Can the 'Post find its feet in the digital age?
After a bruising week of layoffs and public handwringing about the newspaper industry, can the hometown paper of the US capital bounce back? Our bruised Post subscriber reflects...
There are lots of Washington Post hot takes out there, so here’s some thoughts a few days after the announcement of significant job cuts at the Post. (I am still a paid Post subscriber...)
Can you run a newspaper with a newsroom of around 600 heads? I think the answer has to be yes, though it’s obviously going to be a much changed offer from the previous few years. The Post is now going to compete directly with Politico, Axios and the NY Times on its core beats of politics, national security and diplomacy. That’s now a really crowded and contested area - and unlike the Times the Post now has little else to fall back on if it doesn’t succeed.
How harshly will Bezos’ ownership of the Post be judged? It’s clear the owner has significantly invested in the paper since 2013, but not in ways that has transformed its fortunes. The latest cuts should be judged in that context. One thing that I don’t understand - and I spoke with previous Post management about this in the past - is why Bezos doesn’t use the huge presence and publishing power of Amazon Prime Video to boost or showcase audio and video offers from the paper. (One of the casualties of the cuts is the daily podcast, and the video offer has been scaled back further.) It seems a lost opportunity to match up an always-on news organisation with a huge global digital front page whose audience have at least a passing interest in live news, alongside the core sports and entertainment video content.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the high regard that the Post’s own staff had for the value of their work was not matched by the current and potential future readership. And I say that as someone who’s paid for a Post subscription for many years, and will continue to do so. I think this is what Will Lewis was getting at when he told the newsroom that not enough people were reading their product. That’s not a message anyone wants to hear and I’m not surprised it landed badly. Online news publishing is still a brutal business model and it does require a relentless focus on a product that can sustain a business; I’m not sure the current strategy is right or will work, but sadly the current crisis is not out of line with what’s happening elsewhere in the industry.
Finally there should be some credit given to the NY Times and to the WSJ for actually making this work. Rupert Murdoch is an easy punching bag, but it’s striking to see the current rude health of the Journal in particular, a paper that has not backed off its solid reporting of stories that have infuriated the Trump White House, including the current epic legal suit about Trump’s supposed ‘Epstein birthday message’. The Journal and the London Times continue to invest in journalism sustainably, and that’s an inconvenient truth for those who don’t want to give Murdoch much credit for anything.