After The Washington Post
The Washington Post, one of America’s three national newspapers, has just laid off some 30 percent of its staff, following two previous rounds of layoffs and buyouts. The stripped-down Post will have a staff of under 600, compared to 2,800 people at The New York Times. The firings are on orders of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men.
The Post lost about $77 million in 2023, another $100 million in 2024, and even more last year. For Bezos, that’s petty cash. But having purchased one of American journalism’s crown jewels for $250 million in 2013, Bezos has decided to trash it rather than strengthen it, killing its independent editorial page and then cutting back the newsroom.
There are several superb extended articles, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and in our friend Matt Stoller’s Substack, explaining in detail why Bezos did what he did. We don’t need to rehash the details here. Bottom line: The Post turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, given Bezos’s other business interests with Trump.
It’s axiomatic that a strong and independent press is a pillar of democracy. Freedom of the press requires a press. So what is the remedy?
For decades, America’s three great national papers were sheltered by families with an ethical sense of the larger place of journalism in a democracy. The Grahams cherished the mission of the Post; the Sulzberger family kept faith with the Times. Even at The Wall Street Journal, the Bancroft family maintained the integrity of the news department.
Then in 2007, the Bancrofts sold the Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Long before Murdoch bought it, the Journal’s editorial page had been ludicrously far right. But its reporting on the corruptions of capitalism was first-rate. Murdoch, realizing the value of the franchise, left the newsroom largely intact.
The Graham family, meanwhile, brought the Post to new heights, defending the pursuit of the Watergate story against both the crude threats of the Nixon administration to destroy the paper and an extremely fearful corporate Post board.
On Tap This story first appeared in the On Tap newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
Despite occasional lapses and blunders like paying far too much for The Boston Globe, the Sulzberger family continued to defend the integrity of the Times newsroom, and successfully invested in the conversion of a great legacy paper to a mixed-media product for a digital age without giving up print. But the Post bungled this transition. The Grahams could not decide whether and how to make the Post into a true national paper or how to maximize its reach on digital as well as print. Despite its virtuoso journalistic performance under Bezos’s first executive editor, Marty Baron, the Post lost money while the Times and the Journal each ran a profit.
Bottom line: We can’t rely on legacy families and their successors to keep great newspapers independent and financially strong. We need a different model.
One is the British Guardian. Thanks to an accident of history, The Guardian is owned and controlled by a nonprofit trust. After the deaths of its longtime radical editor C.P. Scott and his son Ted in 1932, his surviving son, John, created the Scott Trust as owner in 1936, requiring only that the paper maintain its founding principles.
The Guardian’s longtime editor, Alan Rusbridger, was a model of courage and integrity when he refused to turn over to the British government hard drives provided by Edward Snowden in 2013. Had The Guardian been controlled by for-profit press barons, like the rest of the British press, Rusbridger might never have been editor.
America’s foundations give away billions of dollars every year to a variety of causes, some worthy and some silly. There is nothing more worthy than maintaining a strong independent press. There are also some billionaires with principles. How about creation of a nonprofit trust to buy or create a great daily newspaper in the nation’s capital. Maybe it could be George Soros’s last act? Maybe philanthropist MacKenzie Scott could upstage her former husband, the appalling Bezos.
When I worked for the Post, in the Watergate era, the whole newsroom was around 500. That was sufficient to bring down a corrupt president and to do expert reporting on Vietnam, including the Pentagon Papers.
Baltimore offers a model. The Baltimore Banner was created in 2022 by Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a businessman and philanthropist, after Alden Global Capital, which has pillaged the once great Baltimore Sun, refused an offer from Bainum to buy the Sun. Bainum then created the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism as a nonprofit to create and own the Banner, which is currently digital only.
The Banner won a Pulitzer in 2025 for its coverage of drug overdoses. It already has about 55,000 paid subscribers and a staff of 125, and has just announced a Prince George’s County (Maryland) edition as the Post pulls back from local coverage.
Journalism is too vital to democracy to be subject to the whims of billionaire owners and the vagaries of legacy families. To paraphrase the great press critic A.J. Liebling: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
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