Derek Thompson

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.

The news media has undergone several shifts in the last 20 years, and I thought the best person to explain those shifts might be Jim VandeHei, the former Washington Post employee who left the newspaper 20 years ago to start Politico and then left Politico to start Axios.

Jim is going to tell the story of the Post and the state of news media from his perspective, but first I wanted to share my own view.

which is that I think the future of the news business will more than anything resemble the distant past.

If you go back to the 1800s,

Before the internet, before the modern age of national advertising, there was what historians call the party press era of news in the 19th century.

Newspapers of the time often relied on political organizations who handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era's journalism was not fair or balanced.

It was unfair, unbalanced, heavily biased, highly political.

Thousands of newspapers competed for market share and they used sensationalism and often outright lies to grab readers' attention.

As Gerald Baldasti, a professor at the University of Washington, once said to me, quote, these newspapers didn't just want to inform readers.

They wanted to politically galvanize readers, end quote.

And readers were galvanized.

Voting rates in the 19th century were the highest in American history.