#dongraham — Public Fediverse posts

A newspaper writing its own death notice

My city no longer has a functioning newspaper. It’s true that the Washington Post still exists as offices in a building on K Street with its name out front, a site and an app, and an increasingly thin printed product–but the guts of the paper, the things that made the Post a local institution, got eviscerated Wednesday as if they were copper wire stripped out of the walls by looters.

The number of journalists fired via e-mails with the needlessly cruel subject line “Eliminated”—at least 300 out of some 800 in an already diminished newsroom–understates the damage inflicted by the Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, his Fleet Street fraud of a publisher Will Lewis, and Lewis’s spineless executive editor Matt Murray.

(I have to write “at least” because we still don’t know exactly how many people lost their jobs Wednesday, in part because Murray reportedly spiked a staff story about this exercise in institutional arson.)

The sports section is gone. Metro has been cut down to about a dozen reporters, smaller than the current masthead of my college paper. The photographers? Out the door. The foreign desk, among many other cutbacks, will no longer have anybody in the Middle East; decades of American troops on the ground there, sometimes coming home in coffins, no longer qualifies stationing a Post journalist in the region.

Management’s attempts to explain this defy belief: a poorly written letter to readers from Murray in Thursday’s print edition (“We are taking a series of actions, and rethinking some of the ways we do things, amid sweeping changes in our industry”) and his laughable contention to CNN that Bezos “wants the Post to be a bigger, relevant, thriving institution.”

Murray told the remaining staff in a memo that the paper will focus on politics and national security, which might be more workable if the Atlantic hadn’t already poached so many good Post journalists covering those topics. From outside the newsroom, it looks more like Bezos’s plan is to hold the paper’s head underwater until it grows gills.

Every Post reader should view this as an insult, an act of region-wide civic vandalism.

For the growing diaspora of ex-Posties, it feels more like a death in the family. The paper with bookshelves’ worth of Pulitzers was what many of us saw as a career summit worth an arduous ascent. It wasn’t the biggest or the most influential paper, but the chance to out-hustle those snobs at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal was part of the fun. And the chance to be inspired by and learn from colleagues who could write like angels (to steal a phrase Ben Bradlee threw around in his autobiography) was part of the reward.

I loved working there until my last year or two, when I saw more and more people walk out the door after taking buyouts or early retirement or severance–and then I became one of those people. I remained a reader and a subscriber.

Bezos buying the paper for $250 million in 2013 was supposed to end that grueling decay and give the paper a fighting chance, in the form of ownership immune from stock-market pressure and rich enough to keep paving runway for the Post’s digital reinvention.

And for about a decade, it seemed to work: The paper rebuilt its coverage and staff and advanced its technology, its reporters covered Amazon’s failings rigorously, and Bezos publicly cheered on their work.

But then the Post’s growth during the first Trump administration stopped and reversed under the Biden administration, management squandered numerous opportunities to broaden and build out the Post’s business, and finally Bezos decided to start using the paper’s editorial section as a crude instrument of his own political leanings, starting with spiking an already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Hundreds of thousands of cancelled subscriptions later and after losses that the WSJ reported hit $100 million last year, Wednesday’s careless ransacking of the newsroom represents a complete betrayal of Don Graham, the publisher whom we trusted would have never sold his family’s newspaper unless he had the deepest confidence in the buyer.

It didn’t have to come to this. By the time Bezos realized that owning the Post would never not be “a complexifier” for him, he could have sold the paper. He could have spun it off as a non-profit. He could have deeded it to his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott, who keeps showing herself to be the better billionaire. But having spent an infinitesimal fraction of his growing fortune to buy the Post, Bezos seems unwilling to admit defeat and eat a loss that wouldn’t match his yacht expenses.

To my friends at the Washington Post: I am so sorry this happened to you. This wasn’t your fault, but at least you can escape the newsroom with your honor intact. Here’s who can’t, absent some upcoming arc of redemption that I struggle to imagine: Bezos and his soulless lackeys Lewis and Murray. History and my city will never forgive them for what they did.

A newspaper writing its own death notice

My city no longer has a functioning newspaper. It’s true that the Washington Post still exists as offices in a building on K Street with its name out front, a site and an app, and an increasingly thin printed product–but the guts of the paper, the things that made the Post a local institution, got eviscerated Wednesday as if they were copper wire stripped out of the walls by looters.

The number of journalists fired via e-mails with the needlessly cruel subject line “Eliminated”—at least 300 out of some 800 in an already diminished newsroom–understates the damage inflicted by the Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, his Fleet Street fraud of a publisher Will Lewis, and Lewis’s spineless executive editor Matt Murray.

(I have to write “at least” because we still don’t know exactly how many people lost their jobs Wednesday, in part because Murray reportedly spiked a staff story about this exercise in institutional arson.)

The sports section is gone. Metro has been cut down to about a dozen reporters, smaller than the current masthead of my college paper. The photographers? Out the door. The foreign desk, among many other cutbacks, will no longer have anybody in the Middle East; decades of American troops on the ground there, sometimes coming home in coffins, no longer qualifies stationing a Post journalist in the region.

Management’s attempts to explain this defy belief: a poorly written letter to readers from Murray in Thursday’s print edition (“We are taking a series of actions, and rethinking some of the ways we do things, amid sweeping changes in our industry”) and his laughable contention to CNN that Bezos “wants the Post to be a bigger, relevant, thriving institution.”

Murray told the remaining staff in a memo that the paper will focus on politics and national security, which might be more workable if the Atlantic hadn’t already poached so many good Post journalists covering those topics. From outside the newsroom, it looks more like Bezos’s plan is to hold the paper’s head underwater until it grows gills.

Every Post reader should view this as an insult, an act of region-wide civic vandalism.

For the growing diaspora of ex-Posties, it feels more like a death in the family. The paper with bookshelves’ worth of Pulitzers was what many of us saw as a career summit worth an arduous ascent. It wasn’t the biggest or the most influential paper, but the chance to out-hustle those snobs at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal was part of the fun. And the chance to be inspired by and learn from colleagues who could write like angels (to steal a phrase Ben Bradlee threw around in his autobiography) was part of the reward.

I loved working there until my last year or two, when I saw more and more people walk out the door after taking buyouts or early retirement or severance–and then I became one of those people. I remained a reader and a subscriber.

Bezos buying the paper for $250 million in 2013 was supposed to end that grueling decay and give the paper a fighting chance, in the form of ownership immune from stock-market pressure and rich enough to keep paving runway for the Post’s digital reinvention.

And for about a decade, it seemed to work: The paper rebuilt its coverage and staff and advanced its technology, its reporters covered Amazon’s failings rigorously, and Bezos publicly cheered on their work.

But then the Post’s growth during the first Trump administration stopped and reversed under the Biden administration, management squandered numerous opportunities to broaden and build out the Post’s business, and finally Bezos decided to start using the paper’s editorial section as a crude instrument of his own political leanings, starting with spiking an already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Hundreds of thousands of cancelled subscriptions later and after losses that the WSJ reported hit $100 million last year, Wednesday’s careless ransacking of the newsroom represents a complete betrayal of Don Graham, the publisher whom we trusted would have never sold his family’s newspaper unless he had the deepest confidence in the buyer.

It didn’t have to come to this. By the time Bezos realized that owning the Post would never not be “a complexifier” for him, he could have sold the paper. He could have spun it off as a non-profit. He could have deeded it to his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott, who keeps showing herself to be the better billionaire. But having spent an infinitesimal fraction of his growing fortune to buy the Post, Bezos seems unwilling to admit defeat and eat a loss that wouldn’t match his yacht expenses.

To my friends at the Washington Post: I am so sorry this happened to you. This wasn’t your fault, but at least you can escape the newsroom with your honor intact. Here’s who can’t, absent some upcoming arc of redemption that I struggle to imagine: Bezos and his soulless lackeys Lewis and Murray. History and my city will never forgive them for what they did.

The Washington Post’s site, apps and print edition featured many more anonymous sources than usual Thursday–in the form of generic “Washington Post Staff” bylines above previously-filed stories, reflecting the one-day strike called by the paper’s union to protest 18 months of unproductive bargaining with management over a new contract and the more recent threat by management of newsroom layoffs.

I know that union reasonably well. The Post Guild provided me an immense amount of help when the paper ushered me out the door almost 13 years ago–I still have the union card I didn’t get until the last few months of my tenure–and every year since has provided new evidence of journalism’s susceptibility to toxic management. Solidarity is a good thing.

So I honored the union’s request to avoid engaging with the Post’s output Thursday as best as I could (the print edition showed up on our front lawn anyway) by doing nothing that would make the paper any money that day. The exercise of shunning the Post reminded me that we do have other quality local news sources that often beat the Post to stories around here–ArlNow and Greater Greater Washington come to mind.

But watching an actual Post walkout also reminded me of how much things have changed since I was there.

We had a byline strike in 2002, but the last actual walkout had happened when I was four years old–and ended badly for the union. Seemingly endless rounds of buyouts that escalated from 2008 onwards, paid for by the unicorn of an overfunded retirement fund, did suck the joy out of the newsroom. But for years we could tell ourselves that the Graham family’s private ownership was our rock and protected us from indiscriminate layoffs to meet a quarterly-earnings number.

And then Don Graham shocked the entire extended Washington Post family by selling the paper to Jeff Bezos. The Bezos bucks made enough of a difference fast enough to make me think that the paper had turned a permanent corner–the staff grew, the paper reopened bureaus it had shuttered and stationed correspondents in places it had neglected, the CMS apparently became less toxic, and Posties I saw around town no longer had metaphorical rain clouds over their heads.

(Post journalists also didn’t let up on Amazon after Bezos put down his $250 million for the paper, regularly reporting serious problems with fake reviews and workplace safety at that company.)

It’s depressing to see that the paper’s prospects, at least in management’s eyes, have dwindled so badly that the Post is now planning layoffs and, from what other ex-Posties report, grotesque cutbacks to local coverage.

It’s dismaying to know how much worse things are at many other publications–my former client USA Today comes to mind–where journalists probably envy Post employees who are demanding raises, not just continued employment.

And it’s outright enraging to see that the entire online advertising ecosystem, the subject of federal and state antitrust lawsuits targeting Google’s alleged abuses of market power, continues to compensate publishers so poorly.

But I continue to think, possibly foolishly, that people don’t set out to make themselves dumber about current events, and that business models must exist to sustain journalism that makes people smarter. And I continue to pay for a Post subscription–which I hope will lead to more money going to the people whose valuable work I appreciated reading Friday.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/08/solidarity-with-striking-posties/

#bylineStrike #DonGraham #JeffBezos #organizedLabor #PostGuild #Posties #solidarity #union #walkout #washingtonPost #WashingtonPostStrike