WaPo Would possibly Be Near Closing. Is Social Media Ending the Want for Huge Journalism?

At long last, it appears that one of the crown jewels of far-left American journalism, The Washington Post, is about to breathe its last.

Publisher Will Lewis quit his post two days after the newspaper fired hundreds of journalists, which in turn followed the shuttering of its famed sports department, once host to such luminaries as the late Shirley Povich and John Feinstein.

The question about the paper’s future seems to be how long, not if it can survive, given its staggering losses and a media milieu in which Americans needn’t rely on reporters from the Post or any other leftist media megaphone to provide news through their sinistral filter.

Now, they can get their news directly from podcasters and independent journalists such as Nick Shirley. He uncovered the Somali daycare scandal in Minnesota, a stunning rebuke of legacy media.

Publisher Quits After Layoffs

Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper, long owned by Katharine and Phil Graham, in 2013. The paper declined in prestige as its editors dealt with myriad scandals, notably its smear of Nick Sandmann, the Covington, Kentucky, Catholic high-schooler, in 2019. It was forced to publish a free-standing editor’s note about its coverage of the events of January 18, when a left-wing activist and military faker, Nathan Phillips, confronted Sandmann at the Lincoln Memorial after the March for Life. The Post attached another note to a story that explained revisions to clarify it.

Last Saturday, publisher Will Lewis quit his job after the newspaper “came under widespread criticism for laying off hundreds of its journalists,” The New York Times reported:

Mr. Lewis said in a statement that he had made the decision “in order to ensure the sustainable future of The Post.” His email, which was terse, thanked only Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, and did not mention journalists at the newspaper.

Mr. Lewis left three days after the company, facing years of financial losses, undertook a significant round of layoffs that cut 30 percent of the staff — more than 300 journalists — decimating The Post’s local, international and sports coverage. Marty Baron, the celebrated former editor of The Post, called it one of the “darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

In a news release announcing Mr. Lewis’s departure, Mr. Bezos said that The Post has “an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity.” He added, “Each and every day our readers give us a road map to success.” He did not mention the cost-cutting in his statement.

The Post, which once boasted a Sunday print circulation of more than a million, was losing money hand over fist, the Times noted.

Bezos hired Lewis in 2024 “to transform the publication and turn around years of financial losses and audience decline,” the Times reported:

The Post has yet to achieve consistent profitability, despite a hodgepodge of new strategies rolled out by Mr. Lewis, including the use of artificial intelligence, the inclusion of a new opinion product called “Ripple” and a “big hairy audacious goal,” or B.H.A.G., of reaching 200 million paid users. (It is unclear how many paid subscribers The Post has, since it’s a private company.)

The paper was hemorrhaging readers when Bezos took over, according to Pew Research.

In 1993, the paper’s weekday circulation was 832,332. By 2012, it was 484,385. Over the same time, Sunday circulation dropped from 1.15 million to 696,589.

Last year, those figures were 93,000 daily and 160,000 Sunday, JP reported. “As well, the newspaper had offered voluntary separation packages to employees across all functions in 2023 amid losses of $100 million,” the news service reported.

No More Sports

No wonder the paper pink-slipped hundreds of employees early this month, a move that wiped out the sports department.

“The company laid off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision,” the Times reported:

That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.

During a Zoom meeting, the newspaper axed about 45 sports employees who were “told to stay home from work,” with a “handful” receiving jobs in other departments, reported The Athletic, the Times’ sports subsidiary that replaced its department:

“First, we will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, told the staff, according to Post columnist Barry Svrluga.

While OutKick podcaster Dan Dakich blamed the newspaper’s woke approach to sports, Axios explained that sports fans simply don’t need the sports pages any more.

“Today’s sports fans can get most of what they need without the help of reporting,” the website noted:

Through social media, they can watch highlights, find stats and absorb commentary from a game they didn’t catch. …

Through podcasts and blogs, they can get smarter about teams and leagues they follow from experts who contextualize, rather than produce, information.

Fans are able to get access to players without relying on journalists who were once their main portals for learning about them.

But that’s also true about all news, not just sports. No longer must a reader wait for legacy media to pour filtered propaganda down their throat. They can get information through X and other social media from unbiased sources.

Nick Shirley, again, is an example. He took his camera to federally subsidized daycare centers in Minnesota and found that they weren’t caring for children.

Somehow, the mainstream media missed the story.