The Washington Post Disaster is an Indictment of Both Publishers and Society

"The shocking diminishment of The Washington Post, which has just announced it is cutting a third of its staff, is not just another story of a great paper succumbing to algorithms, social media, and the march to idiocracy. In their zeal to be seen as fair and evenhanded, journalists tend to accept the common criticism that they failed to adapt that, basically, they didn't produce enough viral TikTok videos. There's some truth to that, but the main problem lies elsewhere."

"This disaster is an indictment of the business side of journalism: its inability to understand what remaining readers value, its mistaking novelty for strategy, its cowardice about insisting the product has economic value, its refusal to collaborate as an industry, and its refusal to get out of the way of the product it exists to serve. Of course, there is also a failure of society."

The Washington Post announced cutting a third of its staff. The decline stems primarily from business-side failures rather than newsroom adaptability alone. Print advertising collapsed after Craigslist and Google stripped classifieds, and display ads migrated to platforms offering targeting, scale, and metrics newsrooms could not match. Social media rewired distribution and trained publishers to chase traffic instead of loyalty. Management culture became obsessed with constant pivots—video, social, newsletters, creators—mistaking novelty for strategy. Business leaders failed to understand what remaining readers value, were reluctant to insist the product's economic value, refused industry collaboration, and over-managed the product. Society also failed to pay adequately for reliable information.

Read at www.mediaite.com