It’s Time to Pay Our Last Respects to The Washington Post

[SVPete]

It’s Time to Pay Our Last Respects to The Washington Post

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70249537/washington-post-layoffs/

The body count is over 300 employees, a third of the Post’s workforce. Its books section is gone. Its international reporting will wither and likely die. And, as a point of personal privilege, the Post’s legendary sports section will evaporate. In my daily sportswriting days, there was no better or more talented crew to hang with at various events. I remember at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, I decided one day to write a column on water polo, of which I knew nothing. About five minutes after I sat down, the late Ken Denlinger of the Post sat down next to me. “So,” he said, “what’s going on in the game?” How in the hell do I know, I answered. “Well,” he said, “you’ve been here longer than me. You’re the veteran.” If there’s anything about those days that I miss, it’s the camaraderie of the press box, and it was always a party when the Post gang was there—Tom Boswell at the baseball games, Mike Wilbon and the late John Feinstein at some basketball arena or another, the great Sally Jenkins anywhere.

Ominously, and vaguely, Murray said that the revamped Post will consist of efforts that “will be focused on covering politics and government, and the paper will also prioritize coverage of nationals news and features topics like science, health, medicine, technology, climate, and business.”

The rub, of course, is that there’s no evidence that current management knows how to do any of this.

It began, of course, when Jeff Bezos took a pot of his Amazon money and bought the Post. (On Wednesday, one of the people laid off was the reporter who covered the Amazon beat.) Bezos brought in as publisher a Brit named Will Lewis. Management tomfoolery, such as when Bezos made an 11th-hour decision to pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a blunder that cost the paper an estimated 250,000 digital subscribers, ensued. And, in a tough climate for daily newspapers, that came with a price that was paid on Wednesday. Democracy, the Post says, dies in darkness. Newspapers are murdered in broad daylight.

1. One can hope.

2. The WashPost was on the skids years before Bezos threw a pot of $$$$ into the WashPost, and for even more years before the WashPost manglement couldn't bring themselves to openly back Word Salad Queen Kammie.

3. One can hope.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Self-inflicted suicide. I willingly receive about 5 e-mail blasts from them per weekday, and the headlines in and of themselves are so biased and ridiculous to even click over to read the story.

Bezos didn't ruin the thing, there is no business sense to operate anything if it isn't profitable, from the neighborhood bar or tattoo shop to an "esteemed newspaper". To the WaPo "journalists" to use their own words when coal miners were fired: Learn to code.

[Ralph Wiggum]

It’s Time to Pay Our Last Respects to The Washington Post

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a70249537/washington-post-layoffs/

1. One can hope.

2. The WashPost was on the skids years before Bezos threw a pot of $$$$ into the WashPost, and for even more years before the WashPost manglement couldn't bring themselves to openly back Word Salad Queen Kammie.

3. One can hope.

A further explanation with lefty sob-story stuff here:

The Atlantic: 'We're Witnessing a Murder' of The Washington Post by Jeff Bezos

We’re witnessing a murder.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.

Well, democracy does die in darkness, we're told, while The Washington Post dies in broad daylight. By suicide.

https://twitchy.com/brettt/2026/02/04/the-atlantic-were-witnessing-a-murder-of-the-washington-post-by-jeff-bezos-n2424685

[SVPete]

MSM-folk will refuse to admit that their problem is rooted in 6 decades of partisan bias and arrogance from their part in the fall of RMN. Over those decades their partisanship and elitist arrogance drove a lot of their readership, listenership, and viewership to alternative sources of news and opinion. Pretty much all MSM manglement moves since the early 1990s have been as meaningful as modernizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. They aren't going to regain the trust of people who bailed on them, no matter how well they tweak and live within their revenue-expense base.

I guess Bezos dwelt too much in the same elitist ivory tower to recognize that buying the WashPost was flushing $250M down a toilet that would continue hemorrhaging $$$.