What Jeff Bezos Is Doing to the Washington Post -- from The New Yorker

[erronis]

Email excerpt from Clare Malone

I became a Washington Post reader twenty years ago, when I moved to D.C. for college. Those were the Bush years, so there was plenty to devour above the fold, but I was also an enthusiastic follower of its “Date Lab” column, which set up local singles, then documented their mating rituals. I also discovered two books by past staffers which vivisected the city and its powerful people: a collection of writings by Marjorie Williams, who had been a longtime Post columnist and reporter; and a memoir by the paper’s former owner and publisher, Katharine Graham. “Personal History” traced not just the rarified world of Georgetown social politics but a woman’s unlikely rise to the top of President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Graham put her reputation and businesses on the line when she supported the Post’s journalism, as reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unfurled the story that would come to be known as the Watergate scandal. Now the paper that brought down Nixon is struggling to survive Donald Trump’s second term.

Graham’s personal convictions have sprung to mind in the course of the past few months, watching the Post’s current owner, Jeff Bezos, navigate his relationship with his newspaper and with the President. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, Bezos—who had harshly criticized Trump during the 2016 and 2020 elections—decided that the paper wouldn’t endorse a candidate, breaking with a decades-long tradition. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” he wrote at the time. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.” This winter, he declared that the opinion pages would write only in support of “personal liberties and free markets,” another distinct shift. Many have interpreted these moves as those of a businessman looking to protect his financial interests during uncertain political times. But a fair number of the paper’s journalists find themselves disillusioned with an owner they once admired. Perhaps less understood is that the Post has been struggling financially for the past few years, and its staff have become increasingly frustrated by what many of them say is a lack of a clear business plan for one of America’s most storied newspapers. Staffers have been leaving the paper in droves because of their frustrations with the management that Bezos has put in charge. I set out to try to untangle what, exactly, is happening inside the Washington Post, where, as two former editors put it in an unacknowledged e-mail to Bezos, morale has “never been lower.”

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Lots of newspapers have been slowly losing readerships, subscriptions, all part of the cycle of the digital world

taking everything over vs. actual printed media. Some areas remain the same, such as (IMHO) paper books, etc. but not in the large numbers of yesteryear.

[canetoad]

2. I thought he was doing to the Post

Exactly the same thing he's doing to Lauren Sanchez.

[Aviation Pro]

3. Or she to him

You never know.

[hlthe2b]

4. Did you know she interviewed for one of the seats on the View?

I have only very sporadically watched it over the years, but laughed when the subject came up with Whoopie and Joy (I think?) a few months back, both unable to stifle a knowing smirk... So, there must be a story there.

To be honest, I have no clue what her supposed claim to fame (prior to Bezos) might have been. Hmmm.

[mountain grammy]

5. What a shame. Oh how I loved that paper!

I went to college in DC 1965-67.. what a time to be in college. I was so dumb.

I read the Post daily and often the Star, now defunct.

For what it's worth, I think the Post's and especially the LA Times' failure to endorse Harris played a small role in the election in favor of djt ( I can't even stand to type his name anymore)
To be indecisive in an election where one of the candidates is so obviously highly intelligent and qualified and the other is so obviously not is strange, and I think some voters saw that and decided not to decide.

Still read the New Yorker. my son gives me his copy.

Tax the Rich!