What the hell is happening at the Washington Post? 📰

And how to fix it.

(Daniel X. O'Neil)

The first “big time” job I had in journalism was at the Washington Post.

I got hired, actually, to work at washingtonpost.com which, back in the days of yore, was a separate entity from the plain old Washington Post.

But even when I first started at post.com, I spent most of my time in the famous newsroom in downtown Washington — right on 15th Street.

I would regularly walk by the office designated for Bob Woodward — even though Bob was almost never there as he preferred to write his books from home. The empty office was still cool.

I got a chance to co-byline pieces with political reporting legends like David Broder and Dan Balz. I worked alongside the likes of John Harris, who went on to co-found Politico, and Jim VandeHei, who co-founded not just Politico but Axios too.

I spent a decade of my life at the Post — the longest I have (still) ever worked anywhere. They were GREAT years. Full stop.

And, although I left the Post eventually for CNN, I never stopped loving it. It remains the place I have the softest spot in my heart for, the place I pull for the most.

Which is why what is happening there is so, so hard. The Post is in the midst of a trio of cataclysms:

1. A subscriber exodus numbering in the hundreds of thousands following the decision by owner Jeff Bezos to stop the practice of the Post’s editorial board endorsing presidential candidates. Those subscriber numbers come AFTER the Post said it lost $77 million in 2023 alone.

2. A massive talent drain as well-regarded reporters — especially in the political space — leap from what looks more and more like a sinking ship.

To that point, consider the number of people who have left WaPo in just the last few weeks:

(Sidebar: I don’t think the resignation of Jen Rubin, announced this morning, is such a big deal. And my guess is that the bosses at the Washington Post don’t either.)

3. A colossal drop in web traffic. This, from Semafor’s Maxwell Tani on Monday morning, is simply devastating:

   Over the last four years, web traffic has cratered. According to internal data shared with Semafor in recent weeks, the Post’s regular daily traffic last year sunk to less than a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post briefly reached a high of around 22.5 million daily active users following the attack. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.

Here is the current state of the Post — as explained by “The Simpsons”:

It’s fashionable, I think, to blame Jeff Bezos and his hand-picked publisher, Will Lewis, for all of this.

Bezos’ decision to kill the Harris endorsement appeared to be a blatant attempt to curry favor in the event Donald Trump won. Bezos’ trip to Mar-a-Lago late last year seemed to confirm that suspicion — as did the $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund.

And, to be clear, that’s exactly what Bezos was (and is) doing. His prime business is Amazon, not the Washington Post. He is trying to protect that asset — after having an adversarial relationship with the president in Trump’s first term.

Then there is Lewis who, it seems, has done little to endear himself to the newsroom. He is reportedly a distant presence and many reporters suggest they have no real idea what the plan for the future is.

(Post editor Matt Murray sent an email to staff on Monday morning titled “The Future” but there wasn’t anything specific about, well, the future in it.)

Even if you take ALL of that into account, I don’t think the current state of the Washington Post should be laid entirely at Bezos or Lewis’ feet.

In fact, I actually think Lewis deserves credit for speaking some hard truths to a newsroom that has long been resistant to the simple economies of the news business.

Last June, in a widely reported and decidedly tense meeting with staff, Lewis said this:

We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.

Which, well, correct.

It might be hard for reporters to hear but the reality is that WAY too many of them are producing work for each other (or to win a prize) and not the sort of journalism that people, you know, want to read.

That is not to say that the ONLY North Star of the Post (or any media organization) should be giving people exactly what they want. But it is to say that no one in the media — myself very much included — can operate without an awareness of what people want, what they are reading and, as importantly, what they aren’t reading.

And Lewis is RIGHT. The decline in traffic to the Post cannot simply be written off to Bezos’ cuddling up to Trump. Traffic to the site has been slowly but surely collapsing for the last four years. This is not new — nor is it due to decisions by Bezos or Lewis. (To be clear: Some of their decisions have NOT helped things!)

The reality of the Washington Post is this: It doesn’t know what it wants to be.

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I know exactly what I am and want to be: A voice for independent, authentic and transparent political journalism. I need your help to keep doing that sort of work! I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

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When I was there — from the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s — it was clear what we were aiming at: We wanted to compete with the New York Times as the national newspaper in the country.

That effort went into overdrive when Bezos bought the Post in 2013. Suddenly we weren’t a public company — with the need to demonstrate profits to stockholders — but a private one owned by the richest man in the world.

Those first few years were, in retrospect, the Golden Age. While Bezos had said publicly he wanted to make a profit with the Post, no one really thought much about it back then. He was saying “yes” to everything (or most things). It was a time of optimism and creativity.

And just as that spending spree started to peter out (or at least slow) Donald Trump emerged on the political scene. And traffic soared — at the Post and everywhere else. At which point the big bosses at the Post made a miscalculation. They assumed that the money Bezos had spent on the news organization — and the journalism it was producing — was the reason for the traffic surge.

(Sidebar: Much of the journalism the Post produced during that time was very good!)

Of course, it wasn’t. The Trump presidency was a sugar high for ALL news publishers. It wasn’t sustainable. As soon as Trump left office, interest waned — even though he never really went away.

And Trump, the sequel, never got the ratings or pageviews that Trump, the original, achieved. (Sequels almost never live up to the original!)

Which left places like the Washington Post, well, swinging in the wind. They had staffed up as though they were about to make a run at the Times. But, unlike the Times, they didn’t have the crossword or Wordle or the recipes. (Yes, those are the things that drive subscriptions for the Times.)

The Post also fell victim to the fate experienced these days by most mainstream media outlets. The flattening of the media landscape meant that being “the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza” carried far less weight than it once did. And the rise of platforms like Substack and YouTube made the path to individual, independent journalism much, much more attractive to well-known reporters looking for a more stable existence.

In the face of this sea change, the Post has largely stood pat. They seem to still believe that simply being “The Washington Post” is enough to guarantee that a) people will want to work there and b) people will want to read what they write.

That is a mistake. As I have learned in my two years of being an independent journalist, you MUST think of yourself like a salesman — not just putting out your product for people to see but also telling them exactly why they need it.

Why, today, do you NEED to subscribe to the Washington Post? I would say to read the excellent coverage of Congress by Paul Kane. Or the amazing charts and graphs built by Philip Bump. Or the on-the-spot political analysis by Aaron Blake.

But, like, I don’t think the Post has done enough to make clear the “why”. Bash “Democracy dies in Darkness” all you want but it’s a mission statement. It’s an ethos.

What is the mission statement or the value proposition of the Washington Post right now?

It seems to me the Post has forgotten its mantra.

It’s easy, of course, to stand on the sidelines and note that the Post isn’t ever going to match the national resources — and brand power — of the Times. Or that it will never out-politics Politico or out-Congress Punchbowl News.

So, what then is it that makes the Washington Post special? Distinctive? Unique?

I would argue it’s this: It’s the only MAJOR news organization BASED in DC. (All of the other major outlets are based out of New York/Los Angeles.) And Washington is the CENTER of the world — at least for the next four years.

Yes, that of course means covering the politics of the White House, Senate and House. But it also means covering the proposed slashing of federal workers expected to be the recommendation out of the Department of Government Efficiency. And the growth of Amazon’s presence in the Crystal City neighborhood of Virginia. And how the arrival of the MAGA crowd changes the social life in Washington. What about how Trump is changing the lobbying industry? Who’s up? Who’s down? Is there a hot new private school where all the senior Trump Administration officials are sending their kids?

The answer, to my mind, to the Washington Post’s problems is right there in the name of the publication: “Washington.”

Make yourself indispensable to any who lives, works or cares about Washington! That’s a whole lot of people! Try out a new slogan like “How Washington works.” Or “What Washington reads.” Or “Washington runs on us.”

None of those are great. But you get the gist! Make the Washington Post THE source of all things Washington. Make it unmissable if you care about what is happening in the nation’s capitol.

The web traffic may never approach the previous highs of the first Trump term — even if you do embrace Washington’s high and low culture as your North Star. I honestly think the days of mainstream media prospering financially are likely behind us.

But, at least the people inside the building — and readers outside the building — would know where you are pointing. What the mission is. And why.

I WANT the Washington Post to find its footing. While I believe independent media is the future for lots of journalists, we all need major pillar organizations like the Post to keep on keeping on.

But, they won’t do so if people don’t know the value proposition — the “why” behind the asks to subscribe. Without a mission, the Post is pissing in the proverbial wind.