I subscribed after the 2016 election because, you know, “democracy dies in darkness”. I cancelled after Bezos decided to kneel at the altar of Trump. Don’t regret either choice.
I am a subscriber of the WSJ, as I find their new coverage “fair and balanced”. I do not object to a lot of their editorial page and look forward to Peggy Noonan’s column every Saturday. I try to take in a wide range of viewpoints. So sorry if that doesn’t fit your narrative.
Yes, me too. WSJ and Google News is all I look at in the morning (besides the techy Perplexity Discover). The latter tells me the two thing causing most noise today and the WSJ treats them more deeply.
I entirely agree. Why pay money for obnoxious media that hates Republicans? Not happening. That said, the WaPo is less bad than the NYT, in my opinion. Probably getting scared finally, probably too late.
Meh, republicans deserve everything they get for completely abandoning their supposed principles. I don't care about either political party -- not nearly pure enough for either of them.
You can bet all you want. I was once a voter for conservatives, but there aren't any of those around anymore. Nothing conservative or "classically liberal" about the current republican party. But hey, wear the jersey if it fits you, but I prefer standing on the same beliefs I have always had rather than changing them like socks when the direction of the wind changes.
I applaud Bezos for pushing the paper right. I’ve subscribed for over 10 years and the anti-Trump bias was truly sickening at times. Save for George Will, the editorial page offered nothing but negative, and often outrageous outcry for even insignificant Trump actions. And that doesn’t even touch on the monster woke sentiment that the paper continued to foster. I stayed because I need to read both sides (and the crosswords) of the spectrum and the Post was echoing The Nation and other far left outlets. That they lost the loony left subscribers who felt they owned the paper, to me, was absolutely healthy. This changeover will take time. And it might not work. But the Post truly needed a right shove to get it back on a more respectable track.
Well.... revenue basis I am afraid you're a crappy deal.
They lost not "loony Left" but the large professional class softy-touchy-feely Left that's a mix of the Washignton area tech scene, the professional consulting class on both federal and private contracts. White collar Democrats (of a socio-economic profile that in my youth was centrist Republican).
Calling them Loony Left really says more about you than them.
I would go more for "annoying and tedious college educated class who got sucked in Wokey Wokeness out of herd instinct"
The fact they routinely call dyed in the wool libertarians 'Leftist' these days for (checks notes) *opposing government overreach, tariffs, and foreign wars*.
You're far more aware of the reality, whereas others on this thread are engaging in wish projection on the results.
To quote something I've said in here before: Removing federal funding did not make PBS become more conservatives, but it made the Farm Report more liberal.
I don't think he's pushed it very much Right! I subscribed during the last election year and stayed because I wanted to see what Bezos could do with it. He was getting married to that dubious woman at that time and just gave up, I think. The staff express themselves thru quitting and that may help, in the long run, but they are pretty much out of the news business from what I can see of them.
You should poke around substack more: most of them are here and, being free agents, they are now selling thier articles to local papers and news stations on the cheap.
Meaning, oddly enough for the ones that stick it out, they are likely to have wider reach in the long term because the 'Ick! CNN!' factor is no longer associated with thier name.
How I wish there were a good place to get news now. What I call news --- things happening in the world with some relevance to me (crime news from Ecuador, no), things that actually happened rather than speculation and prediction --- and so on, I have worked up a whole list of desiderada versus the worthless writing happening now. I think there is a HUGE appetite and market for news and very few ways to satisfy it. Somebody could make a lot of money if they could think of a new model. Even the Wall Street Journal has adulterated their content with lots and lots of feel-good, health, personal advice, recipes, dumb stuff. I can remember when the WSJ printed the stock market closing figures in tiny fonts! How far it has fallen.
Bezos's editorial turn and hiring of Will Lewis are clearly a major part of this decline. But I wonder how much is attributable to the Post's failure to follow the Times in adding products and niches outside of hard news that would keep readers around in less urgent times and attract readers who were not news junkies.
The Times leveraged it's Trump bump to buy Wirecutter (2016), Serial (2020), the Athletic and Wordle (2022); these were the most visible signs of diversification, but my general sense is that they expanded coverage in other non-hard-news areas as well. The Post didn't, so when Trump and COVID receded there was nothing keeping people around.
While it was just an aside, the decline of local newspapers has had an impact. I live in a medium-sized city and subscribe to the local paper, but it’s a shadow of what it once was. Perhaps Nate can take a deep data dive into local news. I’d be interested to learn more.
If you're looking solely at how the changes in The Washington Post's editorial stance impacted Post, they were obviously bad. Alienating your current customers is rarely a good business strategy. Viewed in broader context, it probably wasn't a bad decision. The Bezos empire includes a large stake in Amazon and space company Blue Origin. Both rely on having good relationships with the government. They have big federal contracts (Amazon through its AWS division) and need cooperation from federal, state, and local governments for all sorts of projects. I suspect Bezos figured that The Washington Post losing a couple hundred million in annual revenue was worth it to lower the risk of his other companies having to deal with a vindictive or noncooperative Trump administration and more MAGA aligned state and local governments.
I've been an on-line WaPo subscriber since the late Obama years. I can remember when Jennifer Rubin's column was considered right-ish.
Jeff Bezos turn to the "dark side" in the run-up to Trump 2.0 was a bad day for the US newspaper business. Sure, the Post was somewhat left-wing, but that was, in a large part, a reflection of its customers (Nate's Indigo Blob). They had an excellent stable of talent, on both the news and opinion side of the house. Much of that is gone now.
I don't know if Bezos realized that mimicking the WSJ (strong news side, but very right-wing opinion side) wasn't a good business move.
Maybe Bezos can sell the paper to his ex-wife; she could hire a strong management team (un-sullied by scandal) and a moral editorial board and begin to rebuild the paper
Yeah, she's a lefty, all right. Seems to me too bad for all those children they (she) adopted, giving away all her money: clue to women, when you are married to a very high-powered guy such as Woody Allen, Brad Pitt, or Jeff Bezos, don't adopt bumpteen children from all the continents of the planet. They don't actually like the distraction.
Wikipedia tells me that she has three kids from her marriage to Bezos and one adopted kid. I wouldn't worry about the kids' welfare. If I'm reading this right, she's given away about 26 billion and still has about the same amount she did at the time of the settlement (35 or so billion)
I've never seen the Washington Post as comparable to the New York Times. When I lived in Washington only the professional politicos I knew subscribed; whereas nearly every upper-income New Yorker I know took the Times. Unlike the NYT, the Post wasn't good about local affairs, culture, fun, recipes, reviews, useful ads, sports, etc. It was an unbalanced paper--a second rate major urban paper with exceptional inside-the-beltway political coverage and some standout investigative journalism.
I think a lot of the chart can be explained by the declining influence of Washington insiders on politics and the partisan fracturing of investigative journalism. Many of the Post's traditional sources and readers are cut off from power and information. The best investigations are ignored by the half of the population that doesn't like the results, and the weakest investigations are embraced by the half that does like the results. Investigation quality no longer matters. Current Washington insiders probably don't read or talk much to the Post. Much of politics is fought out far from Washington.
But the Post can take heart from Brooks Brothers. The company built around conservative office wear faced bankruptcy when business casual eroded its market, just as populism is eroding the traditional foundations of the Post. But Brooks Brothers made a successful pivot, and so can the Post.
It just sounds like Politico and the NYT are running circles around the Post concerning investigative reporting.
Regarding a rightward pivot, Bari Weiss’ plan to turn CBS News into something it’s not isn’t going much better. I think news branding is sticky that way.
I see investigations as a loss leader. They add enormous prestige, but I don't think they sell subscriptions or collect eyeballs. The details are boring even when the underlying exposure is dramatic. People prefer to see summaries filtered through partisan lenses with entertaining asides.
I have been a subscriber to the Post for some 30 years now, and the Boston Globe for a decade before that. [For whatever that is worth other than to document that I’m old]. The Post and every other newspaper in the United States is in decline and has been for over a decade, losing out to social media. The Post did itself no favors for its non-local readers with their non-endorsement in the 2024 election, but the Post’s revenue has been in decline for years, and consequently its capability to bring in talented reporters in DC, the United States, and the World has consequently been diminished. I would dare say that one of the biggest reasons that the Post is still published is Bezos himself!
It's not quite true that every newspaper is in a death spiral. The New York Times is continuing to do well (and I think part of Nate's point is that anyone who cares about the future of news ought to think hard about the reasons for that).
Dan Myers, in his post above, makes a very salient point, that the New York Times has thrived /as a company/ because they successfully diversified as a company. In other words, you have the NYT Company, which is thriving, because it owns the NYT Newspaper, Wirecutter (Technology news), the Athletic (Sports news), NYT Cooking, NYT Games, and assorted minority interests in assorted radio and television stations. The Post? It's just the Post.
Another facet to the economics is that the Creator economy is MUCH more lucrative to Creators than the Newspaper (Publishing) economy. My subscription to the Post runs about $168 / year, but for that $168 I get excellent local (including professional and amateur sports and weather), national, and world news coverage. As much as I enjoyed assorted editorialists that appeared in the Post, I will not pay $70 to 100/person (Nate Silver is $95/year, Paul Krugman is $70, Contrarian (Jennifer Rubin and others) is also $70) to support any number of writers (Silver, Krugman, and Rubin are the exceptions)
1 — If you are subscribing / reading the Post, or any other news outlet because of their editorial content, you are reading that outlet for the wrong reason. (A) They are called NEWSpapers for a reason and (B) I have a working brain and I do not need an editorial board to either tell me how/what to think or confirm what I think.
2 — Many (MANY … as I date myself), Boston had three daily newspapers — the Globe, the Herald Traveler, and the Record American, these latter two being distant second and third to the Globe. The Record American eventually folded and was bought out by the Herald Traveler to become the present day Herald American, which REMAINED a distant second to the Globe, despite having a significantly more right-leaning bent in both editorial content and news reporting. Subscribers on the left read the Globe for news reporting. Subscribers on the right read it for … sports.
The Post’s revenue doesn’t need a more left facing focus. The Post needs a new Shirley Povich.
Good point! The only reason I stuck around with WaPo was to see if Bezos could fix it and to watch him turn to the Right, which was quite interesting. Newspapers are dead, have been for years, and we all have to find something new, some new way to get the news. I am struggling, myself.
"There’s nothing wrong with personal liberties and free markets; I’m a fan of these things myself. Perhaps an explicitly centrist or center-right outlet could be a good business if it were starting from scratch; this is arguably something of a blind-spot even as the center-right has been hollowed out, either joining Team MAGA or Team Democrat."
That's kinda-sorta what Weiss is building at CBS, while the usual suspects on the Left are complaining and moaning.
CBS definitely remains left-of-center, but not drastically so and when "reality has a liberal bias", they bring receipts. They don't insult my intelligence like some more doctrinaire lefty outlets and I feel smarter from consuming their stuff.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see in that graph other than a temporary bubble. It appears the Post is back at the 4-6% mean from whence it came. The story the graph paints is a "return to normalcy" moreso than a "decline".
Obviously, if the stories coming out are anything to go by, the Post is clearly an organization in decline (or, ahem, "in transition", if we want to paint it that way), I'm just saying that the graph doesn't really illustrate what the headline claims it does.
I subscribed after the 2016 election because, you know, “democracy dies in darkness”. I cancelled after Bezos decided to kneel at the altar of Trump. Don’t regret either choice.
Always subscribe to papers that confirm your priors and never challenge you. It’s the safest way.
I am a subscriber of the WSJ, as I find their new coverage “fair and balanced”. I do not object to a lot of their editorial page and look forward to Peggy Noonan’s column every Saturday. I try to take in a wide range of viewpoints. So sorry if that doesn’t fit your narrative.
I also like the WSJ, largely because they seem to understand the difference between editorial and news content better than most other news outlets.
True. So few outlets left. What’s happened at the LA Times for instance is sad.
Famous for the feud between News and Editorial not so many years ago.
That was so awful. I think Editorial has got them under control again.
I really recommend Noonan’s 2024 book “A Certain Idea Of America”. A collection of previous columns, cogent and thoughtful.
It’s your narrative not mine. You signed up when Trump was elected and dropped it when Bezos bent the knee (didn’t endorse Kamala?)
Yawn.
Yes, me too. WSJ and Google News is all I look at in the morning (besides the techy Perplexity Discover). The latter tells me the two thing causing most noise today and the WSJ treats them more deeply.
I entirely agree. Why pay money for obnoxious media that hates Republicans? Not happening. That said, the WaPo is less bad than the NYT, in my opinion. Probably getting scared finally, probably too late.
Meh, republicans deserve everything they get for completely abandoning their supposed principles. I don't care about either political party -- not nearly pure enough for either of them.
Do you vote? I bet you don't.
You can bet all you want. I was once a voter for conservatives, but there aren't any of those around anymore. Nothing conservative or "classically liberal" about the current republican party. But hey, wear the jersey if it fits you, but I prefer standing on the same beliefs I have always had rather than changing them like socks when the direction of the wind changes.
Come back, come back, we need you.
Hiring a British tabloid editor, particularly one with ties to past scandals there, as publisher was also an extraordinarily bad idea.
I applaud Bezos for pushing the paper right. I’ve subscribed for over 10 years and the anti-Trump bias was truly sickening at times. Save for George Will, the editorial page offered nothing but negative, and often outrageous outcry for even insignificant Trump actions. And that doesn’t even touch on the monster woke sentiment that the paper continued to foster. I stayed because I need to read both sides (and the crosswords) of the spectrum and the Post was echoing The Nation and other far left outlets. That they lost the loony left subscribers who felt they owned the paper, to me, was absolutely healthy. This changeover will take time. And it might not work. But the Post truly needed a right shove to get it back on a more respectable track.
Well.... revenue basis I am afraid you're a crappy deal.
They lost not "loony Left" but the large professional class softy-touchy-feely Left that's a mix of the Washignton area tech scene, the professional consulting class on both federal and private contracts. White collar Democrats (of a socio-economic profile that in my youth was centrist Republican).
Calling them Loony Left really says more about you than them.
I would go more for "annoying and tedious college educated class who got sucked in Wokey Wokeness out of herd instinct"
The fact they routinely call dyed in the wool libertarians 'Leftist' these days for (checks notes) *opposing government overreach, tariffs, and foreign wars*.
You're far more aware of the reality, whereas others on this thread are engaging in wish projection on the results.
To quote something I've said in here before: Removing federal funding did not make PBS become more conservatives, but it made the Farm Report more liberal.
I like Loony Left, but I like yours even better ---- [:-)
I don't think he's pushed it very much Right! I subscribed during the last election year and stayed because I wanted to see what Bezos could do with it. He was getting married to that dubious woman at that time and just gave up, I think. The staff express themselves thru quitting and that may help, in the long run, but they are pretty much out of the news business from what I can see of them.
You should poke around substack more: most of them are here and, being free agents, they are now selling thier articles to local papers and news stations on the cheap.
Meaning, oddly enough for the ones that stick it out, they are likely to have wider reach in the long term because the 'Ick! CNN!' factor is no longer associated with thier name.
How I wish there were a good place to get news now. What I call news --- things happening in the world with some relevance to me (crime news from Ecuador, no), things that actually happened rather than speculation and prediction --- and so on, I have worked up a whole list of desiderada versus the worthless writing happening now. I think there is a HUGE appetite and market for news and very few ways to satisfy it. Somebody could make a lot of money if they could think of a new model. Even the Wall Street Journal has adulterated their content with lots and lots of feel-good, health, personal advice, recipes, dumb stuff. I can remember when the WSJ printed the stock market closing figures in tiny fonts! How far it has fallen.
Bezos's editorial turn and hiring of Will Lewis are clearly a major part of this decline. But I wonder how much is attributable to the Post's failure to follow the Times in adding products and niches outside of hard news that would keep readers around in less urgent times and attract readers who were not news junkies.
The Times leveraged it's Trump bump to buy Wirecutter (2016), Serial (2020), the Athletic and Wordle (2022); these were the most visible signs of diversification, but my general sense is that they expanded coverage in other non-hard-news areas as well. The Post didn't, so when Trump and COVID receded there was nothing keeping people around.
While it was just an aside, the decline of local newspapers has had an impact. I live in a medium-sized city and subscribe to the local paper, but it’s a shadow of what it once was. Perhaps Nate can take a deep data dive into local news. I’d be interested to learn more.
“much of the audience doesn’t understand the firewall between news and opinion pages”
To be fair, I have to wonder how many people IN the news business grasp the distinction.
I believe this is the point. Reduce liberal influence to garner favor with mein Fuhrer.
If you're looking solely at how the changes in The Washington Post's editorial stance impacted Post, they were obviously bad. Alienating your current customers is rarely a good business strategy. Viewed in broader context, it probably wasn't a bad decision. The Bezos empire includes a large stake in Amazon and space company Blue Origin. Both rely on having good relationships with the government. They have big federal contracts (Amazon through its AWS division) and need cooperation from federal, state, and local governments for all sorts of projects. I suspect Bezos figured that The Washington Post losing a couple hundred million in annual revenue was worth it to lower the risk of his other companies having to deal with a vindictive or noncooperative Trump administration and more MAGA aligned state and local governments.
I wonder if Bezos considered selling the Post rather than try to drive it through the eye of a needle like this.
What a great analysis. Silver is hard to beat when it comes to understanding the data.
I've been an on-line WaPo subscriber since the late Obama years. I can remember when Jennifer Rubin's column was considered right-ish.
Jeff Bezos turn to the "dark side" in the run-up to Trump 2.0 was a bad day for the US newspaper business. Sure, the Post was somewhat left-wing, but that was, in a large part, a reflection of its customers (Nate's Indigo Blob). They had an excellent stable of talent, on both the news and opinion side of the house. Much of that is gone now.
I don't know if Bezos realized that mimicking the WSJ (strong news side, but very right-wing opinion side) wasn't a good business move.
Maybe Bezos can sell the paper to his ex-wife; she could hire a strong management team (un-sullied by scandal) and a moral editorial board and begin to rebuild the paper
Yeah, she's a lefty, all right. Seems to me too bad for all those children they (she) adopted, giving away all her money: clue to women, when you are married to a very high-powered guy such as Woody Allen, Brad Pitt, or Jeff Bezos, don't adopt bumpteen children from all the continents of the planet. They don't actually like the distraction.
Wikipedia tells me that she has three kids from her marriage to Bezos and one adopted kid. I wouldn't worry about the kids' welfare. If I'm reading this right, she's given away about 26 billion and still has about the same amount she did at the time of the settlement (35 or so billion)
I thought it was more children than that, but you looked it up, so.
What an economy: it's like the magic oatmeal pot, just keeps replacing whatever we take out. Can't last, but it's going well now.
I've never seen the Washington Post as comparable to the New York Times. When I lived in Washington only the professional politicos I knew subscribed; whereas nearly every upper-income New Yorker I know took the Times. Unlike the NYT, the Post wasn't good about local affairs, culture, fun, recipes, reviews, useful ads, sports, etc. It was an unbalanced paper--a second rate major urban paper with exceptional inside-the-beltway political coverage and some standout investigative journalism.
I think a lot of the chart can be explained by the declining influence of Washington insiders on politics and the partisan fracturing of investigative journalism. Many of the Post's traditional sources and readers are cut off from power and information. The best investigations are ignored by the half of the population that doesn't like the results, and the weakest investigations are embraced by the half that does like the results. Investigation quality no longer matters. Current Washington insiders probably don't read or talk much to the Post. Much of politics is fought out far from Washington.
But the Post can take heart from Brooks Brothers. The company built around conservative office wear faced bankruptcy when business casual eroded its market, just as populism is eroding the traditional foundations of the Post. But Brooks Brothers made a successful pivot, and so can the Post.
It just sounds like Politico and the NYT are running circles around the Post concerning investigative reporting.
Regarding a rightward pivot, Bari Weiss’ plan to turn CBS News into something it’s not isn’t going much better. I think news branding is sticky that way.
I see investigations as a loss leader. They add enormous prestige, but I don't think they sell subscriptions or collect eyeballs. The details are boring even when the underlying exposure is dramatic. People prefer to see summaries filtered through partisan lenses with entertaining asides.
No.
Just, no.
I have been a subscriber to the Post for some 30 years now, and the Boston Globe for a decade before that. [For whatever that is worth other than to document that I’m old]. The Post and every other newspaper in the United States is in decline and has been for over a decade, losing out to social media. The Post did itself no favors for its non-local readers with their non-endorsement in the 2024 election, but the Post’s revenue has been in decline for years, and consequently its capability to bring in talented reporters in DC, the United States, and the World has consequently been diminished. I would dare say that one of the biggest reasons that the Post is still published is Bezos himself!
It's not quite true that every newspaper is in a death spiral. The New York Times is continuing to do well (and I think part of Nate's point is that anyone who cares about the future of news ought to think hard about the reasons for that).
Dan Myers, in his post above, makes a very salient point, that the New York Times has thrived /as a company/ because they successfully diversified as a company. In other words, you have the NYT Company, which is thriving, because it owns the NYT Newspaper, Wirecutter (Technology news), the Athletic (Sports news), NYT Cooking, NYT Games, and assorted minority interests in assorted radio and television stations. The Post? It's just the Post.
Another facet to the economics is that the Creator economy is MUCH more lucrative to Creators than the Newspaper (Publishing) economy. My subscription to the Post runs about $168 / year, but for that $168 I get excellent local (including professional and amateur sports and weather), national, and world news coverage. As much as I enjoyed assorted editorialists that appeared in the Post, I will not pay $70 to 100/person (Nate Silver is $95/year, Paul Krugman is $70, Contrarian (Jennifer Rubin and others) is also $70) to support any number of writers (Silver, Krugman, and Rubin are the exceptions)
If the ONLY newspaper left in a decade is the New York Times, that would be rather sad.
I should add two things.
1 — If you are subscribing / reading the Post, or any other news outlet because of their editorial content, you are reading that outlet for the wrong reason. (A) They are called NEWSpapers for a reason and (B) I have a working brain and I do not need an editorial board to either tell me how/what to think or confirm what I think.
2 — Many (MANY … as I date myself), Boston had three daily newspapers — the Globe, the Herald Traveler, and the Record American, these latter two being distant second and third to the Globe. The Record American eventually folded and was bought out by the Herald Traveler to become the present day Herald American, which REMAINED a distant second to the Globe, despite having a significantly more right-leaning bent in both editorial content and news reporting. Subscribers on the left read the Globe for news reporting. Subscribers on the right read it for … sports.
The Post’s revenue doesn’t need a more left facing focus. The Post needs a new Shirley Povich.
Good point! The only reason I stuck around with WaPo was to see if Bezos could fix it and to watch him turn to the Right, which was quite interesting. Newspapers are dead, have been for years, and we all have to find something new, some new way to get the news. I am struggling, myself.
The "paper" retreated from being biased and not a "paper" at all. Funny 😄
"There’s nothing wrong with personal liberties and free markets; I’m a fan of these things myself. Perhaps an explicitly centrist or center-right outlet could be a good business if it were starting from scratch; this is arguably something of a blind-spot even as the center-right has been hollowed out, either joining Team MAGA or Team Democrat."
That's kinda-sorta what Weiss is building at CBS, while the usual suspects on the Left are complaining and moaning.
CBS definitely remains left-of-center, but not drastically so and when "reality has a liberal bias", they bring receipts. They don't insult my intelligence like some more doctrinaire lefty outlets and I feel smarter from consuming their stuff.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see in that graph other than a temporary bubble. It appears the Post is back at the 4-6% mean from whence it came. The story the graph paints is a "return to normalcy" moreso than a "decline".
Obviously, if the stories coming out are anything to go by, the Post is clearly an organization in decline (or, ahem, "in transition", if we want to paint it that way), I'm just saying that the graph doesn't really illustrate what the headline claims it does.
The WaPo is still published? Who knew!?
Target audience of one person.
It is hardly a surprise you don't really notice them anymore.
Jeff, or Donald?
Mostly personal advice columnists now is what's in WaPo.