#william-randolph-hearst

#william-randolph-hearst

Back then, news didn't break unless the town crier tripped over his own words. There were no "breaking reports," no special election coverage, no bickering pundits crammed into a single screen. News traveled so slowly that it took more than six months for word to spread across the thirteen colonies that the Revolutionary War was over.

We've been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don't know how to do that. The memo comes a day after CBS News owner Paramount Skydance emerged as the likely victor in a takeover fight for Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN. CBS is now headed by Bari Weiss, a conservative commentator turned media entrepreneur, whose appointment was seen as a fillip to the Trump administration.

When Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post in January 2024, he was received as a potential redeemer. The Post had lost $77 million the previous year under Lewis's predecessor as publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, an affable man about town who was once Ronald Reagan's post-presidential chief of staff. "The state of the paper when Fred left was really bad," says a senior staffer on the business side. "It was basically like two generational news cycles of Trump and COVID made the execs feel like they had a strategy and then the music stopped and subscribers fell away." From its high of 3 million subscribers at the end of the first Trump administration, the Post was now down to 2.5 million, and half of its online audience had withered away from a peak in 2020. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, was looking for a leader to jolt the paper to life.

St. Bride's, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists' church. Having weathered not a few disastersthe Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in 1940it now advertises itself as A Space for Silence, offering an hour of contemplation each weekday afternoon, yards from the world's most famous newspaper street. On a recent rain-soaked day, I arrived to find only one umbrella in the porch bucket and a church filled with lit candles and the chill of old sermons.

News that the Washington Post had laid off hundreds of workers and scrapped several sections of the storied paper altogether stunned the journalism community last week. The Post cut roughly one-third of its staff, reduced local coverage, and completely destroyed its sports and international departments. The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder, who has a staggering net worth of approximately $250 billion, bought the Post for $250 million in 2013.