Mourning WaPo
We're losing something.
From The New York Times naturally:
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs.
The cuts, announced in a video call with employees, are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
“The actions we are taking include a broad strategic reset with a significant staff reduction,” Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on the call.
This is not a surprise. I canceled my Washington Post subscription a few months ago, feeling I could no longer trust what it was becoming in the Trump era, and I’ve never really doubted the decision though I’ve regretted it. Today’s deep and brutal layoffs are a little bit like hearing that an old friend — one you deliberately fell out of contact with because the differences were too great, but with whom you once shared important life experiences — has been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
I’m grieving, in other words.
My own professional associations with the Post have been glancing. On the cusp of the Iraq War, I traveled by bus with a bunch of Kansas protesters to cover their march against the invasion and filed my story from the Post’s storied newsroom. Once I sat next to intrepid reporter Dana Priest at an awards dinner.
Both moments were career highlights.1
I’ve spent most of the last 20 years staying mostly — but not entirely — ahead of layoffs and mass firings that have shrunk the news business to a wisp of what it was when I started out. I am mourning for the Post, yes, but also for my whole gasping industry.
And for my whole gasping country, really.
It’s been a little career - I know who I am - but it’s mine.
I fell in love with the Post when we moved to Washington DC in 1995 for my Ph.D. program at Catholic University of America. I was a daily subscriber to the paper edition for six years, and maintained an online subscription from as soon as it was widely available (which may have been immediate upon the beginning of my academic career in 2001; I don't remember). Bezos's purchase of the Post was a huge blow, but I hung on, longer than you did. But I've long since resolved not to renew my online subscription to the Post this year, for the first time in something like a quarter-century. I never thought I'd become a fan of the New York Times, which has massive problems all its own, but at this dangerous, all-hands-on-deck moment when it comes to preserving journalism (and America), beggars can't be choosers.
I have kept my subscription mainly for the international and foreign policy stuff. Maybe not worth it now.