Dem
47
GOP
53
It matters. There are four national newspapers with over 1 million subscribers: USA Today (2.0M), The Washington Post (2.5M), The Wall Street Journal (3.2M) and, on top, The New York Times (11.2M). Nearly all the subscribers are digital. The Times prints only 250K papers every day for its 11M subscribers. There are about 250 million adults in the U.S. so less than 8% of American adults have a subscription, digital or paper, to a national newspaper (probably much less since there are also many international subscribers). There are also regional and local newspapers, but they tend not to have much national news, and what they do have is from the wire services. They don't do much investigative reporting except possibly at the local level.
This means almost all national investigative reporting is up to four papers and a couple of wire services, mostly the AP and Reuters. TV stations do reporting, but it is mostly of the form "Politician [X] said [Y] today." Without investigative reporters, the news will simply consist of reporting what the administration and a handful of key senators are announcing. One of the four, the Post, which Jeff Bezos bought for $250 million in 2013, is showing signs of trouble. With only four major national newspapers, the possible demise of one of them is bad news.
Actually, the situation is even worse than it might appear. Investigative reporting is not USA Today's thing. It does a little, but its real goal is to make the readers feel good. The WSJ does heavy-duty investigative reporting, but its focus is business and it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who gets to veto any reporting he doesn't like. Reuters is a serious organization, but is more focused on Europe than the U.S. That leaves the NYT, the Post, and the AP, plus occasional scoops from smaller outlets, and a few magazines. If the Post ceases to be top tier, that leaves just two main players.
The canary in the coal mine showing the potential death ahead is the—get this—obituary desk. The obit chief, Adam Bernstein, just jumped ship to the Times. All the others on the death beat quit save one, and that one is very junior.
Obit writers are unusual among newspaper staffers. They write up stories about powerful people and then carefully hide them for years until it is obit time. They don't generally have deadlines. They are also unusual in another way. The stories they write can (and often do) contain unsavory details the dearly departed would not like in a newspaper. But by the time the story hits the press or the server, the dearly departed is in no position to complain or sue. Getting rid of all the obit writers will mean future obituaries will be copied and pasted from Wikipedia and may be washed clean of any unpleasant truths about the deceased.
Historically, a Post obit was the ultimate status symbol. If you were important, your death will be covered. John Pope, the Pulitzer Prize-winning obit writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune said: "When you see someone's obit in the newspaper, that is confirmation that the person mattered." The Post covered Washington like no other paper. Now we won't know who mattered. The people who were looking forward to dying so they could be written up in the Post may be so upset they refuse to die now. It is possible for a corpse to keep getting reelected to the Senate, at least, for a very long time (see Thurmond, Strom). On the other hand, there are said to be 900 pre-written obits waiting in cold storage for their namesakes to join them there.
Of possible interest to our older readers, the obit of Tom Lehrer went public yesterday. Here it is. No sequels to "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." Sad. Now only 899 pre-written obits in cold storage.
The death of the obits page is part of a broader exit from the Post. Top opinion columnists Dan Balz, Jonathan Capehart, Ruth Marcus and Jennifer Rubin have all left. So did pioneering sports blogger Dan Steinberg. So have many lesser lights. Part of the problem is that Bezos is now interfering with the paper, something he didn't do at first. He installed a widely disliked publisher, William Lewis, to run the show. Then Bezos took a lot of flak for vetoing the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. It also cost the paper 250,000 subscribers (and since 2020, the paper has lost 500,000 subscribers). Next up Bezos told all the opinion writers that they were henceforth to support personal liberties and free markets—that is, be libertarians. For a guy clearly as smart as Bezos, this was a really dumb move, since very few of the readers are libertarians and many more responded by ending their subscriptions.
Last week, JVL (Jonathan V. Last) over at The Bulwark had a newsletter about all the problems at the Post. Here is a summary:
JVL says a big part of the problem is Bezos' and Lewis' interference with the paper. All they are doing is getting the top talent to leave. Without top talent, you can't have a top newspaper. Bezos doesn't seem to care if he throws away his $250 million investment. After all, if Elon Musk is willing to throw away his $44 billion investment in eX-Twitter, what's a piddling $250 million?
JVL also says that the Post has a lot of legacy that hinders it. There are two opinion sections. No one knows why anymore. There are many more such quirks and they make it harder to evolve. When some piece of the paper is there for historical reasons, but doesn't really have any use anymore, it often continues because a small group involved with it wants to keep it going and no one else cares one way or the other. Getting rid of the many legacy bits requires strategic leadership and wisdom. The Post has none of that now.
Here are some examples. When the Post bought the Kaplan test-prep service in 1984 for $40 million, it diversified the company into a growing sector. When Bezos bought the Post, he didn't want Kaplan. This was when the Times bought the very popular Wordle to diversify.
One of Bezos' first projects was an attempt to turn the Post into a B2B vendor with a content management system called Arc. It failed. Another project is Ripple, where the paper will reprint content from a huge base of outside writers. It is a stupid idea. When AI will soon be producing free news summaries everywhere, what can keep a publication going is a real connection between the writers at the publication and the audience. Grabbing a few random articles from a big database of writers every day is the opposite of what is needed to achieve a connection between the publication and the audience. JVL's own publication, The Bulwark, is growing by leaps and bounds (over 1 million subscribers of which 100,000 are paying $100/year), in large part because there is a real attempt to build a community there with a handful of writers and podcasters, each with a clear personality. (V)