Derek Thompson

That's advertising.

Today, its annual ad revenue is closer to 500 million.

On its own, that might seem like a calamity, a 50% decline, except today, subscription revenue has surpassed $2 billion.

20 years ago, the Times was two-thirds advertising.

Today, the Times is two-thirds subscriptions.

The business of newspapers underwent a total shift in the 1900s, and in the 2000s, it's changed again.

This is not just a statistical change, it's an identity shift.

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectable as the department stores that advertised in their pages.

But the most successful news organizations of the 21st century are very different.

Sharp-elbowed, cantankerous, ideological, personality-driven.

They have perspective.

They have an identity.

In many cases, they feel like individuals because, in the case of Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons, Tucker Carlson, they are individuals.

If you ask me, the Washington Post didn't just lose revenue in the last five years.

Most importantly, what it lost is what 21st century news organizations most need, an identity.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we'll ever go back to the media norms of the 1950s, that mythological era where we all allegedly agreed on a single set of facts, when we could count the number of TV channels on one hand, when newspapers owned local monopolies, and when the words of Walter Cronkite held a special avuncular power.

The answer is no.

We're never going back to that time.

We're never going back to a world when news was scarce,

The future of news is abundant for better and for worse.