Seems everybody but The Washington Post is writing about how awful things are at The Washington Post.
Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times reported Thursday, for example, that Post management recently introduced a new motto to motivate the staff, "Riveting Storytelling for All of America," and have set a goal to attract "200 million paying users" to the paper's website. The slogan is dumb, and the number is dumber: The paper’s current subscriber count is reportedly around 3 million, and by all accounts plummeting. Not only is 200 million never happening, whoever suggested it should be fired.
There have been plenty of equally eye-catching numbers attached to stories about the Post lately, all highlighting how bad things are going at the paper. NPR’s David Folkenflik, who has broken lots of news related to the Post’s nasty slide, reported that more than 300,000 subscribers canceled in the days following owner Jeff Bezos’s killing of a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president about a week before the election. The Wall Street Journal said the Post "lost around $100 million" in the last year, meaning the cash hemorrhaging predated the non-endorsement debacle and ensuing readership exodus. Semafor reported that from early 2021 to mid-2024, traffic on the Post’s site fell from "around 22.5 million" to "around 2.5-3 million" daily users, meaning about nine out of 10 readers may have disappeared. (The Post, like many other publications, can probably thank Google and Facebook for a lot of that drop.)
Wait, there's more. Washington City Paper reported last year that the Post stopped publicly sharing readership stats during the great reader exodus . A letter signed by "more than 400" Post employees was sent to owner Jeff Bezos begging for a face-to-face meeting to hear their complaints about Will Lewis, the scandal-ridden British dude Bezos for some reason hired last year to be publisher and CEO. And CNN said "roughly 100" members of the paper’s business staff were laid off last week. The biz cuts complement a massive departure of editorial staffers who are either hoping to board a ship that hasn’t hit an iceberg or, as with recently resigned Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, decided there is some shit they will not eat.
Lots of man bites dog stuff there, for sure. Alas, the hottest newspaper story of the moment is not being told, rivetingly or otherwise, by Post writers: Folkenflik also reported that upper management has decided the paper "should not cover itself."
The Post’s demise makes me sad and mad. I go way back with the paper. I grew up outside D.C. and first learned to love newspapers by reading the Post's sports section as a little kid. Then I started delivering the paper as an 11-year-old in the early 1970s, a time when a pair of Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were toppling a president who deserved toppling. I had to get up every day at 4:30 a.m. and made about $120 a month, plus tips. But back then Led Zeppelin tickets were only $9.50, and I loved the work.
I kept my Post paper route for more than six years, into my senior year of high school. That's a ridiculously long run for a paperboy. I still have the “Nixon Resigns” issue in the tattered canvas Washington Post bag I delivered it in. (I got giggly and goosebump-y recently when I visited a friend at the apartment he’d just moved to, and he told me he’d learned Carl Bernstein lived there in the '70s. Like, the same unit! How D.C. is that?)
I ended up getting lots of bylines in the Post as a freelancer, and every one brought me pride and pleasure. I worked on a few hundred pop music stories for the paper, starting with a piece about Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994 and ending with a review of a show by The Killers in October 2022. The paper's Style section was in crisis mode at the time of the latter, and when new people came in to run it I stopped getting calls to cover concerts. Going to live shows and writing about 'em still thrilled me for sure. But by then, I'd seen just about every act I ever cared about at least once and, hell, I got to meet Dolly Parton (she was tiny and sweet and glowed) all thanks to the Post.
I also covered horse racing for the paper as a stringer for several years beginning in the 1990s. I knew nothing about the sport beyond the Triple Crown races going in, but found everything about the track to be magic. I was paid $75 a week to write up the ponies, yet apart from the paperboy gig, this was the greatest part-time job I ever had. The paper had arguably the strongest sports section ever assembled anywhere at the time and I felt lucky just to see my words in it. My stint as a racing scribe ended fabulously: Former Post superstar Tony Kornheiser got me fired for writing in another publication about a mean thing he did to another D.C. media guy. At the time, Kornheiser had columns in the Sports and Style sections, and he was likely the highest-paid writer at the paper and definitely its most popular; I was at the bottom of both categories in both sections. So through the years a lot of newspapers ended up running stories about how this mean famous guy put poor, poor pitiful me out of a job. The Post covered itself back then, so a couple mentions of my axing even showed up in Kornheiser's own paper. Damn, that was fun.
I have longtime friends still at the paper, and no enemies that I know of (Kornheiser took a buyout in 2008). And I can imagine what they're going through. It's perhaps folly to compare an iconic newspaper now in its third century to a new media website, but there is a distinct and familiar smell coming off each new and depressing story about the Post's tailspin. I'll be damned if reading about the lousy and stupid things being foisted at staffers at the Post hasn't triggered lots of memories of bad stuff that happened to me and many of my current colleagues during the last months we spent at our previous jobs, working for G/O Media. We also suffered through bumbling executives and overmatched managers doling out dumbass slogans ("stick to sports" is what we got), don't-write-about-yourself edicts, and pie-in-the-sky traffic goals.
For as bad as the media industry is, I'd like to believe that there are some institutions with enough prestige and money and history to resist being undone by idiots. It's one thing for a company as distressed as G/O Media to be run into the ground by management mediocrities, but I never expected to see their same playbook being run at the Washington Post. A newspaper like that, an institution like that, should be above suffering the kind of fool who demands 200 million subscribers and thinks "Riveting Storytelling for All of America" is a slogan worth speaking aloud. If the Washington Post isn't safe from these oafs, who is?
No word yet on whether Bezos will meet with his staff.
