How the world’s greatest businessman drove his newspaper into a ditch

  • Coffee AddictOPM
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    6 months ago

    Some parts I found enlightening (emphasis is mine):

    The Post was at one point reportedly on track to lose about $100 million in 2023; after more than 200 staff buyouts and other drastic cost-cutting measures, it ended the year with a $77 million loss. This year, a loss of roughly $50 million has been forecast,

    […]

    Shortly before Bezos bought the Post, traffic to the paper’s website was hovering at about 20 million unique visitors a month. But in September 2015, after Donald Trump had upended the Republican primary race for president, the Post scored nearly 60 million unique visitors, and in September 2016, more than 80 million. At the end of 2016, Ryan announced that the publication would “finish this year as a profitable and growing company.”

    […]

    But looking back, it’s clear that while the Times used that heady period to build out a business structure that would enable it to thrive after the “Trump bump” ended, the Post … didn’t, at least not to the degree that was needed.

    […]

    During the trump years, “on the surface, there was no problem,” a former senior editor told me. “But there was a problem. Our growth was based on politics” in a historically fraught political period. Whenever normalcy returned, it all risked a sudden collapse.

    Well, this is certainly a case against profit-based news media.

    I’ve seen it argued that news organizations loved the Trump era because they suddenly became extremely profitable. With Biden being relatively boring, they’re now struggling.