Derek Thompson

Mistakes the Post might have made in earlier years, there's really no debating that under the first Trump administration, it is a real commercial success.

Digital subscriptions go from just under 500,000 to nearly 3 million.

The paper wins 11 Pulitzers under Marty Baron.

Was this period of success, because I really am trying to connect all the dots from 20 years ago to now, was this period of success, do you think, the result of

excellent journalistic and business choices made?

Or to a certain extent, was the first Trump administration a kind of rising tide for resistance journalism that lifted so many boats that if you just put your yacht anywhere close to that rising tide, you were inevitably going to benefit?

It's interesting.

This question isn't written down, but the way you were describing this era of media –

reminded me of what so many different companies said about the pandemic years, that it was this blip of acceleration that seemed to pull these companies into the future that got them investing so much in certain kinds of digital technologies in particular, but that turned out to be an overinvestment.

And then you saw TV companies push pullback and movie companies pullback and tech companies pullback.

I'd never quite thought of the Trump years being for

left of center media, what the pandemic was for the digital economy.

This sort of like false impression of, oh, a period of nonstop boom.

And ironically, like both led to like a little mini bubble happening that required a correction.

I never quite thought about that, but that's interesting.

In 2021, Marty Baron steps down and Fred Ryan replaces him with Sally Busby, formerly of the AP.

The paper goes on a hiring spree.

While subscriptions are flatlining

to slightly falling.

The Post loses a reported $80 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024, close to $100 million, I've read, in 2025, which means, just pausing there, that The Post lost more money in the last three years than Jeff Bezos paid for it in 2013, which is just, no matter what you think about the journalism being done at The Washington Post, that is a business strategy disaster.