At the beginning of February, management "The Washington Post” made the decision to lay off more than a third of its employees journalists, three hundred out of eight hundred, according to some external estimates. Although he offered many reasons in his address to the newsroom, the explanation came down to one sentence from editor-in-chief Matt Murray - we haven't adapted to the way people follow the news today.
If he had said something similar ten years ago, we would have understood that the devil of the Internet had come for his own, as it happened massively to the print media at that time. But the "Washington Post" was an example of media that was phenomenally digitized, and in that process it was not without significance that they were bought in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world. Now many bitterly say that "Posta" could have covered the five-year losses if he had not bought a new yacht, but in fact they only give him credit.
Bezos is a businessman who understands the importance and influence of the media, but also the limit to which losses are tolerated. Both the yacht and the newspaper are only demonstrative symbols of his success measured by wealth, which was born precisely from his ability to adapt to the market better than others. Now the editorial office needs to adapt.
For those who like to learn from other people's mistakes and troubles, it is very interesting what went under the sword first. The sports section and book reviews (Book Reviews) were practically abolished, as well as several correspondents around the world. The dismissal of reporters who were on the ground in Ukraine and the Middle East at that moment was received the hardest by the journalistic public.
The logic of the media business today says the following. Sports sides are losing readers who prefer to find results on specialized applications from which they receive the desired notifications, while they get context on independent podcasts and blogs.
Unlike sports, whose popularity is only growing, the situation with books is much more difficult. The public is reading them less and less, therefore the number of people interested in literary criticism has decreased below the profitability limit. That is, they are only interested in books serious readers, the masses have switched to telephone "reading". Literary criticism will also find a "second home", that market is not as attractive as the sports market, but it has its own potential or niche. Us seniors will note that Amazon started as an online bookstore thirty years ago, but today the percentage share of revenue from book sales there is in the single digits.
The abolition of correspondents indicates that the subscribers of the "Washington Post" primarily follow what is happening in their country and that the high costs of presence in the world hotspots are quite useless. Also, "Post" had a hard time bearing the consequences of the decision not to support Kamala Harris in last year's presidential elections, as expected, which led to the cancellation of about two hundred thousand subscriptions, practically ten percent of the audience. That loss is not covered by new income, and here's why.
Artificial intelligence has had the biggest impact on business. Until recently, the media business model was based on search. You type in Google what you are interested in and the first thing you get is the "Washington Post" text on that topic because it is perfectly optimized for search. And the text is accompanied by advertisements that finance the business of the media. Things have recently changed. Now you ask Google a question, and instead of directing you to texts where the answer is hidden, artificial intelligence summarizes it for you in a few sentences. No clicks, no media ad revenue.
There remains a battle for subscribers as the only stable source of income, but this requires a profiled editorial policy. In the case of "Post", it implies greater distance in relation to the current American administration, which is contrary to the current interest of the owner. The same one who in 2017 added the slogan "Democracy dies in the dark" to the newspaper's header. Back then, it was thought to be a motto, not news.
