The day Jeff Bezos announced the purchase of The Washington Post, I was in my office that looked out on WFLD’s large newsroom in Chicago. Michael Flannery, the outstanding political reporter, shouted across the newsroom, “Hey Tom! Jeff Bezos just bought The Washington Post for $250 million!”
It was Monday, August 5, 2013. The Grahams selling the Post was shocking to me, and the price! That shocked me, too. I’d always admired the Post going back to college. During my career as a journalist, I was fortunate to work for a subsidiary of the Post, as News Director at WPLG in Miami, and actually got to know Katheryn Graham and the Post’s Editor Emeritus, Ben Bradlee. The call letters of WPLG, honor of Kay Graham’s late husband and Post Publisher, Philip L. Graham. Even from a distance, I felt connected to elite journalism.
But when I first heard the news in Chicago, there was also a personal dread that it was the beginning of the end. The Post had lost money for years. The company’s television stations were highly profitable, which helped the overall bottom line, but for years, the forecast for print was not optimistic.
Media analyst, Thomas Baekdal, provides one of the best accounts of the collapse now unfolding at The Washington Post. It did not begin with last month’s layoffs, nor with Jeff Bezos’ increasingly puzzling interventions in the paper’s editorial decisions. According to Baekdal, whose meticulously sourced timeline of the Post’s last two decades reads like a post-mortem, the seeds were planted years earlier, well before the most recent acts of self-inflicted damage.
Baekdal traces the paper’s modern troubles back to the financial crisis of 2008–09, when the traditional advertising model cracked across the industry. By 2009, the Post was losing more than $160 million annually, with continued losses through 2013. When Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million later that year, it was widely seen as a rescue, and initially, it was.
Bezos invested heavily. The newsroom expanded. Technology improved. Arc Publishing emerged as one of the industry’s most impressive content platforms. For a time, the trajectory looked not just stable, but hopeful.
Then came 2017.
That year, the Post adopted its now-famous slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” and repositioned itself around aggressive accountability coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency. The approach worked spectacularly, in the short term. Subscriptions surged from roughly 200,000 in 2017 to more than three million by 2020, a phenomenon widely referred to as the “Trump bump.”
Former executive editor Marty Baron later observed that millions of Americans viewed a Post subscription as a civic act — “a way to join the democracy club.” According to Baekdal’s analysis, this framing fundamentally altered the paper’s audience relationship. Readers were no longer subscribing primarily for news. They were subscribing for opposition.
That distinction matters.
When Trump lost the 2020 election, nearly half a million Post subscribers disappeared almost immediately. Baekdal cites reporting from INMA showing a 17 percent drop after Biden took office, as readers’ sense of democratic urgency faded. By mid-2024, daily active users had fallen by nearly 87 percent from their January 2021 peak, according to figures reported by Semafor.
The decline was not subtle. It was structural.
Baekdal’s core argument is uncomfortable but persuasive: the Post trained its audience to value political resistance more than journalism itself. When the resistance moment passed, so did the readers. The underlying problem, the perceived value of the daily news product, had never been fixed.
This context is essential when evaluating the more recent disasters: the abandonment of a presidential endorsement just days before the election, the pivot toward opinion content aligned with a pro-Trump posture, and the reputational damage that followed. These moves, as Baekdal bluntly argues, accelerated a collapse already underway by alienating an audience the paper itself had cultivated.
Blaming search algorithms, artificial intelligence, or “changing media habits,” as recent internal memos reportedly have, misses the larger point. Those forces affect everyone. They do not explain why direct traffic and paid subscriptions fell off a cliff.
The hard truth, one journalists rarely like to confront, is that audiences will not pay indefinitely for moral alignment alone. They pay for journalism that consistently proves its relevance, usefulness, and distinct value. When news organizations substitute identity for information, they mortgage their future on a moment that will inevitably pass.
Baekdal calls the Post’s current state “near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.” That may sound harsh. But for anyone who has led a newsroom, the pattern is painfully familiar: short-term growth mistaken for long-term sustainability; audience passion confused with audience loyalty; mission language allowed to replace product value.
The Washington Post is still a large and important institution. But as Baekdal’s timeline makes clear, its crisis is not primarily technological or political. It is journalistic.
Until news organizations recommit to answering a simple, unforgiving question: Why is this worth paying for when the outrage fades? They will remain vulnerable to the next cycle, the next figure, the next bump.
And no slogan, however noble, can save them from that.