Derek Thompson

This is a big show for me for a second reason, which is that it's my first show back from two months out on paternity leave.

Mom and baby girl are doing great.

And rather than start us off on something dense and complicated like AI or some scientific breakthrough, I thought I'd get back into the groove of podcasting with a subject that is extremely close to home.

The state of journalism and the fate of the Washington Post.

Growing up in McLean, Virginia, I fell in love with journalism by falling in love with the Washington Post, whose sports section, movie reviews, and op-eds were my introduction to what journalism could be.

So it's been more than a little galling to see what's happened to the Post in the last few years, and in particular, in the last few weeks.

After years of posting losses close to $100 million, the Washington Post announced last week that it was laying off one-third of its staff.

Later reports estimate that the paper actually gutted half of its unionized newsroom.

It is exceedingly rare for a newspaper to lay off half of its staff.

In fact, in research for this episode, I found no previous instance where a newspaper of this size had a layoff of this magnitude.

What compounds the frustration or the fury of many people is that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon and Blue Origin founder whose net worth exceeds $200 billion.

We have a situation here where perhaps the richest newspaper owner in modern history is overseeing the largest American newspaper layoff in modern history.

One goal of this episode is to trace the downfall of the Post under Bezos.

In the first Trump years, subscriptions were booming and Pulitzers were raining down from the heavens.

In the second Trump administration, however, Bezos has clearly shifted strategy.

In 2024, he killed off an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a decision that cost the Post tens of millions of dollars in lost subscription revenue.

Since then, almost every left-of-center columnist has left the paper.

His hand-picked CEO, Will Lewis, suffered through a feckless tenure before announcing his own resignation shortly after skipping out on the Zoom call announcing the layoffs and then being caught on camera wandering around a Super Bowl party.

The Washington Post saga is one pillar of today's show.

My ambition, however, is to go one level deeper and to put the Post's story in a broader context.