The publisher is always right

The business model that sustained newsrooms for the last century is over, and we’re left with the rich buying up newspapers like hometown sports teams.

This sort of saviorism isn’t just unacceptable — it’s disastrous.

We’ve watched The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, layoff staff in the name of profitability — followed by Bezos himself prompting 250,000 people to unsubscribe by blocking the publication of a presidential endorsement. We’ve watched members of the L.A. Times editorial board resign because the paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, wouldn’t allow them to publish an editorial about the stakes of the 2024 election (supposedly because of his concerns about Gaza — something L.A. Times staffers were punished for late last year ). And it almost goes without saying, but Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (primarily Fox News) is one of the worst beasts a political system has had the pleasure of dealing with.

If we value journalism, more specifically access to credible information, this can’t continue. Unions, newsroom cooperatives, philanthropists, and industry leaders must understand and make clear the gravity of the situation — because simply protecting jobs to maintain what’s left and hope the publisher class won’t make things worse will be the death knell of credibility for the profession.

To be fair, publishers with questionable motivations are not new. New York Times owner and publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger was homophobic at a time when coverage of the AIDS crisis needed to be clear and centered on public health. As his son and successor Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. put it: “The way [gay people] were being treated by being forced to be hidden was antithetical to the values of the company and the values of journalism.”

So if this was always the case, what’s different about 2025?

One: Newspaper consolidation. That means the editorial whims of one newspaper owner have a much wider impact than they did in years prior. There’s been a net loss of over 3,200 newspapers since 2005, according to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative. At the same time, national consolidation means the industry is fragile and insular. Almost 1 in 10 American journalists works at The New York Times, a publicly traded company worth around $9 billion and still run by the Sulzberger-Ochs family. (The current publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, has notably ignored the complaints of hundreds of writers around the Times’ coverage of trans people in the U.S.)

Two: Newspapers no longer have monopoly control over information — which could be a good thing if not for the oxymoron that’s subsumed the previous system, “privatized public squares.” The most popular “public squares” that exist online — Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok — are anything but public, shaped and led by billionaires with specific political alignments and revenue goals (some of them even purchase newspapers!). This problem is inextricably linked to startup and legacy newspapers. News is shared and in many cases shaped on these platforms.

Three: The ultra-wealthy in the U.S. are significantly more removed and less kept in check than prior generations. America’s 700-plus billionaires own over 50% more wealth than the lower half of Americans. While inflation and housing stock have made many people millionaires, a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Americans have more than $30 million. Relatedly, the effective corporate tax rate has declined steadily since the 1950s, and the tax loopholes individuals with extreme wealth can access are manifest.

The political and material realities of people with this much wealth have nothing to do with the average person in the U.S. We’re dealing with the price of eggs, while someone like Jeff Bezos might deal with not just the farm, but also the company that builds the tractors, the facilities that process the animal feed, and the trucking company that keeps the eggs cold in transit to your local supermarket.

It’s not so much a prediction as a necessity: We must abandon publications and platforms that fail to center our values in favor of newsrooms that actually care for us, our families, our neighbors, and our future.

We are living in a system where our information needs are increasingly being sidelined due to shrinking newsrooms. What we’re left with now is a false choice: Many of the newspapers and platforms that remain are run at the behest of people with a minimal understanding of and interest in the success of our day to day lives.

While I don’t have faith in most of them, billionaire newspaper owners still have the opportunity to do better and I welcome them to support new models for information and journalism focused on models not shaped by their immediate political interests. Whether the future is stronger union-run newsrooms or news cooperatives or nonprofits or even significantly more government investment in news, I won’t prescribe.

But I do know one thing: In 2025, unless we come together as a journalism field and course-correct away from information consolidation controlled by the ultra-wealthy, it will get worse.