This past week’s gutting of the Washington Post was a true tragedy, as Marty Baron, Dan Kennedy, Peggy Noonan and others have made clear. But I have to say I’m not too surprised by Jeff Bezos’s draconian corporate reductions. Sad, yes. Shocked by the scale of the cuts, definitely. But I’m not overly surprised, for it’s been pretty clear for a while now that Bezos’s vision for the Post was fundamentally different from traditional journalism. I don’t think he ever saw the Post as a stand-alone business institution with a noble democratic mission within the nation’s capital. He mostly saw it as a business component within a larger Prime retail eco-system, an Anywhere USA paper that he actually thought he could grow to 100 million subscribers by reaching new readers, “particularly those in the middle of the country,” as the NYT once reported. He talked of a mysterious “third newsroom” and service journalism that would turn “stories into products that could serve users,” etc., etc. He’s consistently sounded like a true product of the dot-com era, confident he could reinvent an entire profession. 

Now he’s trashing the joint after discovering the journalism business isn’t quite like selling books, electronics, and beauty-and-personal care products.

Sure, Bezos was pretty good steward of the Post in the early years after he purchased the paper, but I always viewed that era as a function of him deferring to legendary editor Marty Baron on most editorial matters. Once Baron left the Post in 2021, it was all one ownership misstep after another, culminating in last week’s newsroom carnage and then the pathetic resignation of Bezo’s handpicked CEO. 

So a week of turmoil and controversy ended with yet more turmoil and controversy, something we’ve come to expect at the Bezos-owned Post. No surprise there at all.