All the money in the world, and it's still not enough to save you
On the collapse of the Washington Post and three entirely realistic strategies for the survival of journalism.
Last week, the Washington Post laid off more than 300 journalists and overall a third of its staff, gutting sports, books, international, and metro coverage in a single afternoon. They fired at least one correspondent in the middle of an active war zone. Days later, the Post’s CEO Will Lewis resigned and owner (and reasonably sized sailboat enthusiast) Jeff Bezos released a statement saying “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success (...) The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.’ while naming the company’s CFO, Jeff D’Onofrio as interim leader.
I know I’m late to this party with many excellent angry but funny, content focused, business strategic, etc takes on what happened. Still, I want to spend this edition on the structural questions underneath and what this superyacht-sized failure means for (🥁) media funding.
We are organizing a partners-only online discussion on the 26 of February to cover upcoming funding opportunities, the state of the EU budget negotiations, and fresh intel from Brussels. If you have been considering joining the CSM Partnership Program, this would be an excellent time to do so.
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Too big to fail < too big to survive
This is the rare case where we can’t comfort ourselves with the usual explanation: they just didn’t have enough money. This is an organization owned by someone with more money and better IT infrastructure than God. If money could solve it, I imagine it would be solved.
For a long time, being big was its own protection.
People renewed subscriptions out of habit. Advertisers kept a line item because it felt risky to remove it. Politicians still returned your calls because you were still, technically, you. In the good old days, even platforms sent you some crumbs because you were a “quality publisher,” and for a while everyone liked saying how much they appreciated quality news when they were testifying before Congress.
But scale is no longer a business model in news. Scale became an enormous cost structure. Scale became a minefield of internal politics. Scale became the inability to change.
Big institutions that grew up in a world of scarcity (scarce channels, scarce content, scarce alternatives) thrived because scarcity of supply meant abundance of attention. And abundant attention meant a lot of money. Being big, having solid infrastructure, reach, and a large volume of content was more than enough when there were only so many places people could go.
That equation has flipped. Abundant content, abundant channels, abundant choices means the one thing that’s now genuinely scarce is attention. And when attention is finite and everything else is infinite, the old business model collapses.
It is probably true that Bezos was disengaged, Lewis was incompetent, that they made a series of catastrophic individual decisions and all of this made things dramatically worse. But even without these factors, with a competent CEO and an engaged owner, the Washington Post still needed to fundamentally change, and that is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off.
All big organizations are notoriously bad at change, but big newsrooms are in their own category. Unlike most other workplaces, reporters and editors often work for their guild, their own professional and moral convictions rather than a manager or an owner. In most jobs, if your manager tells you to do something, you are expected to do it, and if you consistently ignore what your manager is telling you to do, either you or the manager loses their job. In many newsrooms reporters can ignore editors and both of them can ignore management and everyone will still turn up for work every day. Moral narratives about what journalism is for, who it serves, and who gets to decide whether it’s good are so deeply ingrained in many organizations that telling them they needed to change because the world is changing around them is very hard.
And when the change you’re attempting isn’t just operational but ideological, repositioning the editorial identity of an organisation whose staff were specifically hired to execute a different vision, it’s nearly impossible. Look at CBS, where Bari Weiss is trying to do something structurally similar. The specifics differ, but the core problem is the same: trying to perform heart transplant while the elderly patient is running a marathon. Uphill. During a heat wave. While insisting they are fine.
In many ways, it’s easier to just start something new.
Three entirely realistic strategies for long term sustainability
So what does survival actually look like now? I think there are really only three paths.