That's a fair enough take -- as far as it goes.
Axios takes notice of the accelerated departures from the Washington Post this year, as owner Jeff Bezos drops shoe after shoe after warning for the past couple of years that changes were necessary. The talent exodus is undoubtedly substantial, and it's newsworthy on its own as a measure of the power shift from the staff to the owner and managing editor. The question asked by mainstream media outlets for the past year would be how long Bezos' choice of CEO, Will Lewis, would survive a staffer revolt over his vision for the paper's future.
Bezos answered that question firmly in the past couple of weeks:
Dozens of journalists are taking buyouts and calling it quits at the Washington Post, fueling speculation about how the storied paper can survive while bleeding so much talent.
Why it matters: The buyouts are designed to make it easier for staffers questioning the strategy of the Post's leadership to exit.
CEO Will Lewis earlier this month encouraged staffers "who do not feel aligned with the company's plan" to reflect on the buyout offer.
Flash back to June 2024, shortly after Bezos hired Lewis to take control of the Post. A month earlier, Lewis had conducted an all-hands meeting with Post employees explaining the dire financial prospects of the paper. "We are in a hole," Lewis declared, "and we have been for some time." Dramatic action would be needed to turn those prospects around, Lewis warned, and wanted the staff to participate in "Fix It" groups to find solutions to massive losses being sustained at that time.
What was the response? The paper published a deep-dive investigation into Lewis himself and the managing editor he brought into the WaPo, for trying outside-the-box thinking to solve a $77 million tsunami of red ink. Replacing a female executive editor with a male appeared to be the main complaint, as well as a tacit demonstration of why the Post's fortunes looked bleak. A few months later, Lewis had to deal with another staffer revolt over the decision to refrain from endorsements in the presidential race. Just a couple of weeks later, Lewis demanded that reporters and staffers return to the Post's offices to work rather than work from home, which outraged journos across the spectrum from Left to Even Further Left.
Two months later in January. the WaPo staff demanded a meeting with Bezos, "expressing alarm at the newspaper's direction and asking him to intervene."
Well, it looks like Bezos intervened. How do they like it?
The lesson here is that Bezos doesn't put up with staffer demands and petty revolts, not from an organization that loses him $77 million a year. Bezos hired Lewis to fix that problem, and the Post's staff made it very clear that they wanted to keep the status quo in place instead and expected Bezos to subsidize it without interfering in their fiefdom. Bezos spent more than a year attempting to get them to cooperate, and has finally decided that it's cheaper to pay them to leave and find people who recognize reality and want to work within it.
As I said at the top, it's fair enough to wonder how such a large-scale exodus will impact the paper's future. However, the context for this is that the paper had no future on its status quo track, a point that Bezos and Lewis kept trying to explain. Bezos has no interest in subsidizing losses of that scale, not even for another year of trying to get cooperation from the staff, and any future buyers would shortly realize that massive cutbacks and changes would be necessary.
This looks like addition by subtraction, in other words. Bezos gets to downsize his costs and bring them more into line with revenue, while inviting those who don't want to participate in fixing their broken model to take the one-time buyout and leave. That removes potentially malign presences from the newsroom and makes it clear who truly runs the organization. It also opens up space for new contributors and editors who will work to change the models that are leading the Post to ruin.
Now, maybe the strategy that Bezos and Lewis are using will prove unsuccessful in the end. Or perhaps it simply won't matter, as consumers reject all media outlets as hopelessly corrupted and operating for the benefit of political agendas and activists rather than reporting facts and truth. (Matt Taibbi has much to say about that in the context of Russiagate today, in fact.) If that's the case, though, it just means that the WaPo really didn't have a future anyway, except as a much smaller version of its current self that required subsidies from the massively wealthy to chatter on about class warfare and "diversity."
In the meantime, though, Bezos intends to create a new model for his paper and to find people willing to collaborate on it. That is the future for the Protection Racket Media, whether they like it or not. Their consumer base trajectory resembles that of Stephen Colbert's The Late Show and of late-night in general, and for the same reasons -- they're only servicing their shrinking bubbles, and no one else is interested in consuming their unreality any longer.
