Josh Benton

He took a very hands-off approach to management.

He was not meddling in editorial decisions.

He was, in a lot of ways, for the first decade or so, a pretty ideal hands-off owner for the Post, who put investment into the paper, who allowed its newsroom to grow, allowed a digital subscription strategy to thrive.

But I don't think at any point it has been a central part of where his business instincts have been focused.

I wouldn't view his ownership of the Washington Post as primarily a business transaction.

I think you could look at the first portion of his ownership as something approaching a philanthropic goal.

And I think you can look at the last couple of years primarily as trying to meet a political goal.

One of the side effects of the changes that he made in 2024, 2025, is that it drove away an enormous number of talented journalists, including to the places like The Atlantic.

One reason that the Post has struggled editorially over the past year is that they lost a lot of their best reporters, their highest profile reporters who were the best source in the White House and Congress and in places where...

You know, the stories that a newspaper can break that gets you attention, that proves to your subscribers the value of the subscription they're paying for.

The people who produce those stories often weren't working there anymore.

And the stories that they would have been writing that would have been proving the value of a digital subscription to the Post, they just weren't getting reported.

The biggest shift in the financial model of newspapers that has occurred in the transition from print to digital is a decreasing reliance on advertising and an increasing reliance on direct payments from subscribers.

When newspapers had something closer to a monopoly on the distribution of information every day,

They were able to charge very high advertising rates, and they had mass audiences, and it was a business that worked extremely well for them for a long time.

Under the print model, an American newspaper usually made about 80% of its money from advertising and only about 20% from readers buying the paper or subscribing to the newspaper.

In the shift to digital, the advertising money has largely gone away to companies like Google and Facebook.

And newspapers are increasingly reliant on subscriber revenue, especially now digital subscriber revenue, since that's where the audiences are.

To succeed in a digital subscription world, you need to convince people why they should still pay for you every month when they're also paying for Netflix and they're also paying for Amazon Prime and they're also paying for the long list of subscriptions that litter the credit card bills of probably everyone listening to this.

That is a competitive marketplace where news organizations have a real editorial burden to prove their merits over and over again.