“I’m out. Along with hundreds of others”. Is this a Washington Post problem, or are newspapers just too expensive to operate?

Photo above - Washington Post reporters, transfixed upon hearing the news that 300 staffers are being fired . . .

When I was growing up, my parents had 3 newspaper subscriptions: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and a weekly for our local community. If I wanted to subscribe to those today it would cost $100 a month. Maybe a lot more, the further I lived from DC or NYC. In an era of instant online news, and cable news 24/7, is there any point to getting a print newspaper the next morning? The Washington Post doesn’t think so. It just laid off 300 reporters. See link below.

I don’t know how much this will save. If a reporter earns $75,000 a year (WaPo average), and gets another $25,000 in benefits, those 300 missing bodies could save $30 million annually. I bet the Post will still lose money though.

$75,000 is a surprisingly low average salary for a major city newspaper reporter. That might be poverty level in a place like DC. If you wanted to buy your own condo, you could only qualify for a mortgage of $200,000. Try to find one of those. Maybe outside the city limits, in Hyattsville or Oxon Hill?

News of the firings began to leak a week ago when sports reporters were told their airline tickets and hotels for 2 weeks in Milan to cover the Winter Olympics were cancelled. Now the entire sports department is gone. No more Washington Redskins, MLB Nationals, NBA Wizards, DC United Soccer, or Capitals Hockey. Staffing to cover the Washington Mystics WNBA team was still ramping up. People just will have to tune in to cable now. Which they were already doing, in order to watch their teams in the first place.

The Books section is gone. The free podcasts are gone. Most international bureaus. Metro. There were also special dedicated reporters to cover “race and ethnicity” and Amazon.

We have entered a new era. Zillions of people are roaming the streets with smartphones, capturing instant video. This is how we know so much about Minnesota ICE and the apprehension of Venezuela’s cartel adjacent dictator. Newspapers are using AI to write summaries for events like these, days after the fact.

I’m sorry 300 people are losing jobs they clearly love. I’m sorry a print edition of the WaPo now costs $50 a month/$600 a year (you can navigate their 5 websites to try and find which intro discounts you might qualify for). I’m sorry the WaPo news department spent years racing toward one end of the political spectrum, while hiding President Biden's cognitive decline. Jeff Bezos' cuts aren’t intended to punish anyone at the newspaper, or even to save the Post. Nothing can save the Post. Just like nothing saved ABC, CBS, and NBC television news either.

I’m just sayin’ . . .



Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post conducts widespread layoffs, gutting a third of its staff