30+ things The Washington Post did wrong and 19+ things they could do to fix it

The internet is positively buzzing with people offering The Washington Post free advice following its massive layoffs on Wednesday.

I compiled a bunch of this advice from Twitter and Bluesky, and present it here in no particular order. I had to draw a line somewhere so this post is limited to stuff people posted either yesterday or this morning, and you will notice that the “fixes” section also includes some “it’s doomed,” pronouncements, sorry about that.

Some of these entries are excerpts from longer posts; all are linked so you can read them in full. RTs are not endorsements, etc.!!! I’ll continue to update the list as I see good ones. Oh, and “The Washington Post” in the headline should probably have an asterisk by it: Much of this feedback is aimed, specifically, at Post owner Jeff Bezos.

What went wrong

SALLY JENKINS: “I trace @jeffbezos poor business decisions re @washingtonpost all the way back to getting rid of Katherine Weymouth as publisher. He knew nothing of the landscape.” (source)

DEREK THOMPSON: “WP’s recent golden age coincided with the paper projecting a clear stance against White House overreach. Even a far-right conservative can see that the ‘democracy dies in darkness’ sears saw a boom in subscriptions, as liberal readers patronized a news organization that was fiercely reporting on and standing up to an unpopular president…

WaPo has made many, many strategic errors in the last few years — letting Politico walk out the door, failing to build a Politico Pro model, failing to build its own Punchbowl business, failing to build a big events biz, letting Ezra walk, over-hiring as subs declined, failing to copy the NYT’s evolution toward becoming a lifestyle brand with games and cooking, etc — but what makes me most pessimistic about its near future is that Bezos has apparently made it mandatory that current leadership abolish all memory of the newspaper’s recent triumphs and install a new strategy with no track record of success.” (source)

KATHERINE BOYLE: “Bezos did the opposite of what the newsroom assumed he would do: he poured obscene amounts of money into a cash incinerator. He gave the Post a fancy new building. He subsidized every section of the paper, even the ones with no readers. He expanded international. He financed experiments in video and podcasting. He gave the newsroom a blank check for over a decade. Rather than pursuing a strategy based in reality, the Post newsroom became very accustomed to a billionaire patron giving them everything they wanted in perpetuity.

In retrospect, this was a terrible business decision because it made the young reporters and editors delusional. The old ones who remembered the cuts and the pain of the business before Bezos — when they finally took the free coffee away — they had all been fired or left the industry.

The “For and About Washington” strategy was also a loser, because it retained the most expensive parts of the newsroom while diminishing its reach. Sports is expensive. Metro news is expensive. And as pretty much every other local newspaper in the country has learned, the old local paper model is broken and has been since the internet arrived.

The Post’s brand was and is Washington politics. It’s the seat of American power. It should be focused on covering politics from its premier perch in DC. It should have never been distracted by anything else — it only ever needed this product. It lost sports to the Athletic. It lost International to The Times. There’s no reason to compete on those products.” (source)

LYDIA POLGREEN: “Striking that three companies — Politico, Axios and Vox all came out of the Post. You could easily see their business thriving within a diversified Post. A baffling series of missed opportunities by the previous owners.” (source)

HEIDI MOORE: “I’ve seen lists of ‘what WaPo did wrong’ that include letting Politico and Ezra walk but frankly I don’t think those were mistakes. You can’t stop a journalist who wants to do something entrepreneurial. What I DO think was WaPo’s key mistake was hiring Sally Buzbee. She seems to have terrible judgment in people and made a lot of bad, restrictive calls on coverage. It was during her tenure that WaPo went from subscriber growth to disastrous contraction. I think it’s illustrative of the cost of choosing a bad leader and thinking that money will solve the problem of bad leadership.” (source)

BEN SMITH: “The original, pre-Bezos sin at the Post was turning down a VandeHarris pitch to launch “http://postpolitics.com” (URL later sold back to Post) in 2006, and then — more egregiously, on the commercial side, sneering as Politico and its descendants built businesses that are, not coincidentally, on the order of magnitude of the $100 million a year the Post is losing.” (source)

SALLY JENKINS: “The @washingtonpost so ignored sports the last couple years that I actually emailed Matt Murray and asked why the homepage didn’t even bother having a ‘tab’ directing readers to Sports. You could get to ‘Well Being.’ But not us.” (source)

JORDAN WEISSMANN: “Never realizing there was a market for something like Politico Pro…Bezos’ decision to use the first Trump-era windfall to try and become a software company, instead of acquiring other desirable subscription media properties like the NYT and building a competitive bundle…Failing to start a competitive events business when Semafor, Politico, and Punchbowl all did…Hiring Will Lewis, who spoke in vague media biz guy ideas from the jump (go back and read his first interview with Ben Smith) and has failed to deliver nearly any of the creative ideas he did promise. (Like the ‘third newsroom.’)” (more at source)

EMILY WITT: “When you start ‘the world’s biggest bookstore’ and buy a print publication but think encouraging a culture of reading is a waste of money and kill its books section.” (source)

NATE SILVER: “To state the obvious, there’s no reason to be sympathetic to Bezos or any of the other leaders there. The paper’s influence really cratered following the editorial shifts in 2024/25.” (source)

DAVID FOLKENFLIK: “I don’t see how Will Lewis can effectively lead WaPo. Lewis did not save Bezos from himself on opinion pages. (375K+ cancelations) His innovations did not stem enough red ink. And he has not taken any ownership of the devastating ensuing cuts. He’s making Murray own it alone.” (source, and note that the 375,000 subscriptions canceled is up from a previously reported 250,000)

LAUREN WALKER: “‘rich dipshit owner doesn’t understand the industry he’s bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good’ feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that’s been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years. bezos is simply following in the grand rich idiot tradition of gannett, advance publications, and many other private newspaper owners before him. he’s merely wealthy enough to sink a more prestigious brand than the times-picayune.” (source)

JAMES SUROWEICKI: “The people at the Washington Post who were poorly performing were Bezos himself and the people at the very top who, post-2020, made a series of bad strategic decisions and failed to capitalize on their success from 2013-2019. And even then, the Post would be in reasonable shape today had Bezos not sabotaged the paper by embracing Trump, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.” (source)

KARA SWISHER: “My take today on Jeff Bezos since I met him at his struggling start up in the 1990s in Seattle: Twice the muscles, half the man.” (source)

MARGARET SULLIVAN: “The hallmark (the ‘brand’) of the Washington Post has been accountability journalism. Thus, today’s staff decimation is Bezos’s greatest gift to Trump, so much more valuable than the Melania movie, inauguration money, etc. This disaster began, for real, with the Harris endorsement he killed.” (source)

PAOLO MANRÍQUEZ: “The Post has, what, a dozen sales people? To fund hundreds of reporters all over the world? NYT has a legit sales army. There’s your problem, in a nutshell.” (source)

ELIZABETH SPIERS: “I don’t buy the idea that Bezos is intentionally killing the Post. If he wanted to do that he could have just bought it and shut it down. Plenty of rich people have done that. The problem is he hired a Murdoch tabloid team to manage it and it’s not a Murdoch tabloid and you can’t run it like one. Never attribute malice to what can be easily explained by incompetence.” (source)

EMMANUEL FELTON: “I’m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post. This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.” (source)

ANDREW SOLENDER: “Bezos tried to make WaPo the WSJ, but we had a perfectly good WSJ at home. he torpedoed the paper’s comparative advantage in pursuit of a reader base he was never going to acquire.” (source)

PHILIP BUMP: “POST LEADERSHIP: look these are tumultuous times and we need to fire everyone so that we can figure out how anyone might possibly make a newspaper profitable. THE NEW YORK TIMES: uh” (source)

How to fix it (?)

ANNIE WU: “.@mackenziescott you have the opportunity to do an extremely funny (and genuinely heroic) thing right now.” (source)

JIM VANDEHEI: “Lots of rich people would buy it, and even more execs would gladly run it. Show me a single entity anywhere at anytime doing anything that worked without strong, engaged leadership. Kinda matters. I bet @dongrahamdc1 or Kara Swisher would pull together a group to take it over. Bloomberg could easily swoop it up himself. Just sell it.” (more at source)

JACOB BROGAN: “We need to read more and talk about books more. Our traffic, which was actually quite good on the whole, especially relative to the general decline of newspaper audiences across the board, attests to the need for that.” (source)

JIM VANDEHEI: “2 reporters on every federal agency, small WH team w/ 3 top-tier reporters and governmentwide specialists in federal rule-making and contracting and spending…Entice Post stars who left to return as service to their city, profession and nation. They talk a big game on X – call their bluff!…Sunday print only or preferably none at all. AI-first for all operations beyond reporting, editing, sales, leadership…Scrap opinion: city has enough noise.” (more at source)

SHARON WAXMAN: “I don’t know if Kara [Swisher] still wants to run the Washington Post, but i’m sure she would help organize a group of investors. The person who needs to come to the table is Jeff Bezos.” (source)

SCOTT BRODBECK: “Loosen the paywall → reg wall after a few free reads; aim to be the most premium free alternative to NYT…Make WaPo Pro the national layer for actionable statehouse + policy intelligence…Fewer newsletters, but invest more in the main ones; center them on star reporters with real voice…Launch WaPo Premium: fewer ads, comment privileges, live events, consumer-level perks…Normalize flexible WFH.” (more at source)

BRIAN STELTER: “It’s worth noting that the Post did not decimate its political reporting team. The proverbial thorns in the side of the Trump administration are, for the most part, still there. The overhauled Opinion section still regularly criticizes Trump and his administration (though not as forcefully as before). Perceptions of Bezos have no doubt hurt the Post and led to subscriber cancellations. But as editor Matt Murray told me yesterday, ‘our job should be reporting on Trump aggressively without fear or favor,’ and ‘we’re continuing to do that.’” (source)

JOSH MARSHALL: “This is the billionaire white knight publishing arc. At a smaller scale see Chris Hughes at TNR going on a generation ago now. It almost always runs this cycle. The end. (In more ways than one.)” (source)

MATTHEW ZEITLIN: “the greatest resource the new york times has is that its owners wealth almost entirely derives from the paper that they also work at. massive skin in the game.” (source)

MATT YGLESIAS: “The Post reached great heights of journalistic achievement and readership under Trump One and was sacrificed in Trump Two to Bezos’ desire to avoid angering the regime, but what I’m yearning for as a reader is robust coverage of local issues in DC and the suburbs…I think this region needs both more routine coverage of our core government institutions and also more analytic coverage to help contextualize things. How does our tax and spending situation compare nationally? What are we getting? Where does it go?” (source)

T. BECKET ADAMS: “Lots of commentary on how Bezos has ‘murdered’ WaPo. But unless I missed it, I’ve yet to hear anyone propose how it could turn around $100M annual losses *without* austerity and content overhaul.” source

DAVE JORGENSEN: “Local News International includes five ex-Posties. We’re all building what we couldn’t at the Washington Post.” (source)