When I was barely making enough money to pay my rent and was eating Ramen noodles and bagged salad for dinner every night, I still scraped up enough money to buy a Sunday copy of The Washington Post every week.
Later, I subscribed to the weekly edition of the newspaper, and then, when it went online, the digital version.
For most American journalists in the 1990s and early 2000s — especially those of us aspiring to break into the business — The Washington Post was very nearly the platonic ideal of what you wanted a big-city newspaper to be. It had everything: Serious news coverage, biting editorial columns and cartoons, and a very lively “Style” section and Sunday magazine.
The New York Times might (arguably) have been the paper of record, but The Washington Post was a lot more fun to read.
But over the past two years, the paper’s multi-multi-multi-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, has gradually tightened his grip on the newspaper. As a result, many of the most entertaining writers and artists have decamped to other publications. I canceled my subscription last year and have seldom regretted it.
The Washington Post has become a little bit like “The Simpsons” for me — something I once loved, but which is now sad to look at.
The news that Bezos has just laid off 300 employees — after earlier laying off 200 employees — surprised no one who has been following the paper’s decline. Among the victims of Bezos’ axe, reportedly, are the sports section, arts and cultural news, the book review and most international coverage. One sports reporter was laid off while they were covering the Winter Olympics in Italy. The paper’s Ukraine correspondent was laid off while she was covering a battle in Kyiv.
The assumption by most people on the Internet is that Bezos is killing The Washington Post because it’s been a thorn in the side of Donald Trump, and Bezos wants government contracts from the Trump Administration. In his second term, the President has made it very clear that he’s open to obvious bribery and flattery, and that he will punish people who are not willing to pay him protection money.
There’s certainly an aspect of that — how could anyone assume anything different? Bezos sat behind Trump during his 2025 inauguration (next to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Elon Musk of X), and then used his Amazon Studios to bankroll the truly dreadful “Melania” documentary to the tune of $70 million. That reportedly includes a $28 million payment directly to Mrs. Trump for the “rights” to her story and $32 million for marketing.
By the way: So far, “Melania” has made back $9.5 million of its $40 million production budget, all in order to attain a 6 out of 100 positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. Incidentally, if you listened to last Saturday’s show, all of the reviews I quoted were real:
It’s pretty clear that Bezos knew what way the wind was blowing and decided he would also blow.
There’s more, though, to Bezos’s affection for the Trump Administration. An aspect of the Biden Administration that was under-reported in the media — and not well promoted by the Biden White House — was that for the first time in decades, the federal government was beginning to target big monopolies for anti-trust investigations. One of the companies it was focused on was Amazon; Biden Administration officials suggested that either Amazon should be broken up into smaller companies, or regulated like a utility.
Needless to say, this was not good news for Bezos. With Trump’s return to the White House, he no longer needs to worry about the federal government putting any restrictions on Amazon — just as long as he keeps signing checks that are Pay to the Order of You-Know-Who.
But is Bezos gutting The Washington Post solely to curry favor with Trump? I honestly don’t think so.
In the video game “Sim City,” users were given the power to build their own city, which would populate itself with digital people. You could form a landscape (including hills, valleys and waterways), design highways, and decide where landmarks and neighborhoods would go. It was like a digital model train set and I found it addicting.
But because it was played in something like real time, a game could literally last for days or even weeks — if you wanted it to.
Or — if you were bored — you could send a disaster to wreck your town. I think in the classic version, the disasters included an earthquake, a flood, a fire or Godzilla. You could even really torture your digital citizens and send all of the disasters at once.
I’ve begun to think as Jeff Bezos as the guy who’s been playing “newspaper publisher” for 10 years and now he’s getting bored, so he’s decided to wreck it.
I have had almost no experience with the super-rich, but I have a had a lot of experience with super-smart anti-social tech-nerds, and they get bored easily. What Bezos is doing to The Washington Post is exactly what super-smart anti-social tech-nerds do when they’re bored.
He’s a child who has spent days constructing an intricate model from Lego bricks, and then gets tired of it, and decides to smash it. Only he’s not doing it with Legos, he’s smashing a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper.
There is a belief among tech-bros that you have to “reinvent” things every so often. It’s called “creative destruction,” but sometimes it’s simply “change for the sake of change,” which means less “creation” and more “destruction.” What’s the Silicon Valley mantra? “Move fast and break shit.”
This, incidentally, is why your favorite software package or smart-phone app keeps moving the buttons and features around every time they do an update. It doesn’t matter that you liked the app just the way it is — the people who make it got bored.
And that gets to yet another reason I think Bezos is gutting The Washington Post. I don’t think he has any concept of why people would like to read a certain publication, or what made the Post so beloved by so many loyal readers. He knew it was successful, but he doesn’t understand the formula, so he’s tinkering with it and making it worse.
When’s the last time you think Jeff Bezos plopped a handful of quarters into a newspaper box to buy one? 1995? Do you think he has a favorite magazine and he rushes to the store every month to buy it? Doubtful.
I’m reminded of the time I stopped at a 7-Eleven type place on the way to work to get a cup of coffee. There was no coffee. The pots were cold.
I said the clerk “Do you know you’re out of coffee?” He rolled his eyes and snorted and said, “I don’t drink coffee.”
Why would Jeff Bezos need a sports section or a style section? He doesn’t read those. I’m reminded again of “The Simpsons,” and the episode where Homer invents a make-up gun and blasts Marge in the face with eye-shadow, blush and lipstick.
“Women aren’t going to like being shot in the face,” Marge says.
“Women will like what I tell them to like!” Homer replies.
You don’t like Jeff Bezos’ changes? Too bad! You’ll like what he tells you to like!
A few people — including The Washington Post itself — have suggested that the newspaper has begun to lose so much money (in part, I’d argue, because of Bezos’s meddling) that he had to do something to stem the losses.
The Washington Post indeed lost $100 million last year, which sounds like a lot, except that Amazon grossed $574,800,000,000 last year. If my math is correct, Amazon grosses 10 times more a day than the Washington Post lost in the entire year.
Bezos himself is the fourth-richest person in the world — worth an estimated $239 billion. Again, if my math is correct, the Washington Post could lose $100 million per year for the next 2,000 years and not make much of a dent in his fortune.
It’s not about the money. And while there’s obviously a political component, I don’t think it’s entirely about trying to suck up to Donald Trump. (After all, not only could Bezos subsidize The Washington Post’s losses until the heat death of the universe, he also could buy and sell the Trump family multiple times over.)
Over at Talking Points Memo (pay link), in a column yesterday titled “‘Do You Speak Billionaire?’ and Other Stories From the Fall of the Washington Post,” Josh Marshall has come to a similar conclusion — it’s not all about politics:
You’re a billionaire and somehow you couldn’t manage to be the owner of a storied newspaper. If you can cover the losses, how hard can that be? And if you’re not willing to cover the losses, how hard can it be? You’re already down on the people who run it. You’ve built Amazon (…)
So the answer is: fuck this whole thing. The staff sucks. The readership sucks. This is when the self-immolation cuts start. If there’s one thing a local paper needs, one thing a metro paper needs, it’s sports. If you can’t do sports, which has a mass audience, you can’t do anything. Maybe you decided in a hard-headed moment that you can’t fund an international section. The Times and the Journal will do that. Not us. It’s not crazy. When you cut your sports section, it’s because you actually don’t want the paper to exist anymore.
I think Jeff Bezos is bored with The Washington Post. It’s not fun any more.
I also, frankly, think he doesn’t know why people were subscribing to The Washington Post for all those years.
Lucky for him, that problem is soon going to solve itself. The more he rips out of it everything that made it valuable to its customers, the fewer subscribers he’ll need to worry about.