Why Jeff Bezos gutted the Washington Post

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, a reckoning for American media as Jeff Bezos guts the Washington Post.

0:21I grew up with a post. My parents got the print copy delivered to our house every morning. There used to be a section called the Kids Post, which is partly how I learned how to read. And I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was pretty young, maybe like 11, 12, and wanted to be a foreign correspondent in particular. And the Washington Post was always the dream destination to do that. Claire Parker is the Cairo bureau chief for the Washington Post. She's reported on the Israel-Gaza war and covered the Middle East for the last couple of years. She'd spent weeks organizing a reporting trip to Yemen when an order came from above.

0:59All travel had to be cancelled. In the middle of the afternoon, we were called to a company-wide webinar, in which we were not allowed to ask questions or to offer comments or feedback. The editor-in-chief told us that dramatic cuts were coming. The head of human resources then told us that we would each receive an email that either said, our job is eliminated or not affected by these changes. An email telling journalists who'd spent years, entire careers with the Post, whether they were in or out. The way that most of us think about journalism and the value of journalism is as a public good and as an essential accountability mechanism for democracy around the world.

1:48and it was just this sort of dramatic moment for a lot of us of realizing that the people now heading the company and the owner Jeff Bezos seemed to have given up on this idea. Around 30 minutes after the company-wide meeting ended, Claire's email came through. She'd gone out to her balcony and was looking down at the streets of Cairo when it was confirmed. Her job was eliminated. And it was just perfunctory. It was, you know, this very sort of bureaucratic language. No, thank you. No note of appreciation. No apology. So I think that's also been been hard for a lot of people. Many of us have sacrificed a lot to do this work.

2:33Many of my colleagues are working in war zones. I've worked in dangerous environments as well during this job. So that was a difficult blow to just be kind of fired in an email. Almost 400 roles had been brutally cut. Pretty much the entire international desk and its foreign correspondents, the sports desk, the book section, the style pages, local politics coverage, the metro desk, all gone. But this isn't just the story of one newspaper and its ruthless billionaire owner. What's happening at the Washington Post is a warning shot.

3:13It's going to be a victory for authoritarian governments everywhere to have fewer independent, well-resourced reporters looking into what they're doing. I think it's a major retreat from a commitment to covering the world by America's second most influential and largest newspaper, And that's huge, frankly, in a moment where the United States, under the Trump administration, is dramatically reshaping the world order. From The Guardian, I'm Nashin Iqbal. Today in Focus. Why what's happened at The Washington Post matters beyond D.C.

4:02Jerry Barr, welcome to Today in Focus. You are the media and power correspondent for The Guardian US. And before that, you were the media reporter for The Washington Post. So you do have quite a unique vantage point when it comes to understanding this story. If we could just start with the staggering announcement from The Washington Post that it has cut 300 jobs from its newsroom. Jeremy, can you explain firstly just how big a moment this is in the American media landscape? Yeah, I mean, I think actually the number is higher than 300. 300 was a number that was reported in a few places, but I think it's actually closer to 400 people.

4:42Oh, wow. At least 375 people out of a newsroom, about 800. So that's almost half the newsroom was cut. It's just a massive sort of retrenchment back to a much smaller newsroom with, you know, presumably lower ambitions. You just can't cover the same amount of stuff. So it's a pretty significant decline from what they had. Could you give a sense to listeners, you know, the place that the Washington Post holds in the American public consciousness, like just a potted history of what that paper means and what it's known for? Right. I mean, it was not a super significant newspaper nationally until 1960s, 1970s, with the Watergate scandals, really what made the Post a kind of global sensation, with the reporting of Ben Bradley and Carl Bernstein, and sort of the role they played in taking down Richard Nixon.

5:34It became a force to be reckoned with. It became a place that a lot of journalists wanted to work at. And I think it really sort of turbocharged the reputation of it. If there is one newspaper the White House is less than enchanted with, it is the expletive deleted Washington Post, whose diligence and persistence almost single-handed flushed out the Watergate story. I think that that kind of continues on to this day, which is why these cuts, I think, were so sort of negatively received that, you know, the fact that this paper that had, you know, that did the kind of shoe leather reporting that took down this administration, that it's now being cut back in scope and ambition and, you know, in staffing in a serious way.

6:15Washington Post is laying off a third of its workforce across both the newsroom and its business operations, a massive blow at a storied newspaper that has struggled in recent years to stay profitable and retain subscribers. So I had first started hearing rumors about layoffs in the fall. I had heard that maybe it wasn't going to be really bad. And that kind of that went away that, you know, there are these rumors that would pop up and go away. In the last few weeks, people started hearing again that they seemed to be back on the table. So when it came to the beginning of last week, there was a strong sense that layoffs were happening.

6:50But the Post didn't actually confirm that it was going to be on Wednesday until they sent out an email at 6.30 in the morning telling people to be on a Zoom call at 8.30 in the morning. At 8.30, everybody logged on and there was a Zoom call featuring the editor-in-chief, Matt Murray. So Matt Murray talked about how the Post was not connecting with audiences and how they needed to sort of reposition the paper. This is the kind of the standard spiel before you announce the layoff that you say, here's what's not working. And here's how we plan to make some changes. And he started to read out some of the sections that were cut.

7:23And then employees were told that they should expect an email within about 30 minutes that would tell them whether they were going to be laid off or not. So you basically put these employees in a situation where they're sitting by their laptops, waiting to see if they get either, you know, email A says your job is safe. Email B says your job is cut. I mean, it's ridiculous. It sounds like a Simon Cowell reality show, just waiting. You're in, you're out. I mean, yeah. Or I was thinking of the weakest link. I'm trying to think of the best parallel, but just sort of the, either you have a career at one of the best companies in American media or your career is over at that company.

8:01That was really shocking. And I think that longtime Post employees were surprised by how they were treated and surprised by the fact that their careers could end so suddenly, particularly people that were really synonymous with the Post coverage. And so Lizzie Johnson, who was a correspondent in Ukraine, is a great example of that. She was one of the people that found out very surprisingly that they were being laid off. And so tweeted about how she was waking up without power, heat or running water again, just to kind of show the fact that she was in the middle of this very dire situation and doing this work.

8:37And then sent out this tweet, I was just laid off by the Washington Post in the middle of a war zone. I have no words. I'm devastated. I mean, that was an example of the abruptness, I think, of the cuts, the fact that no one knew where they were actually happening, and the fact that, you know, some of the areas that people thought were really untouchable, including Ukraine coverage, were actually cuttable. And that's a pretty harsh way to do things.

9:08Hello, everyone. Welcome. Jeremy, you attended a rally in support of Washington Post staff outside the offices. Can you tell me about who turned up and what the mood was like? Yeah, so there was, I think, several hundred people there. There were, you know, a bunch of employees that were laid off. There were employees that are, you know, staying at the Post. There were former employees. And they talked about, you know, what was lost with their coverage. The impact of losing 300 journalists who hold power to account, who investigate corruption, who tell you about what's happening in war zones overseas and whether your kids' schools will be open because it snowed is immeasurable.

9:52There's a lot of anger and frustration. Billionaires only get rich by stealing from us. And what they're doing with these layoffs is so shameful and so stickening. You know, I saw people, a lot of people hugging each other. There was chanting. Save the post! Save the post! Save the post! It felt a bit like sort of a sad reunion because I think the sense is that the paper that many of us worked for is not there anymore. Save the post! Save the post!

10:37Marty Farron, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Now, Felicza's not familiar with your very storied career. You were editor of the Boston Globe when, of course, its dogged investigation into the Boston Catholic Church revealed systemic child abuse, one of Pulitzer. And, of course, that story was then later told in the Hollywood film Spotlight. You joined the Washington Post as executive editor from 2013 to 2020-21, in which the paper won, I believe, 11 of its 76 politzes, and the newsroom expanded to around 1 ,000 journalists under your tenure. Marty, what was your initial reaction on hearing the news that the Post was being decimated in this way?

11:23I was very dispirited, depressed about it, very saddened by it. We had had a lot of success. We had innovated a lot. I think we did our job in terms of holding our government accountable, digging into what was happening in our government and covering the country as a whole, covering sports, covering culture, covering what was happening overseas as well, extremely well. And to see it all dismantled, maybe not all, but a huge portion of it dismantled, was dismaying and unsettling. Let's talk a minute about your time at the Post, because it came during a critical period in the U.S., you know, the end of the Obama era, the rise of MAGA, but also critical for the Post because it was also the time when Jeff Bezos acquired ownership of the paper.

12:05What was the initial feeling like when that deal came about, and how did people respond to it at the time? Well, people were shocked because the Graham family had owned the Post for 80 years, and expected that the family would continue to own it for another 80 years. Don Graham, who was the patriarch of the family, very attached to the paper, he had worked as a reporter there, knew everybody's name. So to learn that it was being sold to a tech billionaire who had no experience in the field of journalism was a shock, I think, to everybody. Okay, first of all, I was not looking for a newspaper. I had no intention of buying a newspaper.

12:44I had never thought about the idea. It had never occurred to me. It was never something, it wasn't like a childhood dream, nothing. And my friend, Don Graham, he approached me through an intermediary and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying the Washington Post. And I sent back word that I would not, because I didn't really know anything about newspapers. And Don, over a series of conversations, convinced me that that was unimportant because we had, inside the Washington Post, we have so much talent that understands newspapers. That wasn't what the problem was. What they needed was somebody who had an understanding of the Internet.

13:27We were in bad shape as a news organization at the time. The Post was struggling to stay afloat. Financially, it was losing money, and it would have to make cuts every single year. The leadership did not really have a strategy for getting us out of that hole, and they acknowledged as much. And so, you know, I think there was some feeling that maybe Bezos could offer a good future for the organization. I felt that way. He knew a lot about technology. He knew also a lot about connecting with customers because Amazon's a customer-based business. And he could provide capital that we needed to make the transition from an analog era to a digital era.

14:03And how involved was he during that period? And what did your relationship with him look like in that initial period? Well, right at the beginning, he was quite involved. We would have conversations with him about every two weeks by teleconference. He brought us out, a senior leadership team of four people. He brought us out to his home in the Seattle area. We had breakfast out there with his now ex-wife and his kids were there and discuss our plans, our budget, what our initiatives would be. He asked us to propose a bunch of initiatives. He approved pretty much all of them and pretty much all of them were successful.

14:38Artie, we hear a lot about how, say, Rupert Murdoch has ruled his newspapers, his businesses, very strident presence with a very strong opinion in the newsroom. How would you describe Jeff Bezos in comparison to that kind of media mogul? Well, very different. I mean, he really was not involved in our news coverage. He was very focused on how we distributed our news, how we maybe presented our news, but not the actual content of our news coverage. He wanted us to adapt to the digital era. And he changed the strategy for The Post. We were largely a regional newspaper for the Washington metro area, but he felt we needed to become fully national and even international.

15:12That was his strategy because we no longer needed to deliver a physical newspaper. And he said we may as well take advantage of the Internet. And then he pointed out that we had this incredible heritage and history that gave us an identity going essentially back to Watergate, such that there were people all over the country and all over the world who had never read a word of the Washington Post, and yet they had a good image of the Washington Post. And so we were to build on that. He wanted us to keep in mind that we were dealing in a digital era, come up with some ideas for that, and also to appeal to a younger audience.

15:45Because he said if we didn't cultivate a younger audience, we wouldn't have an audience in the future. All fair points. Yeah, all fair points, for sure. So by all accounts, under his stewardship, the post did absolutely thrive with you and your team at the helm. And there was a real transformation about what the paper was doing, both locally and internationally. how would you describe that period of transformation? What were the key elements to it? We hired a lot of people who had never worked for a physical newspaper before. They wrote in a much more informal way, as if they were speaking to a family member or a friend, writing about complicated subjects, but writing in a very accessible, casual way, which I think worked extremely well.

16:26And we used a lot of metrics. Bezos was big on metrics, probably not surprising to you. Maybe one headline would go to 25 % of the audience, another to the other, 25%, that sort of thing. We really adjusted our publishing schedule to meet the rhythms of the way that readers were reading the post. We were extremely innovative. In fact, Fast Company Magazine in the United States named us the most innovative media company in the world in 2015 and 2018. And very importantly, when Trump entered the political landscape in 2015, we added a lot of political reporters. And thanks to Bezos's investment, we were very prepared for Trump when he arrived and did a lot of investigative work.

17:09And that was very appealing to our readers as well. From the day President Trump took office through May of this year, the Washington Post has counted that he has said 3 ,251 false or misleading claims, leaving Americans to question what is fact and what is a lie.

17:32You've described a real buzzy, innovative energy. And at any point, was the post then therefore profitable for Bezos? Was this always a prestigious vehicle for him to own in his portfolio? Or did it actually become, yeah, a money-making one? Yes, we made money for about half a dozen years. And all of that was reinvested in the business. Bezos didn't take dividends. He doesn't need the dividends, obviously. But then things do turn. And Marty, I wonder if you could tell me about the position of the Post when you retired in 2021 and what happened in those intervening years. I think what happened is we saw a plateauing in our audience, really, as I was leaving.

18:12Joe Biden had been elected. I think a lot of people who wanted to hold Trump accountable felt that the threat of Donald Trump had disappeared and that they no longer needed to pay for multiple subscriptions because that gets expensive after a while. And then we were expanding as I was leaving. We were adding another, I don't know, about 100 people actually, and many of them overseas. And then they added beyond that, they added a bunch of editors and staffers and expanded the climate team and all of that at a time when digital advertising was really collapsing. I think that was the first big mistake to expand so aggressively at a time when the advertising market was not supporting such expansion.

18:52It's been losing money year after year for maybe five years right now, something like that. And so that was really the beginning of the decline. And then, of course, Facebook stopped including news in its feed. So a lot of the traffic that was coming through social dropped off. And then more recently, of course, search engines, particularly Google, dropped off dramatically because of the introduction several years ago of generative AI. And people get their answers through chatbots and things like that, and they don't go to the links. So traffic from search has dropped off dramatically. Well, let's talk about, I mean, things, as you've described, started to go all right.

19:30But there's a particular turning point, which was 11 days before the 2024 election, when something pretty unprecedented happened and the decision came from high that the paper would pull its endorsement of Kamala Harris. Marty, just how big a deal was this? I think it was a huge deal, a really important moment. The paper had been endorsing for president for half a century, only one year of exception. And they didn't announce this six months before the election or a year before the election. It was announced 11 days before the election that they would not be making a presidential endorsement. And then it emerged that the staff had written an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris and that Bezos had killed that editorial.

20:14And then he announced that they wouldn't be making editorial endorsements ever again. He's taking ownership of this decision for the first time tonight after three days of craziness inside the post. I mean, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of subscriber cancellations. I've never seen anything like it. So a lot of the readers who were deeply concerned about Donald Trump, believing that he represented a serious threat to the pillars of American democracy, felt that Bezos was yielding to pressure from Donald Trump, did it out of fear of Donald Trump, which I think is the case. Trump had promised retribution against his perceived political enemies throughout that campaign.

20:51And Bezos was perceived as a political enemy for one reason, and one reason only, and that was the coverage of The Washington Post. something like 275 ,000 subscribers cancel their subscriptions essentially overnight.

21:13Marty, the Washington Post famously changed its strapline to Democracy Dies in Darkness during your tenure as editor. Now, given Jeff Bezos's enormous, considerable wealth, where reportedly he could fund five years of the post losses in a week's earnings. Why do you think he's slashing this prized media asset now? I think he just doesn't want to continue losing the kind of money that he's losing on it. He's always felt that it needed to be a sustainable business. He made very clear from the very beginning that he was not going to treat it like a charity, that it needed to be profitable. He fundamentally believes in that.

21:48I don't disagree with him. I think it does need to be a sustainable business. and I think he feels that it needs to be completely restructured as a business in order to be feasible. Do you feel that there is any connection between these cuts coming at a time when Jeff Bezos has also sunk$75 million into this what's been called gilded trash of a documentary on Melania, which is tens of millions of dollars more than has ever been paid for a documentary feature film? Well, I think that purchase of that so-called documentary, it's not a real documentary, is a sign that Jeff Bezos really wanted to cozy up to the Trump administration.

22:28He was at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Melania was there. She told him about this so-called documentary. He urged Amazon to invest in this documentary. And they did, to an extreme extent, paying an exorbitant sum. Hi, Mr. President. Congratulations. Did you watch it? I did not. Yeah, I will see it on the news. That was just another sign that Bezos was trying to repair his relationship with the Trump administration, with Trump himself in any way possible. And guess what? He owned a studio. He had a competitive edge in that sense against other people like Elon Musk, who doesn't own a studio. And not only that, by the way, Amazon then purchased the rights to The Apprentice TV series, which starred Donald Trump.

23:10We don't even know the sum that they're paying for that. That hasn't been revealed. I'd like to know that. Who's re-watching that? Well, nobody. Keep in mind, Trump entered the political arena in 2015. He dropped out of that series then. They didn't purchase it during his first term. They didn't purchase it when he was out of office for four years. All of a sudden, they're interested in it when he comes back into office. I think that tells you something. And Trump, according to the lawsuit that he filed against the New York Times, he said that he gets 50 % of the profits of the Apprentice TV series.

23:39So whatever they're paying is pretty much probably 50 % in the pocket of Donald Trump. So there you go. Coming up, is the Washington Post another casualty in Trump's war against the media?

24:08Jeremy, as someone who's not a business head, but at the same time can see that Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people in the world, why do you think it is that he couldn't or wouldn't just prop up the paper and turn its fortunes around like he did the first time round. So in the days before these cuts came down, a lot of post journalists had made these appeals to Jeff Bezos to not cut their section. I'm here in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. I'm here in Surat, Gujarat, the world's diamond capital. President Donald Trump's tariffs are wreaking havoc. It's really hard to understand exactly how much role he played in these cuts.