We Killed Journalism

The Washington Post layoffs are the latest death knell for a 125-year-old business model, driven not just by the internet but by the public's devaluation of truth.

This is a reader-supported Substack for and about you — witnesses to an age of acrimony and anxiety.

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SPORTS NEWS GUTTED. Local news gutted. International news gutted. All told, more than 300 of the 800 journalists in The Washington Post newsroom were laid off Wednesday, crippling one of America’s great institutions of journalism.

It’s also the latest death knell for a 125-year-old business model: Jeff Bezos became one of the world’s richest men by selling nearly everything on the internet, but even he couldn’t turn a profit on internet-era news.

The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, told his employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs, according to The New York Times. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health.

“If anything,” Murray said, “today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape.”

Um, no.

For a better take on the truth, I turn to former Washington Post journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten, who wrote on his Substack:

The scumbags finally struck today, officially, though they’ve been up to their scumbaggery for years. They’ve finally killed The Washington Post two years after beginning to systematically bleed it of its dignity and its moral authority.

Technically the paper will still exist, but in a ruthlessly skinny form that will turn it into a tragic joke.”

There were two proximate causes, in the end:

The first was jaw-dropping incompetence — both professional and financial — by a management team led by British CEO Will Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch protege whose main accomplishment, to date, had been getting implicated in covering up the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London.

The second reason was the greed of a new owner of incomprehensible wealth who viewed the newspaper not as a national trust — he simply had no background in or love for journalism, no understanding of how it is literally vital to democracy — but as a business challenge, as with any other business. In this case, in the end, when his business model failed, it was a business to be milked and repurposed to fit whatever his transitory needs were, using it to increase his wealth and influence by sucking up to a malevolent power his newspaper was morally obliged to challenge. He betrayed his newspaper, and his country. And you.

I’ll add a third culprit to Gene’s list, one that best explains why the entire journalism industry is on life support: Us. We, the people, a nation of information lemmings who at some point this century stopped paying for news; who stopped trusting news sources that wouldn’t confirm our biases; and who vilified rather than sanctified the role of objective, tough-truths, accountability journalism.

Since the turn of the century, we’ve used the internet to seize intellectual property at bargain rates, putting journalism at the mercy of corporations, venture capitalists, and billionaires like Bezos.

There are 60% fewer journalism jobs today than in 2000. The newspaper sector was hardest hit, with employment falling over 50% since 2008. In the last two decades, over 3,400 newspapers have closed, leaving many regions with little to no local news coverage.

I fell in love with journalism 50 years ago in a two-newspaper town. A joint operating agreement in 1989 effectively made Detroit a one-newspaper town. The JOA dissolved in December, and just last week the Detroit Free Press’ corporate owner, USA Today Co., bought the Detroit News from MediaNews Group and promised to keep both papers afloat. For now. The loss of ad revenue and readership is only going to hasten in Detroit (and elsewhere) — and my hometown is one C-suite decision away from becoming a news desert.

Want to keep journalism alive? Subscribe to several media outlets, including one or two that challenge your assumptions. We put journalism on Death’s doorstep. Only we can save it.