Josh Benton

I think the shift away from relying on advertising and relying on subscribers and people willing to invest essentially in what they see as being useful for democracy is a potential route to stability.

In that, you know, the New York Times has been able to navigate that extremely well.

They're a much bigger business than they've ever been before and still doing lots of excellent journalism.

I'm sure everyone can critique any number of pieces of it.

I still think that there is an enormous amount of value in the work that journalists do.

And there are models out there.

And one of those models that a lot of people for a while had some hope in was philanthropically minded billionaires who would see the value in what journalism was doing and also have the capacity to remove it from the marketplace of capitalism, at least to a degree.

And I think Jeff Bezos did that for a while to a certain degree.

So I think that's why it's extra frustrating to see him instead shoving the Washington Post right back into that marketplace and saying, oh, no, now I have to make the same sort of decisions that someone who, you know, a struggling businessman who is worried about paying his mortgage might have to make to make the difficult cuts.

Right.

That's what makes it difficult, that this is very much a choice.

This is a choice that one man made that is going to harm a lot of journalists and is going to harm a lot of people who would have benefited from the journalism.

That's entirely up to Jeff Bezos.

He could decide to convert the Washington Post into a nonprofit.

He could decide to keep shrinking and keep cutting.

He could decide to invest again in anything that he has decided not to invest in.

It's a property that he has total and complete control over.

I think there is a path forward for good journalism.

The Post benefits from its incredible history and the relationships it has built up over the decades in Washington and beyond.

But it's also hamstrung by that history and by the fact that it is built out as a print business that has shifted towards digital as opposed to being a digital-first business, right?