WaPo Changes in Attempt to Stem Flow of Red Ink

I would like to say I'm shocked, buy how can you be? And the staff doesn't want to change. (No surprises there.) WaPo boss sounds alarm over dwindling audience in heated staff meeting: 'People are not reading your stuff' | Fox News

The level of failure is amazing.

The Washington Post has had a rough few years, especially financially. The Jeff Bezos-owned paper lost more than $70 million in 2023 and lost 50% of its audience in the same period, according to The New York Times.

Against that backdrop, the newsroom is restructuring, and the people in the newsroom are not happy about it. They don't seem to understand that things can't go on like that forever.

Think about that. They lost half of their readers in 2023. Do you think that number was at an all-time high in 2022?

Another staffer accused Lewis of choosing two of his "buddies" to run the Post, referring to Murray, who worked alongside Lewis at the Journal, and Robert Winnett, a former colleague from Lewis' stint at The Daily Telegraph.

"The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run The Post," the staffer said. "And we now have four White men running three newsrooms."

Another staffer accused Lewis of choosing two of his "buddies" to run the Post, referring to Murray, who worked alongside Lewis at the Journal, and Robert Winnett, a former colleague from Lewis' stint at The Daily Telegraph.

"The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run The Post," the staffer said. "And we now have four White men running three newsrooms."

So faced with an existential crisis, the business should forget that and double down on identity politics. "Why can't we just keep doing what we've been doing?" The fact that it doesn't seem to be working is apparently beside the point.

I would say "learn to code," but I've been told that isn't nice. Also you do need a little bit of logic to be a programmer, and that seems to be generally lacking from these people.

I tried to find some statistics on the size of the readership by year, but the only stats I could find were behind a pay wall. A couple of news articles indicate that the fall off in traffic was quite abrupt. With its top editor abruptly gone, The Washington Post grapples with a hastily announced restructure. Actually, if I read all of the articles correctly, the impending restructure is what precipitated the departure. By why clutter the issue with facts, when all I really want is the following:

The Post's website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020, and had dropped to 50 million at the end of 2023. The Post lost a reported $77 million last year.

That isn't a decline so much as falling off a cliff.

The nature of the restructure also has me scratching my head. The big controversial move is to separate opinion from what should be hard news. Is this a tacit admission that the news has been more opinion lately? No, that couldn't be the case.