Shumita Basu

Good morning.

The Washington Post is in turmoil as major cuts look set to transform the publication.

Semaphore's media editor delves into how it happened.

why traditional U.S.

allies are leaning away from Trump and toward China, and what to watch for at the Super Bowl on the field and on the halftime stage.

It's Friday, February 6th.

I'm Shamita Basu.

This is Apple News Today.

It is a newspaper with a historic reputation for revealing how government works from within, informing a generation of readers, and infuriating the world's most powerful people by holding them to account.

But 50 years after Richard Nixon went to war with the Post and lost, we learned that the paper is facing a very uncertain future.

Max Taney is the media editor at Semaphore, and he told us what's been going on.

Tani says the paper had been hemorrhaging cash, potentially as much as $100 million a year.

And in their note to staff, executive editor Matt Murray said the company was, quote, too rooted in a different era and would need to reinvent their business model.

Much of the coverage since the announcement has been focused on its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013 as it was struggling financially.

And in those early years, Bezos resisted interfering editorially, leaving the journalists to do their work.

But with Trump's departure in 2020, the Post, like everyone else, needed to find new ways to engage audiences.

In the 2024 race, Bezos' decision to break with tradition and prevent the paper's editors from endorsing a candidate angered many of its traditional readers, as did his overhaul of the opinion desk that would exclude views that opposed, quote, personal liberties and free markets.

Taken together, those moves cost the Post more than 375,000 subscribers, according to NPR.

That's roughly 15 percent of its total paid circulation at the time.

as critics accused Bezos of bowing to the Trump administration.