Katherine Boyle

I can do whatever story you want me to do.

So I found an editor inside the Washington Post, and she's like, you can write as many stories as you want.

We just need people to fill the actual physical paper because they were slashing the people who were well-known reporters left and right because the business was going under.

Oh, I mean, just the business of media with the internet.

Everyone thinks that the media really started declining like maybe 2014, 2015, 2016.

But the first wave of real layoffs were like 2008, 2009, where there was just an understanding that Google and then Facebook, but Google really was just eating the lunch of these companies.

The business models of every major newspaper up until this point of regional newspapers were classifieds.

subscriptions, and then syndication.

So syndication, sending out the story, people paying to have to reprint it.

That was Google.

Google completely took that, right?

So all of the stories would go on the internet for free.

No one was paying for the digital copy.

The Wall Street Journal figured it out, but none of the other papers did.

So they were just hemorrhaging subscribers.

And then the advertising, it was like, well, if people are advertising online, why am I going to advertise my store in your newspaper?

No one's reading the physical paper anymore.

But they still had it, and they still had subscribers that were reading it.

So it was actually a great time to go in and just be like, OK, I'll work for basically very little.

and I'll work a lot and I'll fill your paper."