’m really fantasizing about the Caribbean island.", or a different one? /s
culi 1 days ago [-]
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
I don't think that's a useful model for a "paper of record" model like the NYT or formerly Washington Post. There's so much good to be had with a strong paper that isn't captured by it's ownership.
einpoklum 1 days ago [-]
> for a "paper of record" model like the NYT
NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
wanderingpixel 17 hours ago [-]
I agree regarding the audience, but for those on a more modest budget it is possible to get an affordable FT subscription to their digital version of the print newspaper.
keiferski 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah I actually get a subscription as a part of my eBank membership. Although a couple years ago I paid full price for an annual paper delivery; that was nice to have a physical newspaper, but it was too expensive in the end.
steveBK123 1 days ago [-]
Business news still has paying customers, its everyone else that is flailing
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
This is the modern media criticism equivalent of "I don't even own a television."
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
How so? Growing up most of the time my family didn’t have a television. What are you saying I do read the NYT? I have no idea what point you are trying to make. My comment was in response to the comment about how the NYT had to resort to games for sustainability.
red-iron-pine 7 hours ago [-]
poor analogy. there are more newspapers or other sources of info.
"I thought CBS news was crap so I stopped watching it for NBC News"
g8oz 1 days ago [-]
Not a good analogy
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
> I gave up on the NYT as a news source in their handling of the Iraq War. Prior to that it was a daily purchase.
That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT. I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
palmotea 3 hours ago [-]
> The internet has provided tremendous access to news outside of the NYT.
It also provided tremendous access to the NYT, but most of those outlets are unhealthy or dying at this point ... because of the internet.
> I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
Who cares about them? Anyone can write an opinion column. That's not what we need newspapers for.
Applejinx 1 days ago [-]
That is a REALLY wild take considering what the NYT functionally is.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
> so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing.
Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?
Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news? Do you believe everyone should read the NYTs. What is this Soviet Russia? Who said the alternative to reading the NYTs is getting news from social media?
palmotea 3 hours ago [-]
> Do you believe the NYT is the only source of news?
Not yet, but if you've looked at the trends, that's a real possibility. The New York Times doesn't have any problems not shared by other organizations like it, and I think it's important for such journalism organizations to exist.
einpoklum 1 days ago [-]
> That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
> It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
einpoklum 1 days ago [-]
> You're stuck in the past
Am I? I'm not the one claiming that
> the newspaper industry... was a ... lot better than [that which]'s come to replace it.
palmotea 3 hours ago [-]
What I mean by "stuck in the past" is you're stuck on old criticisms that seem more and more precious given how bad things are getting.
Sure, dwell on Manufacturing Consent in the 90s when journalism was strong and better resourced. But nowadays it seems quaint, like a picky review of a fancy 5-star restaurant when the restaurant industry is collapsing and people may not be able to afford food.
Journalism is collapsing, to be replaced by something worse, not better.
constantius 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand the downvotes to your comment (and the few replies are grotesque...), but I definitely support the sentiment. If dropping the NYT over Iraq is not justified, then the concept of red lines loses its meaning.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
Exactly why should I read a paper that I find is flawed. The editorial board lost my trust.
repeekad 1 days ago [-]
they are not an unbiased news source, they profit from being biased toward what elites with money for a subscription want to hear
mmooss 1 days ago [-]
> And their solution was games.
For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.
reliabilityguy 1 days ago [-]
NYT makes money from games?
snapcaster 1 days ago [-]
I work with many people who pay for the subscription to play the games
rootusrootus 1 days ago [-]
I don't have numbers in front of me, but yes, NYT has basically said exactly that. Their games portfolio is a major driver of digital subscriptions.
shimman 1 days ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised to learn their recipes also drive a decent amount of revenue too. Their physical cookbooks are top notch (big fan of their no recipe recipe cookbook).
barkerja 1 days ago [-]
Their recipe and cocktail repository is excellent. It's a large part while I'm a subscriber.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
I'm really confused. What is a "no recipe recipe cookbook"?
Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.
Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)
Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.
rootusrootus 20 hours ago [-]
> Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
bigstrat2003 15 hours ago [-]
That is a super interesting book concept, thank you for the link!
simonw 1 days ago [-]
There's a joke in the news industry that the NYT is a games company with a loss-making news organization attached to it as a side-project.
Like Harvard is a hedge fund with a school as a side project.
carefulfungi 1 days ago [-]
Their recently shipped scrabble clone is excellent! One of the cleanest scrabble / words-with-friends implementations I've played.
rootusrootus 1 days ago [-]
Yeah I'm hooked on it for the moment. The previous games are entertaining once a day, and we share results amongst our family for fun, but the Crossplay game is a lot of fun head-to-head.
I mean, why not? Sometimes it seems to me that airlines make their money not on flights but on branded Credit Cards.
dwd 17 hours ago [-]
Frequent flyer points are where they make their money. So much so that many airlines would run at a loss just flying passengers.
All their partners hand over real cash for points to give their customers, that often either expire or are never redeemed. I think it was the Economist that stated that airlines operate as unregulated banks. Flying people around is a secondary thing they do.
softwaredoug 1 days ago [-]
The Atlantic, WSJ, The Economist, Politico all come to mind as profitable.
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
panarky 1 days ago [-]
> They historically had the best political coverage of DC
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
If your claim is that the Post had a viable business available to it as a sort of GoFundMe project for the political opposition, this makes sense. Otherwise, it's hard to see how an org with 2500 employees but without much more national appeal than Politico or the Atlantic was going to compete long term.
panarky 21 hours ago [-]
I don't know how to quantify "national appeal", but the Post had about 2.5 million paid subscribers in 2023 and ~800 newsroom staff, while The Atlantic had about 1.1 million paid subscribers and ~200 newsroom staff.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
tptacek 21 hours ago [-]
What's the other national American newspaper --- not newsmagazine, 95% of what the Atlantic runs isn't reported --- besides the WSJ that's doing well right now?
panarky 19 hours ago [-]
Other than the NYT and WSJ, the only national example I can think of is The Guardian's US operation, but that one is supported by a trust plus recurring donations from readers.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
RA_Fisher 1 days ago [-]
Agree, if Bezos hadn’t alienated the readership, they’d probably be doing well.
I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Seems false. The Atlantic Monthly, to take an example --- another publication I subscribe to --- is an order of magnitude smaller than the Post. If the Post wanted to run the Atlantic's business successfully, they could; they'd just have to lay almost everybody else in the company off.
RA_Fisher 22 hours ago [-]
What seems false?
tptacek 22 hours ago [-]
That the Post's predicament is a consequence of Bezos partisan editorial decisions. I don't like those decisions either, but I don't think they get close to the core problem the Post faces.
llllm 21 hours ago [-]
Seems false.
Applejinx 1 days ago [-]
Indeed. It's really, really something when I can even entertain the idea of 'I'll go to Wal-Mart, it's awful but at least it's a lot morally better than supporting Amazon'. Yikes!
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
Of those only the journal is a newspaper. The Atlantic is a magazine and economist/politico are focused on a single news sector
monero-xmr 1 days ago [-]
The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.
rootusrootus 6 hours ago [-]
I don't want a world where we rely on citizen journalists. The value of the organizations is in providing credibility (or at least a predictable understanding of their bias). Just because some rando sounds convincing does not mean what he is presenting is any kind of credible representation of the truth
brendoelfrendo 1 days ago [-]
Which is, in and of itself, a problem: I feel like we're trending towards a US news landscape where the NYT and their editorial board are the only ones setting the tone and discourse of print media.
diego_moita 1 days ago [-]
Also The Guardian and The Economist.
ReptileMan 1 days ago [-]
The Guardian has turned into Gawker with better spell checker. Everything I have read from them is culture war and extremely shallow lately.
snowpid 1 days ago [-]
in the English speaking world...
FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.
mejutoco 1 days ago [-]
Subscribing to FAZ is closer to getting a new phone line or a gym membership than paying for a newspaper. Do they accept credit card now?
softwaredoug 1 days ago [-]
The local cuts hurt and feel like a betrayal if you’re in the DC area. It’s possibly the most mature outlet covering local issues with actual investigative reporting. At a time when local TV outlets are bare bones operations barely limping along.
Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
The outside force you're referring to is Facebook Marketplace.
earlyriser 1 days ago [-]
I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
> I'm not familiar with this, but are you saying the Washington Post doesn't post about Washington anymore?
You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP:
> The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
softwaredoug 22 hours ago [-]
Washington Post has always been very strong covering US Politics in DC. That’s probably what drives subscribers more than anything. Reporters there have a lot of access to decision makers in Congress, White House, etc
A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
input_sh 1 days ago [-]
It's not a 0 or a 1. They had more staff doing it, now they have less. That means they now do 0.2, which is not 0 as you're implying, but it's still significantly worse than back when it was 1.
hybrid_study 1 days ago [-]
We can rationalize the newspaper business all we want, but WaPo's downward spiral started with what's been described as a "gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days" before the election. That's when many cancelled their subscription.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
The article says they lost -$77M in 2023 and -$100M in 2024. That predates the endorsement thing.
To be fair, it's social media and search engines that killed The News. Every news outlet has been gutted by the need for profitability, and editors have always clashed with the interests of their benefactors.
Legend2440 1 days ago [-]
The real value of newspaper was never the news; it was the paper. The moneymaker is the platform, not the content.
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
diego_moita 1 days ago [-]
More like a death by a thousand cuts.
In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
mc32 1 days ago [-]
This is it. It's a medium and organizational structure that aged out. Even before social media and Google, people were getting more of their news via 24hr news channels, then came the internet and the citizen journalists, then came social media and now the attention industry. The market was getting smaller and smaller but was accelerated by new technologies and habits.
Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
axus 1 days ago [-]
I still check all the news sites who's biases aren't too obvious. But my views aren't paying their bills.
Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
AceJohnny2 1 days ago [-]
Nah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.
tvink 1 days ago [-]
Sure you can say consumers refusing the ad-ridden paywalled experience killed it, or we could say the lack of adaptation and finding better business models did. I think a lot of players killed themselves off fighting to preserve rather than adapt, or worse have digital content subsidize analog (to this day I keep running into ebooks that cost more than the physical books, and they wonder why people pirate)
porise 1 days ago [-]
Just say Google. The need for keywords plastered everywhere (often hidden in the HTML) was their invention.
999900000999 1 days ago [-]
I feel the Internet makes legacy media less relevant.
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.
mingus88 1 days ago [-]
Newspapers seem to clock in anywhere between a 7th grade to 11th grade reading level. That’s just too much to ask of people these days.
Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely.
I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
wellwelloctober 1 days ago [-]
It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
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.
wsatb 1 days ago [-]
> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> 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.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
ribosometronome 1 days ago [-]
>c. 2017
4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
It's just so odd that he chose to move back to DC some time after the Bezos acquisition! It's almost as if these are unrelated events...
ribosometronome 1 days ago [-]
Bezos didn't buy DC, he bought a newspaper. The commenter was saying that the decline in quality was potentially unrelated to the acquisition and then immediately compared pre and post acquisition quality. That seems like a strange way to make that point and like it might suggest that the acquisition perhaps was related to its decline in quality.
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
The commenter said they moved back to DC in 2017 and noticed the change then.
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
ribosometronome 1 days ago [-]
Elementary reading skills would also make it obvious that I'm not talking about their move from and back to DC. Them moving back and forth from DC is certainly irrelevant to WaPo's quality.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
... because they left DC before the acquisition ... and moved back to DC after the acquisition ...
ribosometronome 2 hours ago [-]
And? Why do you think that matters to what I'm commenting on? Them moving to and from DC is almost certainly completely unrelated to any changes in WaPo's quality.
That there is a personal reason for why their two datapoints are before and after acquisition doesn't change that their two datapoints are before and after acquisition such that it's hard to use those two datapoints to exclude that the ownership had major effects on the quality of the paper's reporting, if anything, it seems extremely suggestive that it did.
wellwelloctober 1 days ago [-]
To be clear, my main point here is that people seem to be in total denial that The Washington Post has been in decline for a while. Of course I don't wish being fired on anyone, but I don't think that it really has much value as a journalistic periodical at this point. Perhaps it happened while Bezos was in charge, perhaps it didn't, but I don't think all the staff there and who just got laid off have been producing a great product.
wsatb 17 hours ago [-]
The problem is your comment is missing really important information. You said you returned in 2017, but only mentioned that it was good in 2005. This leaves a 12 year period where it could have declined. You didn't say it was good in 2005 and you already started to see the decline before you left.
You have no more evidence that it declined before the acquisition than after it. It reads as some weird defense of Bezos and then you doubled down by saying management wasn't happy with employee backlash.
Anyways, I agree that the decline did start before the acquisition, like it started for all newspapers. The Internet killed the newspaper. Bezos was supposed to save it.
simonw 1 days ago [-]
I don't think I would trust a newspaper where the journalist did NOT leak proceedings of company meetings!
miltonlost 1 days ago [-]
Oh, so its the workers who are to blame!!!! Your timeline of the paper after 2017 is when bezos acquired...
dmix 1 days ago [-]
The part about financials
> 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.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
It's funny how so many of the tech exec class have gone from "we only hire the best people" because you get so much more value for the dollar of wages, to viewing labor purely as a cost center to be minimized by any tolerable means.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
kenjackson 1 days ago [-]
Depends on the industry and work. They are still paying top dollar for AI talent.
no_wizard 1 days ago [-]
Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past
mc32 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately execs will pay for an expected ROI and the news business doesn't offer tremendous ROIs. If it did you'd see investment in it. It's only been able to float because of ads/classifieds and as venues for propaganda.
epistasis 1 days ago [-]
My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.
If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.
However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.
It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.
mc32 1 days ago [-]
Few if any people but mr Bezos have an idea of why he bought it. It could have been a precocious whim before he found his new spark in life --maybe he calculated it would benefit him in his other business and it didn't pan out. Who knows? Whatever the case, running a newspaper is not likely to exceed profits of other ventures he could plough his money into. Newspapers are kind of like horseracing it mostly loses money but gives you prestige in some circles; however, stables also close down.
UncleMeat 1 days ago [-]
Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.
"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
mc32 1 days ago [-]
Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.
He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
It lost a lot of subscribers because of its changed politics.
And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
tokyobreakfast 1 days ago [-]
People need a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs?
mjmsmith 1 days ago [-]
People definitely don't need a subscription service that pivots to reinforcing the owner's beliefs. Even that is probably giving Bezos too much credit, since it falsely suggests principles beyond "what will make me richer."
marxisttemp 1 days ago [-]
Billionaires need to own a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs
tokyobreakfast 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
atonse 1 days ago [-]
I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate.
I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.
justin66 22 hours ago [-]
To add a little clarity, here's a link to (perhaps ironically) the Post's own reporting on the event.
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step
Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
atonse 21 hours ago [-]
Having an endorsement isn’t normal either.
We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.
I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
rileymat2 1 days ago [-]
I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.
atonse 21 hours ago [-]
My point is that isn’t there a difference between “we had to endorse Trump because Bezos made us do it” and “we were forced to not take a side”
My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?
Why are newspapers picking sides at all?
19 hours ago [-]
justin66 1 days ago [-]
You misunderstand what occurred. The paper prepared an endorsement and Bezos killed it.
> they refused to endorse a candidate.
> for them choosing not to endorse Harris
There was no "they" or "them" involved.
atonse 21 hours ago [-]
My point is that why were they picking a candidate to begin with, even before Bezos got involved. Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?
I don’t like the idea of a paper taking sides (even if, in this case, their endorsement aligned with my side).
It seems antithetical to the ideas of independent and non-partisan journalism.
justin66 19 hours ago [-]
> Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
tw04 1 days ago [-]
Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.
acomjean 1 days ago [-]
Washington posts tag line was “Democracy dies in darkness”.
It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
UncleMeat 1 days ago [-]
"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.
atonse 21 hours ago [-]
But why are people ok with the fact that a newspaper was going to pick a candidate to begin with? Doesn’t that undermine their claims of non-partisanship?
UncleMeat 20 hours ago [-]
Editorial boards publish opinion pieces. That is the function of the editorial page. Is "we believe that X will be a better president than Y" so different than "we believe that corn ethanol is bad policy" or "we believe that you should send your kids to public universities?"
atonse 10 hours ago [-]
Yes it is different. Because they go out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan. If you endorsed one candidate and the other one wins, how can we trust your reporting about the winning candidate for the duration of their tenure?
Nobody is claiming neutrality or specific issues like corn subsidies which cross party lines.
UncleMeat 3 hours ago [-]
Editorial boards have never gone out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan.
michaelt 1 days ago [-]
> 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,
Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.
'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.
So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.
And just a few paragraphs below, it described why it was losing subscribers like crazy at that time.
> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.
This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.
yearolinuxdsktp 1 days ago [-]
Seventy-seven million in *2023
elorant 1 days ago [-]
He allegedly spent $70M to market that dreadful documentary about Melania Trump. Surely he could afford spending that much every year to keep an historic paper afloat.
technion 1 days ago [-]
That movie will be quite case study in media bias. Depending who is reporting on my social media feed, it was either the most successful movie of all time with every single showing at capacity, the run being extended, and gen z girls being the main demographic for a movie certain to clean up awards. Or it was a flop that lost money.
input_sh 1 days ago [-]
It can be both! You can fill up the seats with people that you pay to watch it!
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
testdelacc1 1 days ago [-]
Instead of both-sides-ing this, you can look at objective data. Here's BoxOfficeMojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4287397889/. Right now it says $8.1M in the US, $75k worldwide. Not bad for a movie that cost $40M to make and about as much to market, huh?
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
delaminator 1 days ago [-]
The one breaking box office records?
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
ryandvm 1 days ago [-]
Show me some full theaters. Various GOP organizations have a well documented history of buying books to get them onto the best sellers lists.
myvoiceismypass 1 days ago [-]
Yup, RNC bought up Don Jr's books (both - Triggered and Liberal Privilege) in an attempt to boost it to best seller status
delaminator 14 hours ago [-]
if your TDS continues for more than 4 hours, seek medical attention
afavour 1 days ago [-]
Eh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
Amazon hasn't done any theater stuff like this before, this is the first year they are putting multiple streaming movies into theaters as an experiment. They usually spend money on marketing just for the platform. This was likely a big success because it was double the projected box office everyone was expecting. Even bad PR is good for business sometimes.
andytratt 1 days ago [-]
right, the internet didn't play any part
guywithabike 1 days ago [-]
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
Exoristos 1 days ago [-]
There is more to the New York Times Company than meets the eye [0].
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
gordian-mind 1 days ago [-]
International prestige and internet-centered strategy (online games, lifestyle...).
teachrdan 1 days ago [-]
This is an ignorant take. The New York Times made a profit last year of $550 million. Clearly the problem isn't the internet -- nor should it be for a paper bought by JEFF BEZOS, the man arguably who did more to revolutionize selling stuff on the internet than any other individual.
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
The post getting less liberal and more conservative seemed to harm its reputation in many circles, like CBS is getting now
insane_dreamer 17 hours ago [-]
WaPo lost 250K - about 20% - of subscribers in a few days when Bezos killed the paper's endorsement of Harris and then set out to control the Opinions section.
People don't like overt control of editorial by a billionaire owner obviously seeking to curry favor with the WH (and not just any WH but unquestionably the most overtly corrupt WH in history since the Pendleton Civil Service Act)
gordian-mind 1 days ago [-]
The Good Billionaire? He buys journals to call other billionaires "evil".
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
hnburnsy 21 hours ago [-]
When looking at the bylines of many of those laid off, I noticed that many had written about 2-3 articles per month. I don't know how journalism works but it seems to me that low of productivity cannot be sustainable. Example, an 8 year tech columnist had about 15 articles since August and one was a black Friday article. With all the tech news happening today, this output feels low.
tptacek 21 hours ago [-]
Those aren't comparable jobs. Reporters report; they go to locations, they develop sources, they make phone calls. Columnists opine, or synthesize other people's reporting.
I'm not bullish on the future of newspapers generally but this is the thing you're afraid of when you think about how they're receding: people conditioned to think that random Substacks or Engadget or whatever were ever doing serious first-draft-of-history journalism. A huge percentage of everything people read online is based on reporting work that's done at a pace of 2-3 articles per month. You'll definitely miss it when it's gone!
afavour 1 days ago [-]
It's very curious to reflect on the change in Bezos over the last decade or so. No, The Washington Post doesn't make money. But surely he never bought it under the expectation that it would. A billionaire buys a newspaper for other reasons than that. And he initially spent a ton of money on the paper, they even had a superbowl ad. He was happy to go toe to toe with the first Trump administration.
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!
openasocket 1 days ago [-]
I genuinely don't get it. I just don't understand how billionaires think.
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.
groundzeros2015 1 days ago [-]
100M burns seems a little excessive?
UncleMeat 1 days ago [-]
Bezos could burn this amount every year for 2,500 years before exhausting his current wealth.
groundzeros2015 23 hours ago [-]
Is he going to login to etrade to market sell 100 mil of Amazon stock every year? 20% cap gains and then whatever additional tax the gross amount incurs? That will also lower the price.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
UncleMeat 20 hours ago [-]
Why not? 100m is two days of AMZN trading volume.
The idea that billionaires are not actually billionaires because they cannot possibly sell their shares is not real.
groundzeros2015 18 hours ago [-]
I didn’t say he’s not a billionaire. I said it’s ridiculous to lose 100m/yr on a newspaper. and yes 100m sell order would be impactful.
UncleMeat 10 hours ago [-]
"Losing" or "spending?"
In principle, Bezos could be in this because he values journalism and wants to promote it. There is no reason why this couldn't be a patronage system where one of the richest people in the world spends their money on something good for society.
groundzeros2015 8 hours ago [-]
“Loss” as in accounting.
Sure I suppose anything could be someone’s passion and that could explain why any amount of money would be spent.
But according to the article he is actually concerned about the amount, and I’m agreeing it’s a justified concern.
eudamoniac 23 hours ago [-]
What is your point? I could burn $400 in my fireplace every year for 2,500 years before exhausting my current wealth. That doesn't mean it's not stupid.
Afforess 1 days ago [-]
Power + Control >> Money.
That’s it.
ativzzz 1 days ago [-]
> I just don't understand how billionaires think.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
kgwxd 1 days ago [-]
Never attribute to vanity that which is adequately explained by despotism.
gowld 1 days ago [-]
It wasn't for clout and prestige. It was to protect Amazon and Blue Origin from news critical coverage and from policy advocacy for regulations.
inquirerGeneral 1 days ago [-]
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onetokeoverthe 1 days ago [-]
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coldpie 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
rootusrootus 1 days ago [-]
To use Bezos as an example, how would you work that out? Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM? Who would you give it to? Would you nationalize it?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
> Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM?
Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
I also strongly support enforcing our existing antitrust laws, yes.
> Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists
Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
> What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
> How do you expect that to go?
Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better.
> Better than what we have now, hopefully.
We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse.
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right?
Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor.
Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason.
There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations.
In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M
This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.
We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
rootusrootus 1 days ago [-]
Alright, but I really would like to hear your solution for the next question ;-).
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
I'm sure there are plenty of creative ways to have the general public reclaim the excess wealth. How about a public mutual fund where every citizen owns 1 share. Every year on tax day, all personal holdings over $100M (or whatever the threshold is) are seized and ownership is transferred to that fund.
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
Sure. Turn it into a public company with a board, sell the shares to reduce any individual's ownership stake to <$100M.
pllbnk 1 days ago [-]
I think the OP’s proposal is great but impossible to implement right away. Some steps have to be taken towards that direction though. First, eliminate borrowing using their stocks as collateral, thus avoiding capital gains tax. That would immediately reduce the number of new mega yachts.
But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
input_sh 1 days ago [-]
I have an even simpler step one: increase the IRS budget significantly so that they actually have enough resources to go after the big guys.
It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
nobody9999 18 hours ago [-]
>I have an even simpler step one: increase the IRS budget significantly so that they actually have enough resources to go after the big guys.
>It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
Has it been on a downward spiral?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022[0] added $80 billion over ten years to the IRS budget[1] (a good step in the right direction, IMHO), but which has now been withdrawn. Gee, I wonder why?
Fun fact: Elon stopped fighting his Twitter purchase around the same time the Inflation Reduction Act was signed. In fact, the purchase was finally completed mere 2 months later.
Hm, I wonder why those two dates happen to be so close. It's truly a mystery.
strbean 1 days ago [-]
Liquidating shares over some fixed interval (1 year?) would be one option.
LargeWu 1 days ago [-]
Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.
EricDeb 1 days ago [-]
couldnt you have control shares that weren't worth money?
AlfredBarnes 1 days ago [-]
While I don't disagree, that is unrealistic.
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
I'd love to hear more ideas for how we can reduce these peoples' power to control our society!
trentnix 1 days ago [-]
Reduce the power of government if you want to reduce the power certain individuals have over society. Because government is such a single, extremely powerful lever it becomes a singular target of influence and corruption by the rich and influential. Why do you think so many of the rich and powerful move to DC or keep residences there?
The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
manuelmoreale 1 days ago [-]
The French have a tool they used quite successfully during the revolution back in the late 1700s.
Jokes aside, unless we go through major societal reforms (that would likely involve a lot of chaos) I don’t see this problem being fixed anytime soon.
abvdasker 1 days ago [-]
It would take one or two not especially complicated law taxing wealth and loans against equity. Congress could do this tomorrow but guess who controls congress. And cap political spending like every other sane democracy.
SJC_Hacker 1 days ago [-]
Support locally owned, small businesses
quantummagic 1 days ago [-]
All you're doing is giving the power to someone else. Giving way more power to politicians like Donald Trump. The reality is, there will always be powerful people, with outsized control and dominion over others; it's baked into the fabric of reality. Thinking otherwise is a utopian fantasy.
EricDeb 1 days ago [-]
well ideally more power should be distributed amongst normal people
quantummagic 1 days ago [-]
Wishing it could be so, flies in the face of everything we know about human nature, power dynamics, and game theory.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> a hard wealth cap. 100% tax on wealth above $100M
I can’t think of a better policy suggestion for folks who have more than $100mm than this. Sort of like “corporate death penalty” mostly serves to distract from fines, “no more billionaires” conveniently distracts from e.g. adding tax brackets to pay for increasing the ones we have.
ncruces 1 days ago [-]
Will that save newspapers?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
It might! Reducing the power held by this handful of billionaires necessarily means that power is spread out amongst more people. That means the people who work at newspapers might have the power to influence laws and society in a way that benefits the workers instead of the owners.
ncruces 1 days ago [-]
Will that make people want to pay for news? Or do you think taxpayers should pay for news? Otherwise, what will pay for news?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
Good questions! A United States where all of our public policy is not controlled by a couple dozen billionaires who are trying to increase their personal high score is so different it's hard to know how things would shake out. As an example, perhaps in this alternate world, enough of Facebook would be owned by non-billionaires that they could direct the company to change how it presents news and sells ads such that it would make an ad-based business model viable. Who knows! What we do know is the current system did lead to newspaper collapse. We know the current system does not work. Let's try something else.
IncreasePosts 1 days ago [-]
So if you build a company that all of the sudden everyone wants a piece of, you aren't allowed to keep it
If someone says a valued family heirloom of mine is worth $110M I would be forced to sell it?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
> So if you build a company that all of the sudden everyone wants a piece of, you aren't allowed to keep it
You're allowed to keep $100M of it! That's seriously a lot of money!
IncreasePosts 1 days ago [-]
It's a business, not money. If I'm forced to sell parts of the business I am building, and then the new owners drive it into the ground and zero out the rest of my equity, is it just "tough cookies"? Can I get a tax refund?
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
Sure, I'm open to softening the edges a bit if you have suggestions there. Good incentive to plan your partners in advance ;) But yeah, in the end, if you own $100M of a company, I bet you'll still land on your feet even if it all goes down in flames somehow.
pllbnk 1 days ago [-]
I don’t get why reasonable claims like this get downvoted. Are billionaires downvoting them? Do so many other ambitious people expect to become billionaires at some point in their lives?
groundzeros2015 1 days ago [-]
This comment is repeating a political slogan with no consideration of the content of the article.
Also the slogan is a Marxist alternative theory of wealth and power which conflicts with some basic premises of being interested in startups and is debunked in pg readings.
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
> This comment is repeating a political slogan with no consideration of the content of the article.
Bezos was able to purchase one of the nation's most important news outlets because he is a billionaire. If his wealth was capped at $100M, he would have had to pool resources with many other ultra-wealthy individuals to effect the same purchase. These people would have competing interests, and would also themselves be open to being bought out because their ownership stake in the company would be small. This would be good for the country, because one person being able to turn an important news outlet into his personal propaganda machine is bad, as the article describes.
groundzeros2015 1 days ago [-]
You’re imagining a system where one variable can change and all others hold constant.
coldpie 1 days ago [-]
Yeah probably! Do you have any ideas for how we can reduce the amount of power individuals like Bezos have over our society?
groundzeros2015 1 days ago [-]
Has bezos made any decisions for you lately? Money tends to be a pretty weak form of power.
What we are seeing is bezos trying to translate money into media power, which is real. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out that well. His paper is not that influential or distinct. He is unable to wield much control over the journalists likely because they operate within a tight culture that exists across outlets.
Your instinct is that media is actually real power. Isn’t a few people operating the media scarier than a few people being able to consume a lot?
But then why is media powerful? Public opinion is directly useful for winning elections. But also indirectly as public officials need to cater to the public.
bigstrat2003 1 days ago [-]
I downvoted it because I think that forcibly taking away people's wealth (however much or little they have) is immoral in the extreme. However, I did just now vouch for it because the post isn't breaking any rules even if I do think it's a bad take.
pllbnk 1 days ago [-]
Let’s not discount with what means that wealth has been acquired in the first place. One man’s wealth might be poverty for the thousands. That’s why we got social welfare, it’s just not doing enough. At this point I would say a random store floor cleaner is more valuable for society than someone like Jeff Bezos.
tengbretson 1 days ago [-]
My grandchildren will likely need to be billionaires just to retire.
clcaev 1 days ago [-]
Billionaire status points not only to extraordinary talent but also to remarkable positioning in our business environment and regulatory framework.
If that environment/framework has been unjust, how could you remedy it? A taking seems deeply problematic to me. That said, a renewal of our nation's antitrust laws might be a more effective and palatable approach.
outside2344 1 days ago [-]
Remember that once that happens the next year somoene will propose a 100% tax on wealth above $1M.
Then $100k.
And then you live in Cuba.
miltonlost 1 days ago [-]
Will they tho?
mudil 1 days ago [-]
The murder of the Washington Post has been ruled a suicide. Guess peddling a one sided world view is not very profitable.
pluc 1 days ago [-]
1. He bought it
That's it, that's how he did it.
kccqzy 1 days ago [-]
The article clearly said that in the first few years after Bezos the newspaper was doing very well and even expanded. It was also very successful during the first Trump administration. It just didn’t know what to do after the end of the first Trump presidency.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.
manesioz 1 days ago [-]
Yes, _Bezos_ brought down WaPo. Surely there's no other reason... Seeing as traditional news outlets are all doing so well across the board and trust in them is at all-time highs. It's the Billionaire.
miltonlost 1 days ago [-]
He bought the company, changed the editor in chief, forced the editorial board to not make an endorsement in 2024. That decision alone helped drop thousands of subscribers due to its overt spiking from the Billionaire. So yes. He is to blame entirely for tanking the reputation of the WaPo to be nothing more than billionaire trumpet. That's going to turn off the vast majority of people who had subscribed to what the WaPo had been.
Rendered at 22:57:30 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Recently, both NYT and WP had front page articles about a book by some billionaire's daughter whose husband cheated on her. They seemed like puff-PR posts.
When Kanye West bought a full-page ad apologizing for his anti-semitisim upon release of a new album, he apparently also bought a full-on legitimate looking "news" article to go with it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/arts/music/ye-kanye-west-...
This is the same newspaper that has reporters bragging on Twitter that they shouldn't have to report on major economic news, like the broad effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, because they don't need to report on anything that would benefit Biden. Apparently Biden didn't pay off the right people at the NYTimes.
I mean if their reporting about everything but this one topic is good, perhaps their “Zionist pro-war bias” and “genocide whitewashing” only seem that way to you because you’ve assumed an extremist position on the issue?
NYT is taking a smart approach to other verticals, such as The Athletic and some of their podcasts (for tech, Hard Fork). I am hoping they can figure out business coverage eventually.
What surprises me is how almost no other "hard news" brand in the English-speaking world has attempted to follow even a lite version of the NYT approach. It's not like Bezos or the other billionaire owners of legacy media (Murdoch, Soon-Shiong, Henry, etc) didn't have the chops or the deep pockets to invest in a recipe database or a simple gaming portal. Even AARP figured out that simple games are a good way to engage with its users (https://www.aarp.org/games/).
I now read WSJ largely for the same reasons "more focused, a little drier, easier to follow". I also find WSJ is much better at writing good headlines that draw you in, on a broad range of topics not just breaking Trump news 24/7 which is mostly what NTYimes notifies you with. WSJ also has an excellent Youtube channel, probably the best of the big 3. The only problem with WSJ is it costs twice as much.
While not made specifically for that purpose, this extension[0][1] does a nice job without a lot of hassle, and it makes such pages accessible to others with a URL you can share. The downside is that dynamic content isn't supported.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archive-page/
[1[ https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page
Yeah but that doesn't help when the entire purpose, when what we need, is an informed general populace.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
If the Fed goes back to cutting rates, it could be soon.
You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two
This Guardian article from yesterday gives a complete overview of all the links found: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-file...
NYT being a "paper of record" is something of a delusion of grandeur.
"I thought CBS news was crap so I stopped watching it for NBC News"
That was more than 20 years ago. It's hardly relevant to the journalism landscape in 2026.
It's not inconceivable that in the near future, if you give up on the NYT, you give up on having a news source, period.
It also provided tremendous access to the NYT, but most of those outlets are unhealthy or dying at this point ... because of the internet.
> I have not seen the NYT editorial board doing anything to improve their status. Didn’t Paul Krugman leave the times for integrity reasons?
Who cares about them? Anyone can write an opinion column. That's not what we need newspapers for.
It's also exactly the sort of take you'd see propagated by what the NYT functionally is, so I guess have fun with that? For me, seeing wild talk like that only underscores my complete, utter, earned distrust of the thing. All righty then, the New York Times is the only information, full stop. How nice for it.
Then have fun reading takes on social media other kinds of cheap opinionating. Is that really better?
Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is a problem a lot of people have.
Not yet, but if you've looked at the trends, that's a real possibility. The New York Times doesn't have any problems not shared by other organizations like it, and I think it's important for such journalism organizations to exist.
It is actually very relevant. If you read Chomsky & Herman's 'Manufacturing Consent', you'll get examples from the 1970s and 1980s, another 20 years earlier, and you will find that "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
You're stuck in the past, and letting the (non-existent) perfect be the enemy of the good. However imperfect the newspaper industry may have been, it was a whole hell of a lot better than the mix of social media and outright propaganda that's come to replace it.
Pretty soon you may have no place to find out what's going on in your city, country, or the world; except via the rumor mill and works similar to Melania. But I guess you think that's fine fine, because Chomsky & Herman said the NYT wasn't perfect?
Am I? I'm not the one claiming that
> the newspaper industry... was a ... lot better than [that which]'s come to replace it.
Sure, dwell on Manufacturing Consent in the 90s when journalism was strong and better resourced. But nowadays it seems quaint, like a picky review of a fancy 5-star restaurant when the restaurant industry is collapsing and people may not be able to afford food.
Journalism is collapsing, to be replaced by something worse, not better.
You didn't lose much by the way, their handling of Gaza was equally despicable.
For a long time, the solution of most newspapers was classified ads. They've always financed news with non-news services.
https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Cooking-No-Recipe-Recipes/...
Basically tells you have to make various dishes saying without specific amounts and just going more on feel and what tastes good.
I love this tip about adding anchovies to pasta sauce to get a very rich flavor on the cheap.
Honestly like to think of it as the "stoned but competent" cookbook because the directions are quite easy to follow and come out tasty :)
Also the material they used for the "flexible" edition is really nice to use as you cook.
This is how my mom taught me to cook, and she decided (unilaterally I assume) that it was the definition of gourmet cooking. I went a lot of years thinking that was the literal definition, ha. Though in retrospect, it is not 100% wrong, and I don't think she was joking when she said it.
https://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund-that-also-ma...
All their partners hand over real cash for points to give their customers, that often either expire or are never redeemed. I think it was the Economist that stated that airlines operate as unregulated banks. Flying people around is a secondary thing they do.
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.
Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?
There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
Now the Post is down to ~2 million paid subscribers and 500 newsroom staff.
I don't think the Post was known as a slanted project for "the political opposition" during red or blue administrations, but it's got that reputation now.
My claim is that this new slant is responsible for the bulk of the paper's loss of paid subscribers. There's a market for rigorous, fact-checked reporting. Degrading that makes the business worse, not better.
There are some good regional examples that show people will still pay enough for rigorous, old-school, fact-checked journalism to make it sustainable.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: ~200 newsroom staff, roughly $220M annual revenue, solidly profitable, seven Pulitzers.
Seattle Times: ~600 employees (not sure how many in the newsroom), marginally profitable after paying legacy pension obligations, nine Pulitzers.
Guardian US: ~110 editorial staff in the US, no subscribers but ~270,000 recurring and ~170,000 annual one-time donations, one Pulitzer but maybe that one should be shared with Snowden.
404media: tiny, 5 people, but solid investigative journalism, national distribution, and some pretty impressive scoops, and it makes a profit from subscriptions.
I used to look up to him before he became an obsequious traitor.
FAZ, Der Spiegel, NZZ earn money, too and their market is way more restricted.
Seeing a local institution gutted by an outside force simply sucks.
You should probably read about the cuts we're talking about, then. From the OP:
> The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve
A lot of that trust in WaPo is gone now and moved onto Politico and NY Times.
Once upon a time newspapers were the platform, and they made quite a bit of money selling access to eyeballs. If you wanted to get a message in front of a lot of people, you had to pay a newspaper to do it.
Now on the internet they don't own the platform anymore - tech companies do. Newspapers are just content creators, a much less lucrative business to be in.
In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
Same with magazines. There are some niche magazines that still do alright and also what were niche broadsheet publications became online subscriptions where they offered the subscriber an ROI of some kind.
Would news be in a good place if they had the monopoly for online advertising?
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.
Social media, short form video, podcasts, etc are consumed far more broadly today and effectively have taken reading off the table entirely.
I’m a parent and I think one of the most valuable skills I can impart is the love of reading and the attention span to make it through a novel. That basic skill is going to put them above the bar compared to their peers.
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.
This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.
> 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.
Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?
4 years after the Bezos acquisition?
Elementary reading skills suggest this means they lived in DC for some significant period of time prior to 2017 as a WP reader, moved away from DC for some unknown period living elsewhere as a non-WP reader, moving back to DC in 2017 when they started reading WP again.
They noticed a decline in quality from before and after the acquisition and are using that to conclude that the acquisition didn't impact the quality of the paper. Again, that certainly seems like a strange way to make the point that the purchase didn't impact its quality.
That there is a personal reason for why their two datapoints are before and after acquisition doesn't change that their two datapoints are before and after acquisition such that it's hard to use those two datapoints to exclude that the ownership had major effects on the quality of the paper's reporting, if anything, it seems extremely suggestive that it did.
You have no more evidence that it declined before the acquisition than after it. It reads as some weird defense of Bezos and then you doubled down by saying management wasn't happy with employee backlash.
Anyways, I agree that the decline did start before the acquisition, like it started for all newspapers. The Internet killed the newspaper. Bezos was supposed to save it.
> 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.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.
However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.
It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.
"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.
He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/10/25/washin...
https://archive.is/2rJgD
The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.
Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.
We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.
I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.
My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?
Why are newspapers picking sides at all?
> they refused to endorse a candidate.
> for them choosing not to endorse Harris
There was no "they" or "them" involved.
I don’t like the idea of a paper taking sides (even if, in this case, their endorsement aligned with my side).
It seems antithetical to the ideas of independent and non-partisan journalism.
It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness
It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.
Nobody is claiming neutrality or specific issues like corn subsidies which cross party lines.
Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.
'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.
So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro
> He pointed to Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement—a “gutless order” that cost the paper more than two hundred fifty thousand subscribers.
This completely matches my own memory. When Bezos killed the WaPo endorsement of Harris my own social media feed was full of people encouraging each other to boycott and cancel WaPo.
You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.
One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.
Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_the_Ne...
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
People don't like overt control of editorial by a billionaire owner obviously seeking to curry favor with the WH (and not just any WH but unquestionably the most overtly corrupt WH in history since the Pendleton Civil Service Act)
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
I'm not bullish on the future of newspapers generally but this is the thing you're afraid of when you think about how they're receding: people conditioned to think that random Substacks or Engadget or whatever were ever doing serious first-draft-of-history journalism. A huge percentage of everything people read online is based on reporting work that's done at a pace of 2-3 articles per month. You'll definitely miss it when it's gone!
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!
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.
I’m just saying this is kind of an absurd amount for a mediocre newspaper with ok reach.
The idea that billionaires are not actually billionaires because they cannot possibly sell their shares is not real.
In principle, Bezos could be in this because he values journalism and wants to promote it. There is no reason why this couldn't be a patronage system where one of the richest people in the world spends their money on something good for society.
Sure I suppose anything could be someone’s passion and that could explain why any amount of money would be spent.
But according to the article he is actually concerned about the amount, and I’m agreeing it’s a justified concern.
That’s it.
What he's really buying is power. Even your example of opera houses vs libraries accomplishes two different goals.
Opera houses are places for elites to gather and experience "culture". It means is you own a club for other rich people and create a form of soft power by controlling who gets invited to and can hang out at your club - and maybe put on some shows that everyone can buy tickets to as your "philanthropic contribution to society"
A library is more of a common use. At least in the modern day. Maybe 100 years ago libraries were similar to opera houses - mostly frequented by elite/educated and created a club for them to hang out at. Similar to donating to universities. But they're free for the public, so I'd argue this is quite a boon to common society.
But buying a media company is straight power. You are buying influence over how the public receives information. This is why Musk bought twitter. This is why Murdoch bought Fox news. This is why a billionaire conglomerate forced TikTok to sell itself to them. At this point, more money provides diminishing returns on power, so they buy influence in other ways.
Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
> Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists
Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?
Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.
> How do you expect that to go?
Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better.
> Better than what we have now, hopefully.
We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse.
> I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right?
Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor.
Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason.
There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations.
In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.
This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.
We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
But the biggest boon for society would be progressive taxes on inheritance. It wouldn’t be government’s problem to figure out how it would work. It would be on inheritor to figure out how to pay the taxes on their newly inherited wealth.
It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
>It's on a downward spiral consistently, and it was further cut by 9% this year.
Has it been on a downward spiral?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022[0] added $80 billion over ten years to the IRS budget[1] (a good step in the right direction, IMHO), but which has now been withdrawn. Gee, I wonder why?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce
Edit: Added index [0] for link.
Hm, I wonder why those two dates happen to be so close. It's truly a mystery.
The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
Jokes aside, unless we go through major societal reforms (that would likely involve a lot of chaos) I don’t see this problem being fixed anytime soon.
I can’t think of a better policy suggestion for folks who have more than $100mm than this. Sort of like “corporate death penalty” mostly serves to distract from fines, “no more billionaires” conveniently distracts from e.g. adding tax brackets to pay for increasing the ones we have.
If someone says a valued family heirloom of mine is worth $110M I would be forced to sell it?
You're allowed to keep $100M of it! That's seriously a lot of money!
Also the slogan is a Marxist alternative theory of wealth and power which conflicts with some basic premises of being interested in startups and is debunked in pg readings.
Bezos was able to purchase one of the nation's most important news outlets because he is a billionaire. If his wealth was capped at $100M, he would have had to pool resources with many other ultra-wealthy individuals to effect the same purchase. These people would have competing interests, and would also themselves be open to being bought out because their ownership stake in the company would be small. This would be good for the country, because one person being able to turn an important news outlet into his personal propaganda machine is bad, as the article describes.
What we are seeing is bezos trying to translate money into media power, which is real. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out that well. His paper is not that influential or distinct. He is unable to wield much control over the journalists likely because they operate within a tight culture that exists across outlets.
Your instinct is that media is actually real power. Isn’t a few people operating the media scarier than a few people being able to consume a lot?
But then why is media powerful? Public opinion is directly useful for winning elections. But also indirectly as public officials need to cater to the public.
If that environment/framework has been unjust, how could you remedy it? A taking seems deeply problematic to me. That said, a renewal of our nation's antitrust laws might be a more effective and palatable approach.
Then $100k.
And then you live in Cuba.
That's it, that's how he did it.
> Buoyed by Bezos-funded expansion and the public’s fixation on the new Trump Administration, the number of digital subscribers soared from thirty-five thousand when he arrived to two and a half million when he left, in the summer of 2023. But Ryan failed to develop an adequate plan for how the newspaper would thrive in a post-Trump environment.