Josh Benton

There are reasons for someone with that much wealth to invest in something that they think is good for society, good for civilization, good for the country.

And the way he spoke when he purchased the Post was filled with language of, I'm giving you runway.

I'm not a shareholder.

You have to pay in the same way that a publicly held or hedge fund purchased newspaper company would have to.

And it was the fact that that was his stance for so long, for a decade, that makes this transition, I think, somewhat jarring to people within the Post and people who read the Post.

So our insight into the financial condition of the Bezos-Earth Post is really limited because as a privately held company, they don't have to report any numbers to shareholders or regulators.

It certainly was true, though, that they benefited starting around 2017 with the Trump bump that helped a lot of news organizations.

Once Trump was elected and this very unusual new federal government came into place, there was a huge increase in interest in national news that sort of raised all boats.

And the Post certainly benefited from that because they were, along with the Times, one of the premier operations that was covering what was happening in Washington during this very unusual time.

So they had a huge increase in the number of subscribers that they had.

They reached a peak.

They reported of around 3 million digital subscribers, which was the third highest in the country behind the Times and also the Wall Street Journal.

They were breaking stories left and right.

When Bezos first appeared, he was willing to invest into increasing a lot of positions within the newsroom, adding a lot of people on the product side and on the digital side of the operation.

It was a good time to be at the Post.

They also happened to have a very good editor at the time, Marty Baron.

And they were blessed with the first Trump administration as a story to cover.

There certainly is a universe in which you could have imagined a second Trump administration providing that same sort of bump, or at least a smaller version of it, to the Post.

But this is one of the other unfortunate things about the timing, is that at the exact moment that this second Trump administration was beginning was right when Jeff Bezos had shot themselves in the foot by...

not endorsing the presidential election and causing these 250,000 subscribers to cancel and making this pivot into having the opinion section only be about free markets and the promotion of what he considers to be personal liberties.