Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said she was struck by a presentation showing that in one stretch of 2019, nearly all of the 50 most popular articles on the Post’s home page were related to politics, whereas in the same period of 2021, just three of the top 10 were related to politics, people familiar with the meeting said…

One document provided a stark snapshot: The site had about 66 million monthly unique visitors in October, down 28% from last year. Most major publishers have suffered audience declines from 2020, when national politics and the Covid-19 pandemic lifted readership. Several of the Post’s rivals, including the New York Times, the Journal, Vox Media and CNN, had smaller declines in that time frame, according to the document, which cited data from Comscore. Other politics-focused publications, including the Hill and Politico, had traffic declines greater than the Post’s during that period, according to the document.

The Post’s digital subscriber growth, meanwhile, has begun to stagnate. The outlet had 2.7 million digital subscribers as of October, according to the internal document, down from roughly three million in January. Some of the people familiar with Post’s operations said the publisher is expected to end up roughly flat in digital subscriptions for the year.