Oh, the lefty drama surrounding the demise of the once-vaunted newspaper of record in the nation's capital, The Washington Post. Pick any classic description of anguish you like — there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and garments are being rent everywhere one looks in Lefty Land. All of it is being done from fainting couches, of course.
And most of it is being done by people who haven't read or subscribed to The Washington Post in years.
The Washington Post is a business, and that fact alone makes leftists lose the thread rather quickly. Democrats loathe the private sector ("FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ÜBER ALLES!"), and tend not to get fully grasp what makes the real world tick. During all of the meltdowns over the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show last summer, I frequently wrote about their inability to comprehend the overall decline in late-night television, as well as the harsh economic reality of the money pit that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert had become for CBS. The show costs a fortune to produce and not that many people are watching it anymore. CBS accountants had probably been nagging the brass to rid the company of the Colbert albatross for years.
The old news media version of that is what is going on at WaPo. Print media has had 1 3/4 feet in the grave for years, and that death rattle is getting louder by the day. Newspapers were slow to adapt to the digital age and haven't been very successful at playing catch-up. Even The New York Times — the 800 lb. gorilla of the American newspaper business — stumbled and fell on its face when it first came out of the gate. The Times' initial attempt at getting readers to subscribe to its digital offering was a resounding dud. The NYT is doing well now but — as my friend Stephen Green has pointed out — that's because it offers a suite of games that people who don't even read the news subscribe to. The games subscription can be part of a total package or purchased à la carte. The Times was able to read the writing on the wall and adjust.
Over at WaPo, it would seem that the only one who can read the writing is the guy at the top, Jeff Bezos. He's a convenient target of hate because he's a billionaire and he's catching a lot of heat for the drastic layoffs at WaPo, but it's not like he didn't give everyone there a chance. Bezos has owned the company for almost 13 years now; he didn't swoop in after President Trump was reelected and use a MAGA hat to smack everyone out the door.
Not only is Bezos reading the writing on the wall; that writing has also been there for a while. This article from The Post Millennial was written in January of last year:
The Washington Post's subscriber and readership base has reportedly tanked over the last four years. The revelations come as Jeff Bezos is seeking to bring the left-leaning publication more to the center.
Data on web traffic over the last few years shared with Semafor shows that the 2024 daily numbers shrank substantially from their January 2021 high. At the beginning of Biden's term in the White House, the site saw 22.5 million daily users. However, in 2024, the average was around 2.5-3 million users a day—a drop of 20 million.
One doesn't need to be a math major in order to figure out what a trainwreck that is. As I am fond of saying, this game of connect-the-dots has only two dots. The organization in severely underperforming and a house-cleaning was in order. Bezos is running a business, not a sweetheart-funded charity.
There is, of course, a discussion to be had about the one-sided cheerleading of the Post being the real cause of its demise, but I am mostly focusing on the basic, numbers-based reasoning for the upheaval at WaPo. The people who have lost their jobs are, for the most part, leftists who have no concept of accountability. In their minds, they are all blameless victims in this story. They will never acknowledge that they've been churning out a product so crappy that they can't even sell it to the audience they're sucking up to. Those familiar with my work know that I'll be dealing with this in another column.
It's more than likely that I — an avowed rightwing nutjob conservative opinion columnist — read more of The Washington Post in a week than the majority of those caterwauling about its demise have in the past two years. Writing about liberal bias in the media is sort of my raison d'être around here, after all. As I often remind people, I read the Opinion sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post every day so that my friends, family, and fans don't have to. Because it's a business expense, I subscribe to both.
As if I weren't already giving Jeff Bezos enough of my money. I think some of my dreams are being delivered by Amazon now.
Perhaps Bezos can save The Washington Post from itself. He's made his mark as more of a startup and acquisition guy, though; he may not have the patience for the Coastal Media Bubble™ idiots to stop being, well, idiots.
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