Jeff Bezos Gutted the Washington Post. What Happens Now?

15 years in and the DC SEU is still at it. Still helping DC save money, reduce energy use, and build a cleaner, more affordable future. Together, did you know they've invested $120 million in low-income communities? They put $99 million in DC-based businesses, too. And they have turned out over 300 graduates trained for the new green workforce. That is economic mobility, y'all. And that is what it's all about. Still here, still redefining power in the district. Find out more at DCSU.com. Today on CityCast, D.C., yesterday was an incredibly grim day for the Washington Post, and for our city, too. The Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, laid off up to a third of its staff. The sports section is being shuttered, the metro section is being cut by three quarters, and many of the critics who have followed local culture and championed local theaters have been sent packing. So my friend Jack Schaefer has been covering the post for 40 years since he was the editor of Washington City paper in the 80s and 90s. He's the guy I call when I want to talk media anything. We talked yesterday as the cuts were going down, and we reflected a little bit about what it all means for D.C. Today is Thursday, February 5th. I'm Michael Schaefer. Here's what D.C. is talking about.

Hey, Jack, welcome. You betcha. So you've covered the Washington Post for like 40 years. And for like the last two weeks of those 40 years, we've been waiting for the hammer to drop here. And it finally happened. Almost a third of the post staff were laid off. How did it come to this? Well, the post has gone through various contractions. I didn't have a chance to go to the archives and look it up. But in the aughts, when the paper is still owned by... Don Graham and led by Len Downey. They paired the paper down. I'm anecdotally, I remember down to maybe six or seven hundred people, maybe closer to six. So the reduction in the size of the editorial staff is not unprecedented. Obviously, when Jeff Bezos bought the paper in. Was it 2014 or 2013? There is a influx of cash, new cash. Basis talked about building a runway for the paper's future. So the cuts, which are dramatic, are not unprecedented. And so if you were looking for... you know, a golden crease in the in the catastrophe here. The post has cut back before and build up, but I wouldn't predict that. And the pairing in the past was different in that what has happened today, and you can speak to this more than me, is that they have eliminated entirely certain functions or massively cut certain functions that were once viewed as essential, like metro coverage, sports coverage. Yeah, the growth of the metropolitan newspaper. basically cakes off in the 1890s, where prior to that, you have a lot of specialized titles, some newspapers in big cities cover banking or the business, or there's a more general interest paper. But starting in the 1890s, all successful Metropolitan Dailies started to build a bundle. And there wasn't just the news of what happened yesterday. There were international dispatches. And beyond that, there was massive sports coverage, primarily of college, football, and horse racing. And bit by bit, you turned the newspaper, which was, you know, closer to, like, a tattle sheet or a newsletter for most of the 21st century grew the... the bundle grew to be bigger and bigger thing. It was like a home entertainment section. I can remember growing up in Michigan in the 60s, and we would get both, we lived in a town between Detroit, Chicago. We'd get both newspapers because each newspaper had, you know,

comics or cooking for my mom's interests or, you know, massive sports sections and puzzles for kids. And they were, they, they, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, And so that was the general vector of newspapers for the great lion's share of the 21st century. But the newspaper as an advertising and editorial vehicle seems to have peaked sometime in the 70s. People think of newspapers as being in the news business when in fact what they were in for so long was in the advertising business. 80% of their revenues came from advertisers. And that's just not true anymore. You look at the Washington Post and it's almost devoid of advertising. So we went from a period in which advertisers were subsidizing news to today where largely when it comes to a print product, the subscriber is bearing the brunt of the costs. So what's your understanding? What did they get? What got cut yesterday? All I know is what I've been, you know, reading today. They appear to have cut completely the sports section. I imagine there will be a page of scores and other related news. That was my reading of the releases. They appear to have completely removed the book section. which was part of the traditional bundle of a newspaper. And there are huge cuts of, I understand that all but a couple of the people on the tech news staff have been let go, major cuts in foreign coverage. I have not heard the other shoe dropping on Metro, but I understood that there were going to be some metro cuts. That's my understanding. It's going to be down from like somewhere in the 40s to around a dozen people in Metro. And this is astonishing. I mean, under the Grams, the paper was, it had a national focus, but Don Graham in particular wanted it to be a local newspaper. And at one time, the Washington Post had bureaus. in both state capitals of Virginia and Maryland, and it had satellite bureaus in most of the counties surrounding D.C., providing, you know, compared to today, sort of bumper crop of news. And, you know,

This has been whittled down over the years. So the cuts that they're doing today are kind of a reduction of cuts that they've been making for years and years and years now. Another thing I saw is they have cut a large percentage of the critics they have. And this is, you know, what's playing at the studio theater or at the 930 Club. What does that do? to the city? They appear to have given up on, I mean, given up on culture some time ago. They had a, I'm not a big touter of Pulitzer Prizes, but they're dance critic when a Pulitzer Prize. Sarah Kaufman, I believe. Ann Midget was a classical critic. They got rid of her. You know, they've been done sizing cultural coverage. for the longest time. What I have noticed, and I don't know if it's just anecdotal, I've noticed that the style section is almost completely about television now. You know, years ago, the Post used to send out a couple of reviewers every night to write little capsule reviews of popular music. And you could stay on top of the culture that way. But they gave that part of the bundle, too. You have covered Washington, like me, you were the editor of city paper. And, you know, like me, you were the editor of city paper. And. competed sort of with the post, but also covered the post and sort of looked at the post's impact. Can you talk to about sort of what it meant then and what it is likely to mean in this different focus now? Well, I think you'd agree with me that being the editor of City Paper, you were basically one of the charges of the editors. And I would say that this true view of Eric Wemple and of David Carr and others that have served in that job. We covered the Washington Post as a major institution. It was as important to the life of the city as the schools, the libraries, the police force, the department of public works. It really was, you know, a major, a major institution. And... You know, in many ways, a place like city paper was a kind of weekly exercise and press criticism. We were hitting the points that the post either couldn't or wouldn't go after. And, you know, we were sort of like, we were part of the editorial food chain, and it was the Washington Post by virtue of its size and its workforce, you know, was the major news predator that we all competed against. And for better or worse, to find ourselves against. What do you figure it was of like all the news that was reported in Washington, D.C.?

in this halcyon age. What percent started in the Post? And then other people found holes in the story that they could explore or used video on TV or whatever. But I would put it this way that the Post set the news agenda for the city. It wasn't that Washingtonian and the television stations and city paper couldn't find their own stories. But it was sort of the bedrock of news. And not just today's Washington Post, the years and years and years of posts that you could retrieve electronically. I had one great editor who worked for me, John Cohen, who, when our officers that were done by the Martin Luther King Library downtown, used to go over to the Washingtonian Room of the library. and go through the Washington Star Archives for stories that had appeared 100 years ago, or in that case, it's more like 80 years ago, always finding, you know, new ripples, things that did change, things that hadn't changed. So the paper was, you know, the post was often... It could often be the, you know, if the metaphor is tennis, it was the wall that you played against, that you hit your stories against to see if they would land. So looking at your social media as this unfolded, it's pretty clear you think this is a pretty boneheaded thing to do. I think as a news consumer, I think it's boneheaded. One of the questions I asked on Twitter today was, They've taken a paper and they've debundled it. They've taken away. The very first thing that I do every morning when I get my newspapers is I go directly to the Washington Post sports section. It's dipping my toe in the bath and seeing, you know, taking the temperature of the day. There's no sport. There'll basically be no sports section. On Sunday, there'll be no book section. A couple of years ago, they got rid of the Sunday magazine. They've really pulled back on coverage of the metro section. So what they're left with is what they're saying is that they're going to cover like politics and national security and some foreign stories. So politico? Kind of a politico, yeah. And I don't know. I asked on Twitter is, is that enough to justify a subscription? You know, is the post going to uncover? How many stories is the post going to cover or uncover that the New York Times already didn't get to? And I'm waiting for the post to make a case to me of like, no, no, you really should keep your subscription. We're doing important and good work. What's your answer right now? Well, I hate to see any newspaper die.

Once again, the reduction force of the reduction in headcount is dramatic, but if memory serves me right, they've got as many journalists working in the building now as they did in a low point in the odds. Although they never whacked a third at once. No. But they still put out a decent paper with a similar size force in the odds. What's more disturbing to me than... than the count, the head count, is that of throwing away a third of the bundle, which is really important to me. So they never did that before. There was a great journalism review published in the 70s called Moore, not to be confused with the Women's Magazine Moore. And they published a story about the newspaper war between the Washington Post and the Washington Star in the mid-70s. And they, when both papers were rather credible and highly regarded, and one of the, one of the salient points they made was that the Washington Post was, had the catbird seat because it had a bigger staff. than the star. And that was 375. So in, you know, in the 1970s, the mid-1970s, The Washington Post put out a sports section. It put out a Sunday magazine. It had book coverage. It covered the counties and the state capitals and national and international news. And it did it with fewer people. So as much as I mourn the loss of these jobs, what I really mourn here is they're turning their back on. what I consider essential parts of the daily newspaper bundle.

And they think, well, I can do better than the last guy. And it takes a couple of years often to figure out that the problems that they thought were easily solved and that they could wrap them up are much more thorny. You know, I would have to do a Vulcan mind probe to really figure out a. why it was so important for him to buy the paper, and B, why it was so important for him to spend all the money on the paper attempting to grow it, and what has caused his turnaround. We know that he's much more pliant. He stood up to Trump in the first administration, and I think it's fair to say that he's been pretty pliant. In the second administration, I mean, the idea that the owner of the Washington Post is making a hagiographic film about the first lady who's not really deserving of this adulation doesn't seem to be the same guy. You know, was Jeff Bezos' body snatched at some point in the place with, you know, with some sort of automaton? And that stuff hit the post bottom line. Because a lot of people, when he killed the Kamala Harris endorsement, which nobody would really have been influenced by, the real material impact was like 200,000, 250,000 people cut their subscriptions, which is real money. Right. They may have made a mistake there. They build themselves as the resistance newspaper. And in the first Trump administration really ran up the subscription rolls nationally as being the paper that was standing in resistance to Trump. I don't know that that was the best strategy, but it seemed to have been successful. Then came the dog years of Biden. So it was quite logical that when the paper no longer wanted to. present itself as a resistance paper or anti-Trump, it's not much of a surprise that it lost hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Right, which brings them into a pretty tough spot. Do you think he wants to sell it? Do you think anyone would want to buy it? Well, he obviously doesn't want to sell it because he's not selling it. Kara Swisher, former post reporter who's gone on to great celebrity and written bestsellers and started a company of her own, has talked about that she's prepared to or has put together the footwork for a purchase of the post, but they seem to be uninterested in selling it. So I can't really figure out the strategy. This being a G-rated podcast, I think they either need to do the business or get off the pot. Are we a G-rated podcast? Don Graham would insist on a G-rated. He would insist on the Meyer principles, which is his grandfather instituted of the Washington Post that the daily newspaper should be fit for ladies and children.

Well, in that case, listen, talk about what it means for DC. And, you know, I sort of see there's sort of two things I'm interested in. One is like, what does this mean for sort of would-be scoundrels in public office in the city hall or wherever? I think that boat sailed. You know, how much how much do we know about? city coverage. I mean, you grew up in D.C. and city coverage was always part of a bundle. And this is not to denigrate the coverage of today. There's just not very much of it because it's a much, much, much smaller metro staff. So it's obvious that there'll be less watchdog. action, and that's deplorable. Because you can't trust the government. It doesn't matter who's running it. You just cannot trust them. The other thing is that things like, I mean, is it a little hokey maybe, but things like shared sports coverage or shared gossip in the reliable source or just shared like storylines when there's some crazy scandal or murder or something that people talk about over the back fence. Without a big dominant newspaper, it seems to me it's maybe a little bit harder for those things to break through and become a thing that can actually unify people in this crazy, isolated world. Yeah, I talked earlier about the post being an institution. And the post was something that everybody loved to complain about, but everybody clipped and found essential. You know, I think a lot has always been made of how The Redskins now, the commanders were like this unifying force. Everybody had some interest in the Redskins. And so it provided the city and the region with a kind of identity. The post, too, but as the physical paper has disappeared, like you don't find it in street boxes anymore. You're not really expected to because I think what's the cover price on it, $4? But publications do give a city an identity. I mean, we know this from editing city paper that when you saw somebody carrying a city paper, you knew what kind of person, you thought you knew what kind of person they were. They were interested in. in the entertainment and the politics and the culture of the city. Or the sex ads. What? Or the sex ads, which were very important. And eventually, the Washington Post got around to, I can remember that it was a red letter day in the 90s when they finally started accepting same-sex matches. Because before then, you know, you had to go to city paper. to find that. So no, no, publication creates a kind of identity for its residents. And that ship may have already sailed, too, because we don't get a fully, we don't, you know, in the old days.

It was not uncommon that a family's only news paid news outlet was its newspaper. And today, you know, it's the iPad screen or the computer screen or the phone screen. And the source of all the news is sort of atomized comes from, you know, a hundred different places. And I think with that goes the identity. Just as a person who spent a lot of time, you know, reading the post closely, beating up on the post, making fun of the post, enjoying the post, can you be emotional for a minute? How do you feel about, how do you feel today watching all this? I sort of feel like, you know, when your grandfather dies at 86 and you don't have, it's a shock to your system. You knew he was going to die. And it's a shock to your system, but once he's dead there and he's, and he's starting to stink in the parlor, you have a kind of physical reaction. This is a death foretold. In the mid-1970s, there was this great... media reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote a big multi-part series, and his lead was, the thing that you're holding in your hand is an endangered species. Yes, the daily newspaper. So in 75, everybody who was in the newspaper business, the editors, the publishers, Wall Street. all knew that the newspaper as the dominant media outlet was winding down. Why was it winding down? But basically, except for radio and then television, it had no real competition. But starting in the 70s, you have cable television, which siphons off a bunch of the... advertising and later the web. And it became, you know, it's a very expensive thing to build presses. And, I mean, a daily newspaper is a, in the print product is a manufacturing and distribution business, you know, the same as beer or paper towel. everything, all the economic currents were running the other way to send the same information through a wire. So I think that that was, it was a death foretold. It's so, that's how I feel about it. That's how I'm regarding it. My grandfather, who's been threatening to die for some time now is actually turning up, he's not taking the dirt nap. Hey, Jack, thank you for being here. Loved it. Talk to you soon. Hey, it's Mike. Since we have been talking about whether anyone's going to be left to cover our city, I wanted to share a bit of CityCast news. In the wake of the post's retreat, we're actually planning to add capacity, to hire a new team of journalists to cover the big beats that hometown DC actually cares about. We'll have more specifics soon, but in the meantime, I hope you'll support us back and become a member. You can sign up at membership.citycast.fm. Thank you. We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from around the city. Bye.