Washington Post-Mortem

The Washington Post is gone.  What's left is merely a penny-ledger version of its former self.

The once-proud newspaper cut 30 percent of its staff, eliminating its book-review section when it became apparent that people in Washington, D.C. don't read (it's never been what you would call a literary town), and, in an admission that its major-league teams suck, eliminating the sports pages.  The Post tried to put the best face on the fileting of the staff.

"If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape," Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor said. "And after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles."

Yeah.  Right.

Jeff Bezos (above), who famously brought the Post in 2016 and hoped to make it a showcase for how a newspaper would and could thrive in the digital age, but given how artificial intelligence has rendered his original plans useless and given also how the media landscape is becoming ever more fragmented as more people move toward independent media, it's clear that saving the only prestigious newspaper in the nation's capital (the far-right Washington Times is run by the Moonies) was never a priority for Bezos, who demonstrated his loss of interest in it when he refused to let the paper endorse Kamala Harris for President in October 2024 and turned his attention to Blue Origin and other endeavors in the hopes of keeping lucrative contracts with the government under Trump. 

Democracy hasn't yet died in darkness, but the Post died in broad daylight.  It has lost so many employees as a result of these cuts, it will have to strive for years just to reach the quality of an exurban Gannett newspaper.

Maybe letting billionaires whose interest in journalism wanes when their priorities and interests change by media outlets wasn't such a good idea.

I'm going to have to rethink my association with Amazon now.  I've been a Prime member for a couple of years, ordering only items that I need when I need them, but when I don't need anything, I still pay for a service that guarantees overnight delivery that I'm not using.  Why should I line Bezos' pockets even more?

Oh, that's right . . . because more often than not, when I do need an item, I can't find the item I need anywhere else! 

Compact discs?  I don't have much room for more, and I think I'll start collecting albums on a flash drive rom now on.