Washington Post slashed a third of it’s workforce after billionaire owner Jeff Bezos issued a directive. The sports and Middle East desk is gone, the international desk is abysmal, and Caroline O’Donovan, Amazon report and frequent critic of big tech, is out. The cuts reflect a disturbing pattern of choking and destroying integrity-based journalism.
Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for the Washington Post, brings her journalism ethics expertise to the conversation as she joins Jen in editorial mourning. Sullivan dissects the lead-up to this journalistic wipe-out, Bezos’ stake in the Post, and the future of journalism.
Margaret Sullivan is a journalist, columnist for the Guardian US, and ethics professor at Columbia Journalism School. Sullivan has worked as a New York Times public editor and media columnist for the Washington Post. She published her memoir “Newsroom Confidential” in 2022. She currently hosts “American Crisis” on Substack.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contour, and I am delighted to have with us My old colleague from the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan. Margaret is an esteemed ethics and journalism guru. She was editor-in-chief of the Buffalo News, a great local, regional paper. She was the ombudsperson, the public editor at the New York Times, and a media editor at the Washington Post. She has been on the Pulitzer prize-winning, committee and board, and has been a juror. Welcome, Margaret. It’s so nice to see you on this very, very sad day.
Margaret Sullivan
Thank you, Jen. It’s good to be with you, even though the circumstances are pretty grim, and I mean, it’s such an… it’s such an upsetting time for those of us who care about journalism’s role in our fading and failing democracy.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. Let’s back up a minute. Why… Has the post’s fortunes fallen so far? They talk about a loss of readership, they talk about, lost revenue, it has occurred, of course, under Jeff Bezos. Why the slide? And then we can talk about what has made it worse for the Washington Post since Bezos has really gotten his bits onto it.
Margaret Sullivan
Right, so, you know, backing up, I think, even a little bit. before Bezos bought the paper in 2013, it was having real financial troubles, as was the rest of the newspaper industry. It hadn’t really made a full or a good transition to the digital world. And so, when Bezos bought the paper from the Graham family. It seemed like phenomenally great news. You know, he paid $250 million dollars for it, which really wasn’t that much. I mean, that was a bargain. And he said all the right things. He was the one, in fact, who came up with the slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness. He stood up to Trump in the… in the first Trump administration, and as the Post competed successfully for scoops and for accountability with accountability journalism against the New York Times and others. people responded, and the post was actually profitable not that long ago. You know, I think it was probably in… 2018 that we heard that it was profitable, and, you know, again, we don’t know the details here. We don’t even know the details of how many employees there are, because it’s privately held, and they don’t, you know, have to put that information out, and they don’t. But… You know, since then. You know, I think there have just been some terrible moves. The hand-picked, Bezos-picked publisher of Will Lewis, who came from Murdoch World, was a terrible choice, has never seemed to have any vision for the You know, how are we gonna make this paper successful, and how are we gonna… keep in touch with its storied past of accountability journalism, while also, you know, coming to financial, some sort of financial viability. Never really heard a plan from him. They had this crazy thing, Jen, that you’ll remember that was announced. that just… I just remember thinking, well, this is nuts. A third… they announced that there would be a third newsroom. So the idea was that there was the newsroom, the regular newsroom, that we understand what that is, and I guess they were counting the editorial department as a second newsroom, and then there would be this mysterious third newsroom. that never was fully explained, and I think has gone away. But there have been all of these kind of, you know, I guess half-baked ideas.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Margaret Sullivan
Yes. And, you know, a big change in leadership, as Marty Baron, retired, legendary editor and, you know, winner of many, a Pulitzer, whether at the Boston Globe or the Post itself. You know, and really… extremely strong coverage of the January 6th, riot at the Capitol and the aftermath, which won a Pulitzer Prize. You know. So much that was good. And now, you know. I guess the paper’s losing, the paper, the company, is losing at least $100 million a year. And may I add that that is not a big deal for Jeff Bezos, who has $250 billion? I mean, Nate Silver… Nate Silver referred to that as a… what should be seen as a rounding error for Bezos.
Jen Rubin
That’s right.
Margaret Sullivan
This is really not… this is not something that requires you to wreck the paper.
Jen Rubin
And that… that, I think, is the mystery. He took the… opinion section, of which I was a proud member for 14 years, which was the most diverse, the largest opinion section, and he essentially ruined it. He didn’t want the endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was very clear that he wanted to move it to some pale imitation of the Wall Street Journal, and a whole flood of us left. That was a very big source of readership and revenue for the paper. Now, he has decided to slash it even further. So, whatever people are paying, they are getting less and less and less. When he bought the paper, he cautioned against this very strategy. He said, if you start downsizing, people don’t have a reason. to do it. We can speculate, I’ve speculated, you’ve speculated, that a lot of the changes are an effort to kiss up to Trump, frankly. It’s for the benefit of his Amazon business, his space business. If you’re gonna do such radical surgery, amputation, why keep the paper? What does he even want it? He’s destroying it, and he looks like a failure.
Margaret Sullivan
Yeah, it’s mysterious, but I guess when you look at… you know, you can’t look at any words, no… Bezos has uttered no words about this.
Jen Rubin
Yes, he’s silent. He was silent when his reporter was…
Margaret Sullivan
Right.
Jen Rubin
Gotcha.
Margaret Sullivan
When you look at what he’s been up to for the past year plus, you know, the… as you say, the really bad stuff started to happen, with the killing of the draft of an editorial that would have endorsed Kamala Harris for president. And he caused that to be spiked, as we say, in the newspaper business, killed. And after the… and so many, many people left. after that, as you say. And then it’s all been sort of downhill from there. But why… well… It’s possible… I mean, what’s the Washington Post’s brand? The Washington Post’s brand is accountability journalism. Let’s think about who would prefer not to be held accountable in the current era. Well, you know. I think we know who that is more than anyone else. I think we also know that Jeff Bezos has, through Amazon, has done some very nice things for Trump. He’s contributed to his inaugural committee, he has, you know, gotten behind the Melania documentary to the tune of $75 million, which could have kept some some journalists working, frankly.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Margaret Sullivan
You know, so if you look at those kinds of things, meeting up with Pete Hegseth, you know, I guess maybe you can connect the dots and say, well, he doesn’t want… he doesn’t want Trump… he wants Trump to feel, perhaps, that here’s one less problem for him. the Washington Post. And that’s, you know, it’s such a dereliction of duty. You know, I think of the word… I think of the word… stewardship and being a steward. When you are given something to buy it, when you have bought something like the Washington Post, and there aren’t many things like it, your duty As a person, as a citizen of the world, is to do whatever you can To help it along, and certainly not to wreck it along the way in this cruel and pointless way that is unnecessary. I mean, it’s just shocking.
Jen Rubin
Exactly. There have been billionaire families, or whatever a billion was back, decades ago, newspaper families, the Graham family, other families, that have respected the paper as a, as a precious jewel, as part of their duty as citizen. We have… it seems a billionaire class now that does not have a social conscience, to be quite frank about it, that is out to get more and more and ingratiate themselves with Trump. What’s the future, then, for a newspaper? Not all newspapers can be profitable. Some can be minimally profitable. The New York Times has figured it out, Wall Street Journal has figured it out, but not all can be. Is it to make them charitable entities within a foundation? Is it for people just to suck up and spend their money on it? What do you mean?
Margaret Sullivan
There’s no one perfect answer, and there’s no one-size-fits-all, but I’ll mention a couple of things. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which I admire, is part of a non-profit. It’s owned by a nonprofit called the Lenfest Institute. The paper I read recently is profitable, you know? Amazing. And they do really good work. The… this one is in the news a lot right now, the Minnesota Star Tribune, which is doing such important work in Minneapolis and throughout the state, is thriving. And it, I would add, is owned by a local billionaire. So not all billionaires are bad. But in general, you know, there’s no… it’s not as if you really can depend on, you know, your friendly billionaire to come in and just say, go ahead and spend, and I will… I will just pay the costs. I mean, I’ve worked now, not directly, but I’ve worked at two newspapers owned by billionaires. The Washington Post and the Buffalo News was owned by Warren Buffett, and one thing I would observe is that even billionaires don’t like unending losses. They… they just… it rubs them the wrong way, and so…
Jen Rubin
Exactly.
Margaret Sullivan
you know, Buffett sold his chains of newspapers, and Bezos is doing what he’s doing. You know, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for, you know, hanging in there, and saying, you know, I’m gonna fund this because I can, and because it’s good for the world. But, you know, he really… he was singing a very, very different tune just a few years ago, and I just think the change came with the second… with the… with the rumor of… with the prospect of. a second Trump administration. And so starting off with killing that editorial, going to the inauguration, putting all this money behind the documentary, and not doing his stewardship duty with the Washington Post, it’s all… it’s all of a piece.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. The other model, of course, was a non-profit model. ProPublica has done magnificent work, and they’ve actually tried to rescue local journalism by doing these partnerships. But at the other end of the spectrum. You know, because you came from a regional newspaper, one of the best. We’ve had a thinning of the herd, to put it mildly, but really a desert in local and regional journalism. What do we do there? And that seems to me as… we have seen in Minnesota every bit as critical, as a big national paper.
Margaret Sullivan
Right, and you know, I’ll answer your question, but I’ll also add, local journalism is more trusted, than national, and so it’s a way of getting very disparate points of view and politics to at least have a basic set of facts, which is so important. So when local journalism goes away, people become more polarized. But, you know, the answers there are various. I mean, there… and there’s, again, no good answer. There’s sort of the philanthropy model, there’s the membership model, there’s, you know. people… there’s a kind of a combination, which is probably what will work in the end, you know, membership. or subscriptions, advertising, some philanthropy, some events, and, hope the plane flies, you know? And it’s, it is, you know, the Boston Globe, oh, I’ll mention the Boston Globe, too, is owned by a wealthy, local. man, John Henry, I think, and his wife, and she’s the publisher, and, you know, they have not gutted their staff, and I don’t know what their numbers are, but I don’t think they’re in real trouble. So, it’s not as if it can’t be done. I think it can be done, and we do such a disservice by making it all about viability. It’s not about viability. It’s about accountability. And it’s about democracy. I mean, there are bigger issues here than the balance sheet.
Jen Rubin
Last question for you, and it’s a big one. We have seen, an incredible erosion of journalistic integrity and independence, whether it’s Barry Weiss at CBS, whether it was a set of settlement deals, that were really frivolous, another way of ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump. It seems as though, legacy journalism is in a very, very bad way. What do we lose as a democracy, as a society, when this happens?
Margaret Sullivan
Yeah, we lose a lot because even though there are great independent news organizations like yours and others that are doing such a good job, and are important, and are important to people. The thing that’s very difficult for all those sub-stackers to do, and all the commentators and, you know, everyone else in the whole media ecosystem, is do the sort of really tough reporting that takes institutional knowledge, lawyers in the building, you know, investigative work, all of that stuff that, really, the Washington Post has excelled at. And so you.
Jen Rubin
Exactly.
Margaret Sullivan
Like, when people say to me, well, I don’t read those things, I would never, ever read those, I’m all over here with the independents. I have to kind of remind them that we who are, you know, and I have a substack as well, we who are in the independent journalism world get a lot of our… what we talk about from.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Margaret Sullivan
The Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the… from ProPublica, from the AP, from Reuters, and when we lose one of those, or lose a major part of them, we really… the whole system gets weaker.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and when you think back at the Washington Post, the deep dives they did, as you mentioned, on January 6th, also with, police shootings in, DC, where it took hours and hours, hundreds of hours and people to analyze this data. And you look at some of the work that the New York Times has done. and reviewing dozens of federal court judges. An amazing feat in and of itself. If we don’t have that, we will lose something that is absolutely vital to America. Well, it is a sad day for all of us, Margaret, as you were saying before we went on. It’s one thing to know, in principle, what is going to happen, and it’s another to see great journalists, fade away, lose their job, lose their livelihood. And we would love to have some of them on, our masthead, and we will help whenever and wherever we can. But thank you, Margaret. You have always been a source of clear thinking and, honesty, and I’ve enjoyed you for years. Thank you.
Margaret Sullivan
It was great to have you as a colleague, and now great to have a relationship like this. So, carry on, and you know, we do what we can.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Thanks so much. We’ll talk to you soon.
Margaret Sullivan
Okay, bye, Jen.
