The Washington Post Enters Its Amazon Era

Data and efficiency are destined to shape the paper’s future. Whatever that means.

Every so often, incurious bosses must relearn why doing more with less always fails. Sadly, for the journalists of the Washington Post, there are few humans on earth more incurious than Jeff Bezos, the owner of their newspaper. The New York Times’ recent report on the Bezos-driven firing of more than three hundred and fifty journalists and the destruction of the Post’s institutional credibility recalls a classic genre: Overconfident Boss Who Believes a News Publication Is a Widget Factory.

Bezos’s Amazon-ish strategy, according to the Times, involved slashing the newsroom budget by half while somehow doubling productivity and maintaining a focus on time- and resource-intensive beats like investigative journalism. The story quotes Jeff D’Onofrio, the Post’s chief financial officer and acting chief executive, explaining to reporters at staff town hall meetings that “increased costs and decreases in output” have “resulted in a doubling of costs for story-units since 2020.” Articles are also to be assessed an “audience value score” on a scale of zero to one hundred based on reader-engagement time, shares, and similar metrics. If these Amazon-inspired buzzwords and phrases failed to inspire, D’Onofrio also “noted that executives discovered in some areas it cost ’multiple thousands of dollars to publish a single story.’”