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?
