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Jeff Bezos came, he saw, he conquered.
Maybe not in the way you’d expect from a onetime financial savior of an iconic newspaper. There are now two Bezos eras at the Washington Post: The first started when he rescued it in 2013. The second began when he saw it gutted, blessing mass layoffs the company executed on Wednesday.
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The Washington Post is eliminating one-third of its staff, including more than 300 people in the newsroom, and shuttering or decimating entire sections, including sports, local news, books, and international coverage.
The company told employees the paper had failed to meet readers’ needs, struggling to maintain financial health while audiences, technology, and the media environment transformed.
The news business has been in deep trouble for a while. And even the New York Times (NYT), the rare legacy media boat without a giant hole in it, shows that it’s a tough industry regardless.
Shares of the top-dog newspaper-turned-puzzle-and-cooking-app are down more than 6% after reporting on Wednesday, as investors were apparently spooked by higher costs tied to the latest pivot to video. (I, too, am now a vertical video journalist; please find me on TikTok and Instagram.)
On social media and in news coverage in the aftermath, Post employees, the labor union, and alumni (myself included) strongly criticized the decision.
Others have pointed to more recent moves by Bezos.
Leading up to the Post’s deep cuts, several media observers highlighted Amazon’s enormous budget to produce and market the new documentary “Melania,” about first lady Melania Trump.
Amazon’s extraordinary spending prompted questions about the movie working as a kind of bribe from Bezos to the White House. (Amazon says they licensed the movie because they think people will love it. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes scores and box office numbers have inspired a news cycle of their own.)
But the splashy Melania rollout provided an ugly contrast to the austerity Bezos was serving down to the Post’s newsroom. In the worst light, critics said Bezos was willing to burn money to please the president but was now unwilling to do so for journalism in the public interest.
It’s not a secret that political calculus seems to be leading business decisions across corporate America. Aligning yourself or your company with the White House can keep you out of harm’s way or advance your financial interests.
That’s an element in the media business, as this newsletter has discussed in the corporate fight over Warner Bros.
What Elon Musk has done to Twitter, reshaping it into X, is the less obvious but more relevant comparison here.
Billionaires aren’t “saving” media platforms as much as they are redefining them.
Marty Baron, the former executive editor famously portrayed in the movie “Spotlight” who led the Post for eight years under Bezos, offered the most cutting rebuke in a statement: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
Baron, like others, pointed to several decisions by the Post in recent years that repulsed its core audience — including Bezos’s decisions to pull a presidential endorsement days before the 2024 election and remake the editorial page to align with his politics.
“Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” Baron wrote. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”
Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on X @hshaban.
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