The Market for Journalism

The Washington Post recently announced that they are laying off a significant portion of their staff, including whole departments such as the Sports section and the Books section.

I have nothing but sympathy for those personally affected by this.  Being laid off is an intensely unpleasant and unsettling experience which I would not wish on anyone which not only leaves you worried about your financial future but also about your professional effectiveness and self worth.

One thing that's been surprising to me in the discourse around this announcement is that a number of the people who have been talking about the shrinking of the Washington Post as a threat to the free press and the First Amendment are in the same circles (and in some cases the same people) who were loudly advocating that everyone cancel their subscriptions to the paper back in 2024 when they announced that they would not be making an official endorsement of a presidential candidate in the election.

Since the Post is privately held (by Amazon founder Jeff  Bezos) it doesn't formally publish financials, but as Nate Silver wrote in a recent post by looking at how often users link to WaPo articles one can get a pretty good idea of how much it is being read.  That data would suggest that the WaPo is now doing almost as badly as it was prior to Bezos buying the paper.

This means that the "boycott the Washington Post" people have largely been successful in hurting the paper.  Why some of those people are now unhappy with the success of their work I'm less sure.  

Another thing the graph shows is that how much people read and link to newspapers has become subject to a partisan cycle.

When Trump was first elected, both the NY Times and WaPo saw significant surges in attention and  subscribers.  This was, after all, the original "Democracy Dies In Darkness" era of the Washington Post, when it was getting attention by being even more steadfast in its opposition to Trump than the NY Times. 

There was some loyalty carry-over after the first Trump presidency, but as you can see from the graph the trend was downwards.  And as the Biden presidency slumped towards its ignominious conclusion, the references to both papers declined precipitously.  Arguably, this is because their readership had become strongly linked to a particular partisan alignment, and people with that partisan alignment were not enjoying the news much in 2023 and 2024.

With the second Trump presidency, the NY Times is once again getting huge amounts of attention, but there has been no benefit to the Washington Post.  Arguably this is because the WaPo offended its partisan readership by not officially endorsing a candidate in 2024.  This resulted in about 10% of the paper's digital subscribers cancelling, a reduction of about 250,000 subscribers.

What do companies do when they see a significant decline in revenue?  Often they cut costs, and for a newspaper, a lot of those costs are people.  It's probably not surprising that the successful push to literally decimate (reduce by 10%) the WaPo subscription base ended up resulting in layoffs.

Perhaps the surprising thing is that there's a fair amount of overlap between the people who encouraged people to cancel subscriptions to the WaPo back in 2024 and the people who are upset to see it laying off employees now.  I even saw a few posts in which people tried to blame the layoffs on the Trump administration attacking journalism as an industry and institution.

The actual narrative here, I think, is first that in an environment where many newspapers were losing subscribers in the 2000s, the WaPo successfully made itself a national brand (arguably at the expense of local papers which continued to die) by making itself a nationally known source of opposition to Trump and the Right more generally.

However, taking on this brand meant that when the WaPo did something which offended the customer niche it had tied itself to (partisan supporters of the Left) it found its readership significantly reduced and was losing money rapidly.  (Reportedly, the paper had a roughly $100M loss in 2024.)  A lot of people are blaming Jeff Bezos for not subsidizing the paper despite its losses, and it's true that keeping the paper going would cost Bezos less than producing another excruciatingly bad season of Rings of Power, but while it's true that a determined billionaire could keep pounding money down the budget whole, it is in the nature of money losing organizations to cut expenses.

Maybe a better question is: why was the fury against a paper not explicitly endorsing a candidate which it was clear to everyone the vast majority of its staff supported sufficient reason for angry subscribers deal such painful financial blows to a paper which in retrospect many people broadly on the left seem to consider a valuable thing to have in existence?

Darwiniana 2026

I feel like Mr. Hat here all the time.

Last night my 8yo son read me Green Eggs and Ham, all the way through, without stopping.

Not a milestone at your house, perhaps: your child did this at age 4, probably. Some of my other children did this at age 4. But this child, my seventh and my youngest, has dyslexia, and we have been working through a reading program designed for dyslexic brains. This is my second time through this program, and we started earlier with this child than we did with his older sister. I'd taught four children to read without more than the usual fuss, and couldn't understand why #5 was having such difficulty doing the things that worked before. With #7, I recognized the same signs earlier (and fortunately, hadn't resold my expensive dyslexia curriculum).

My mantra, in regards to teaching this one to read, is, "If it was easy, he'd be doing it already." It's tempting to compare progress with other children -- someone else's 8yo has beautiful neat even handwriting; his cousin is reading novels; other homeschoolers his age can read directions well enough to compete in a math tournament. I believe strongly in reading, and I want all my children to have a firm foundation of literacy. This guy needs some extra help and support, and this is a reason I continue to homeschool: I want to provide that support in a way that builds lifelong mastery and confidence, not just quick testable results which are forgotten as soon as they're documented. 

What that means in practice is a lot of me reading aloud books or instructions that other children his age could read themselves, and lots of what would be considered tutoring, I guess: one-on-one work at the table in various subjects instead of me sitting him down with a book or worksheet or paper for independent work. Is this the best way to do things? I don't know, but it's what seems to work for us.

I read recently an article about stages of brain development, which cited research about major developmental changes at ages 9, 33, 66, and 82 or 83. I'm trying to lay the foundation for some solid age-nine growth in my 8.5yo. Laying the foundation seems like the bulk of our parenting right now. My dad used to say, "I'm raising you kids to be adults," and that's something I think about a lot. Several of my children are legal adults, and others are fast approaching that age. I pray that their foundation is solid enough that they can continue to build on it themselves, and in turn, support new relationships and provide stability for future generations.

I don't write much these days partly because I feel like I've forgotten how to write, but also because as the kids take up working on their own foundations, their stories become their own, and I owe them the privacy of being able to do that work without Mom putting it out there for the world to discuss. Our last year was chaotic to an unprecedented extent for our family -- not bad, mind you, not evil, but challenging for everyone. The beginning of 2026 looks very different from the beginning of 2025, and our plans are different than we thought they would be. We're not prepping for a wedding, for one thing. Two daughters ended relationships; one has started a new one. Educational plans have changed for a few people. People are moving out, and moving back in. The younger ones live through these changes in a way that the older ones didn't have to (since it's the older ones making the big life shifts), and that leads to stresses and adjustments that didn't have to be made when all the kids were young. I don't know exactly how this works, but everyone feels like they're the middle child, falling through the cracks while everyone around causes drama. I literally, at this very moment, have a cat in the walls of my house. 

This is my wall, but this isn't even my cat.

Life feels all-consuming -- good, but all-consuming. My prayer life seems to consist mostly of the name of Jesus with each breath.

But we don't stop having small milestones because we have big milestones. And reading Green Eggs and Ham is definitely a cause for celebration. My 8yo wanted a blue camo hat, and as a reward for reading his book, we went to Amazon and picked out one he liked, because his developments are no less momentous than his older siblings'. What's one more hat, or one more cat, in a house and a life that's already so full? The foundation, I think, can take it.