OLD AND BUSTED: “Yeah, I’m In the Media. Screw You.”
—The late Ginny Carroll, a bureau chief with the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, who admitted on C-SPAN that she wore a button with the above message at the 1992 Republican convention.
The New Hotness? Washington Post Braces for Massive Layoffs.
Bezos has probably spent more than a quarter billion dollars keeping the paper going for just 3 years. And my guess is that all the metrics are going in the wrong direction. In other words, there’s no end in sight to the losses. But the staff reaction to his attempt to stop the bleeding is that he’s not a good steward.
A top Post reporter tells me "there's now a strong sense" across the newsroom "that neither Jeff Bezos nor Will Lewis are serious, good-faith stewards of The Washington Post." pic.twitter.com/ORtFdFmWbD
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 26, 2026
Thanks for the $300 million, Jeff, but you suck!
Some of this is definitely self-inflicted. The paper was making a profit during Trump’s first term because it went all in on resistance journalism. It had a staff of progressive voices that became well known on the anti-Trump left. So when there was no Trump to bash starting in 2020, readership declined. Then when Bezos demanded a bit more neutrality from the paper (canceling an endorsement of Kamala Harris) a quarter millions progressive subscribers cut them off. Simply put, the Post made itself a paper that catered to the far left and readers came to expect that. There’s no going back without angering a lot of those people and losing their support. That’s where things are now.
The layoffs are expected to happen in early February, so expect more on this by next week.
The Sulzbergers managed to diversify the revenue streams of the New York Times sufficiently over the last decade to the point where, as one wag said on LinkedIn in 2024, to him, the paper is “is basically a game and cooking app, with occasional detours into the news when I want to feel enraged about something:”
This tracks our household’s experience. Last year, I upgraded from the $20/mo basic digital subscription for the Times to the $25 All Access Tier. We use the NY Times Recipe App (which was a separate subscription) several times each week to plan and cook meals. I’m a sports junkie, so this gives me access to The Athletic. And now we have unlimited access to all puzzles (though, ironically perhaps, none of us play Wordle). For me, it’s Sudoku and sometimes the crossword. Honestly, the news is so depressing these days that I can’t stand to read it anyway.
The New York Times is basically a game and cooking app, with occasional detours into the news when I want to feel enraged about something.
In contrast, Amazon is Bezos’ diverse revenue stream, and the Post his money pit. No wonder he wants to cut the bleeding before likely offloading the carcass to its next owner.