That’s not how it works. The Post doesn’t become proportionately more expensive with each additional subscription. The Post’s expenses are set - mostly by payroll. Any electronic subscription has virtually zero related expenses for the Post. It’s almost entirely profit - profit that must be balanced against the cost of producing the paper in the larger scheme of things, but again the paper doesn’t become more expensive to produce because there’s an additional subscription. There’s a tiny bump in the aggregate bandwidth requirements of the web servers, is all. But there’s also a tiny bump in ad revenue, so that’s probably a wash.
A paper subscription is a slightly different proposition. They might lose money on those. I have no idea what the production and distribution costs of paper media are relative to paper subscriptions these days. But again the marginal cost of one extra paper for one extra subscription vs the subscription fee and distribution-number-based ad revenue is unrelated to the overall production cost of the paper.
I don’t quite get these legacy media organizations trying to re-fashion themselves as Fox News-lite, especially when people seeking a Fox-like product can pretty easily tune into full-strength, original recipe Fox News, which is all too happy to continue feeding bullshit to its viewers.
Also, conservatives and the media that panders to them have spent years trashing the Washington Post. I can’t imagine too many conservatives are going to start reading the paper just because Jeff Bezos has decided to focus the opinion section on “free markets and personal liberties.”
Somebody, perhaps Bezos, must have asked the question: “do you want to continue to lose money as a liberal paper, or do you want to join the fascist revolution and enjoy the glorious profitability of Fox News?” Apparently everybody said (with tears in their eyes) “sir, yes, sir, we sure do want that fascist thing, thank you sir!”
Not that money has any influence at all in politics – John Roberts assured us, in the Citizens United ruling, that it never does. But still, one still senses that it sometimes might.
The Washington Post was once a standard-bearer for American journalism. It stood for fearless investigative reporting, for holding the powerful accountable, and for the simple but radical idea that democracy cannot survive without a free press.
The choices for layoffs at the Washington Post are bizarre, and don’t make any sense. I could understand if he killed off the paper outright. If he’s doing this to curry favor with Trump I could understand laying off anyone critical of him, or of the entire division covering Washington politics. But he’s leaving ac lot of things intact, yet destroying entire sections that you would think would make sense for a functioning newspaper to have:
The Ukraine bureau chief and correspondent (in the middle of a war) (the rest of the staff is still there)
The entire Middle East staff
The Sports section (!) – You can’t get more apolitical than sports, and I’m sure a lot of people buy the paper just for the sports section. Why close it?
The Books section – well, books can be subversive, but it makes almost as little sense to close this as it does the Sports section.
Lots of other people being let go, too. They’re “restructuring” the Metro section (so, still some local news). And they’re letting go Caroline O’Donovan, who specialized in covering Amazon – no real surprise there.
As has been pointed out, Bezos can easily cover any of the paper’s losses. So why this selecting disembowelment, rather than simply killing the paper?
Legit questions, not rhetorical ones. But probably ones none of us can answer definitively:
Is Bezos personally picking who or what got axed?
Or did he just issue an edict to the bean counters to reduce payroll X percent?
Plus fire these one or two especially irksome employees that had come to his attention?
Or was this a “decimation” in the original sense of the word: Axe a bunch of people / departments sorta willy-nilly to ensure everyone else is terrified into “happily” going along with whatever form of anti-journalism comes next?
IMO …
tl;dr:
Faux is highly profitable. WaPo is not. So convert WaPo into a Faux clone & watch the money roll in and as a collateral benefit, eliminate the old-style WaPo as a thorn in the side of the Fascist / Oligarch takeover of the USA.
Long form:
If there is method to the seeming madness it sounds like his goal is to create a propaganda outlet that’s relentlessly focussed on his personal pet projects. Which are a) sucking up to trump, b) selling laissez faire fat-cat friendly regulatory & tax policies, and c) general techbro racist conformist noise for the masses.
A Middle East bureau or a sports section don’t contribute to that mission. Further, it’s pretty clear they intend to eventually stop producing a dead tree “newspaper” and simple become, like Faux, a website & social media stream of opinion propaganda pieces lightly disguised as current events.
Any content which is not that content is simply unfocussed noise that doesn’t contribute to their mission of firehosing their flavor of propaganda at a crowd conditioned to want, nay crave, a focused dose of that stuff.
Probably for the same reason that FOX “News” stopped actually reporting news, weather and sports, and became a right-wing mad-at-the-world TV talk-radio channel around the clock, or almost– because that’s what sold with too many rednecks in the South, for one; they didn’t want to know what was actually going on, but really wanted FOX to confirm what they believed was going on (just like liberals have wanted with what is now MS NOW).
I don’t understand dropping sports news. I am not a sports person but from what I observe there are a lot of people who must get their sports news. (Just as an example, my father has a subscription to the Post but asked me to set up their app so that sports came up first when he clicked on it). I would assume that sports is a driver to any news site. Dropping Ukraine coverage OTOH makes sense because coverage is expensive, dangerous and most important harmful to Trump in reminding people that the war that he promised to stop in 24 hours is still ongoing.
Yesterday the WP ran a transphobic column by Megan McArdle, that FILTH who had just made excuses for Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rapists. Filthy hypocrite.
As far as I can tell, the Post did not report on its recent layoffs in its own pages. (That omission is more what you’d expect from a smalltown rag than a newspaper of record.) So it’s left to readers in the comments sections, and awesome advice columnist Carolyn Hax, to discuss what is on everyone’s minds.
The New Yorker has a well-informed piece this week on “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post.” The author, Ruth Marcus, proposes that Bezos make the Post a nonprofit that he funds but does not control. It’s a nice idea, but you can be sure that the distinction would be lost on Trump and that he would continue to threaten and punish Bezos for whatever the Post published.
I used to think there was something called “fuck you money” - that if you had enough money, you could do whatever you wanted without caring what other people think. Now I realize no such thing exists. Look at Jeff Bezos: he has hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet he still doesn’t have enough to say fuck you to Donald Trump.
In a way, Jeff Bezos is even worse than Elon Musk. To paraphrase Hamilton: “Musk has beliefs - Bezos has none”. 99% of Musk’s beliefs are crazy, evil or both, but at least he has some sort of vision and plan for the world. Bezos is just a hollow, empty man.
Trump could theoretically throw him in prison & take everything he owns. Hard power beats soft power. And having to break the law to do it wouldn’t make Trump hesitate in the slightest.
Trump is highly unlikely to actually do such a thing, yes but in the end, the guy with the army and no concern for the law beats the guy with a big bank account every time. Just ask all the Russian oligarchs who “fell out of windows” how well money works against brute force.