In the beginning it was eBay and Craigslist siphoning out the classified ads. Then it was AOL, Yahoo, ICQ and YouTube taking away the attention and eyeballs (before the smartphones era). Then came smartphones and social media.
> The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2013, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors.
All it took was a few years of higher interest rates and a depressed investment environment!
> Melania film earns $7m in US, strongest documentary debut in over a decade
And a hundred million a year is play money to someone who earns (low estimate) $2m an hour.
Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.
Another metric: Subscribers to the Times last year went up, while subscribers to the Post went down. It's clearly not just about the internet, or about partisan politics. (as the Post at least used to be about as liberal as the Times)
The Bad Billionaire? He buys journals to run them to the ground. Learn the difference!
I don’t think it’s anomalous to have a major national newspaper that’s profitable. And WaPo should have been absolutely primed for Trump II given its long time DC focus. They historically had the best political coverage of DC.
gamache•27m ago