JOSH BARRO: Digital Revenue Dies in Drumpfness.

According to the Times, the Post is considering layoffs and publisher Fred Ryan thinks there are substantial numbers of low performers in the newsroom who should be managed out — a plausible idea I’ll get to in a moment. I want to talk first about the strategic decisions the Post made that cemented its dependency on Donald Trump’s constant chumming of the news cycle — and the smarter ones the Times made to become more resilient.

But the Times, where I was a correspondent from 2014 to 2016, is also a lot of other things. It is a leading food and cooking publication. It owns one of the top product review websites, Wirecutter. It’s a major producer of successful podcasts. It has a market-leading team that produces graphics, interactives and visualizations — that team’s work is deployed to showcase the Times’ political and investigative reporting, yes, but it also is a driver of the Times’ general interest offerings, like the dialect quiz or this fun explanation of how “songs of the summer” came to sound so similar to each other. And the Times has the New York Times Crossword, helmed for decades by Will Shortz, as the flagship of its daily games offering.

None of those businesses, with the partial exception of the podcast business, is dependent on liberal political agita about Donald Trump. Most of them aren’t even dependent on high levels of interest in news. And even in the core news report, while there are several areas of coverage where the Times and the Post are comparable, it’s easy to identify areas remote from politics where the Times is clearly stronger — notably arts and business. It’s hard to think of any area where the Post clearly leads the Times.1

During the Trump era, the Post’s lack of diversification wasn’t a huge problem — politics was big business, liberal politics was really big business, and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spoke to customers who wanted to stand up to Trump. Indeed, the Times reports the Post had once been planning to adjust its business for a drop in reader interest in politics — the team working on the strategy for this called it “Operation Skyfall” — but those plans were shelved in 2016 when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election and a pivot became unnecessary. But eventually the sky did fall, and the Times was ready for a post-Trump era in a way the Post wasn’t — it’s likely a lot of dual subscribers realized they could get all the political coverage they needed from one of the papers, and that the non-politics offerings from the Times were way more compelling than the Post’s.

So what should the Post do? I don’t think it has the option to become a specialist publication like the Journal or Politico.2 But it can diversify its business so it is like the Times not just in tone, but also in scope.

The Times article says the Post has been looking at acquisitions.3 If I ran the Post, and I had a budget to buy other companies, my first choice would be to buy a cooking publisher with a monetizable recipe archive — maybe America’s Test Kitchen, or maybe Conde Nast’s food magazine business. (Food is an especially logical core competency for a media company owned by Jeff Bezos because of the obvious cross-promotion opportunities with Whole Foods, Amazon.com, and Amazon Prime Video.) I would get into the games business. And more broadly, I would try to think like the Times has — about being a destination for information, not just news, which makes it possible to build a brand that might have a political valence but isn’t just about politics.4

It appears that some effort was made to create WaPo-branded television for Amazon Prime Video in earlier years, but these shows simply got swallowed up by the massive amount of flotsam and jetsam on the platform. Evidently, Bezos is content to let the Post exist as another backwater asset in his portfolio, while Amazon spends the big bucks on flashier product: Amazon’s $1bn bet on Lord of the Rings shows scale of its TV ambition.