I can't see where the article defines how it measures "productivity". Is it just words produced per hour?
Journalism is, I imagine, much like programming: a lot of the words are "boilerplate" and cheap to produce, but those aren't the important parts of a story. Some of the words require a lot of work. Getting a direct quote from a relevant person. Doing the deep research to expose a claim as false instead of blindly parroting it. Getting multiple sources to voice contrasting views on a topic. Fact checking an article before publication.
I worry that whatever their definition of "productivity" is, it ignores these important yet time consuming aspects, and as such, what looks like "increased productivity" in their metrics is really just a decrease in quality.
The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change. On the other hand, Blue Origin reportedly loses multiple billions of $ per year, and has done for decades, which Bezos pumps in without insisting on massive cuts or layoffs.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
> The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change.
You don't even "might understand" this, because you're intelligent enough to grasp that its profitability as a newspaper was never a factor in Bezos' desire to purchase the WP.
There is quite a bit of difference between not making a profit and consistently losing around $100m a year with apparently no path to at least revenue neutrality.
So it loses pocket change for a multi billionaire?
Edit: The consideration being that perhaps billionaire toys need not be profitable per se, but are purchased for different reasons. Twitter is another example here.
That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.
In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.
So it's a cost center. Exactly like the public relations tool that WP is. Until due to cuts public loses interest in it, at which point it ceases to be an effective tool and keeps being only a cost center.
Rich businessmen have expensive hobbies, and those can look a lot like real businesses. Jeff could also buy a couple oceanographic research vessels tomorrow, spend a few years looking for sunken Spanish treasure ships, then get bored and sell the whole "business" in a liquidation auction.
Yes, Jeff and his companies keep making idealistic, pro-social statements. Unfortunately, such statements are little more than socially mandated lies. Which millions of people really want to believe - so be cautious about calling them out.
The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
Jeffy wants to have his cake and eat it, too; a propaganda apparatus that turns a profit. The obvious solution would be to not own a spin machine if it's not turning a profit if you're looking to make money. But of course that would leave him without a mouthpiece.
I also wonder how much having his name attached to the thing is responsible for the awful balance sheet ca 2024. It may never turn a profit as long as it's a known Bezos operation.
Simple solution: quantify the value of the propaganda and add that to the Post's balance sheet. Problem then is that the worker bees might decide they should get a slice of that value, which would offend Jeff's core sensibilities.
It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” he announced Wednesday, leading to editorial page editor David Shipley’s resignation."[1]
> It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets"
That's about as uncharitable a take as you can possibly get. Bezos pushed the paper's editorial slant toward libertarian, and Shipley didn't like it, because it didn't fit his own political ideals. You could just as easily say Shipley was propagandizing a different philosophy before the change, it wasn't selling to the paper's target audience, and Bezos fixed the problem.
Regardless, editorial writers do not have a deity-given right to espouse their political opinions while collecting a paycheck -- particularly when their opinions aren't selling product. This goes all the way back to the very first news broadsheets. Throughout US history, newspapers have switched political philosophy as business needs dictated.
> I like that you say that the opinion you quoted is uncharitable and then agree with it.
To people who disagree with you, your opinion is always trivially dismissed as "propaganda". This is neither insightful nor charitable, and applies universally to actors on any side of a political debate.
> Propaganda as opposed to information (what one would naively expect from a newspaper).
> While a regular newspaper article would inform, propaganda would deceive with the intention of convincing people of some idea
We're talking about the opinion section. The editorial board writes opinions. You're fundamentally just upset that they switched from writing about opinions you prefer, to ones that you don't like, but they've always been engaged in what you're characterizing as propaganda.
As far as I can tell, "left wing" or "leftist" mostly doesn't refer to any coherent ideology or group of people, so much as acting as a catch-all term for things the ruling class doesn't like or people who they'd prefer not to have a voice in media
> Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled
Sort of like Moore's Law. If he can do that every 18 months then in a few decades the newsroom will really fly! News flash: it doesn't work like that. :(
It is like a guy seeing headlines "wapo is losing" money and feeling ashamed in its "genius entrepreneur's ego / could never be wrong" and taking revenge on whoever he can take revenge and inflict pain just for the sake of it.
Why doesn't he sell while he can still get something for it? Continuing the trajectory it has been on in the last two years will mean shuddering the paper or turning it into X hoping some users will switch.
Newspapers just aren't worth that much. They don't make money, in general. He was losing $100m a year at WaPo.
You buy a newspaper because you're rich and you want your opinions disseminated. Not because you think you'll make money. So the number of potential buyers is really small.
Their last peak of subscriptions was when Trump got elected in 2016. It was a good time for newspapers and TV. The NYT is having an even higher peak now[1]. Surely the Sulzbergers aren't the only family competent enough to run a newspaper. Lots of papers aren't owned by billionaires and manage to do ok. Wapo didn't have games in 2016 and people still subscribed. It just lost it's value to readers, so people unsubscribed. I certainly did.
Bezos is literally just showing his incompetence at this point in running a paper, and the NYT is probably loving it. Sure billionaires can buy social networks and papers, but people can also subscribe to and use things not owned by billionaires.
The NYT almost went out of business before they were rescued by billionaire Carlos Slim. The NYT is probably doing okay because the local papers everywhere else are a pale shadow of what they once were, so people sign up for NYT looking for what they used to have.
But they did switch to a pretty good online presence, the NYT did games, others could try to go after classifieds or other online pastimes without neutering the news room like Bezos has done. Sure it takes investment, Bezos seems to have had no problems doing that with Amazon.
He should've chosen to not make editorial decisions, and help with finding other revenue sources. Instead he lost revenue by making editorial decisions, and shows no signs of learning anything. He's lost more in market value at this point than yearly profit with his current strategy, which he can change anytime.
That's not just WaPo. That's the newspaper business. The business model for newspapers just doesn't work anymore, and they've all been trying to come to terms with it since Craigslist launched in 1995.
The big problem is that the greedy TechBros want to
influence legislation and politics. Right now there
is an orange TechBro in charge, so the oligarch
mafia will succeed (aside from their own intrinsic
stupidity) - but eventually voters in the USA need
to decide whether they really want the superrich
to pull all strings on the puppet.
Maybe the subscribers of the Post? They (reportedly) left in droves after Bezos interfered to stop the opinion board from endorsing a candidate and more recently fired nearly all international reporters. (including those in warzones)
He owns the paper and can do what he wants within the bounds of the law, but anyone is also free to criticize the decisions he makes, and subscribers are free to unsubscribe.
Criticism is about what someone ought to do, not what they can do. (these are very different)
Obviously his strategy with WA post seems to be working (for him and his ventures). He secured contracts both for AWS and Blue Origin from a seemingly hostile gov. Even if everyone unsubscribes and journalists leave, it was still a good investment.
So the shareholders of Amazon are happy. He did the right thing.
Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter. We opted to give him so much unchecked power.
There's some truth to this, but most of the news that gets disseminated on social media was originally gathered by a professional journalist somewhere.
https://archive.ph/jDX3O
I can't see where the article defines how it measures "productivity". Is it just words produced per hour?
Journalism is, I imagine, much like programming: a lot of the words are "boilerplate" and cheap to produce, but those aren't the important parts of a story. Some of the words require a lot of work. Getting a direct quote from a relevant person. Doing the deep research to expose a claim as false instead of blindly parroting it. Getting multiple sources to voice contrasting views on a topic. Fact checking an article before publication.
I worry that whatever their definition of "productivity" is, it ignores these important yet time consuming aspects, and as such, what looks like "increased productivity" in their metrics is really just a decrease in quality.
Also the whole manufactured consent thing
LOC equivalent of the news!
The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change. On the other hand, Blue Origin reportedly loses multiple billions of $ per year, and has done for decades, which Bezos pumps in without insisting on massive cuts or layoffs.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
Yep.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
> The WP reportedly lost $100m in 2024. So one the one hand, you might understand Bezos wanting things to change.
You don't even "might understand" this, because you're intelligent enough to grasp that its profitability as a newspaper was never a factor in Bezos' desire to purchase the WP.
There is quite a bit of difference between not making a profit and consistently losing around $100m a year with apparently no path to at least revenue neutrality.
So it loses pocket change for a multi billionaire?
Edit: The consideration being that perhaps billionaire toys need not be profitable per se, but are purchased for different reasons. Twitter is another example here.
A $100m here, a $100m there, pretty soon, you're talking real money.
That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.
In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.
Y'all are talking about the real Scrooge McDuck.
Yeah, he could only keep this going for another 2600 years
He could, you know, not have bought the newspaper too. It didn't belong to him originally.
It's not like he will make it profitable anyway.
You can't compare the two. BO is essentially an R&D firm.
So it's a cost center. Exactly like the public relations tool that WP is. Until due to cuts public loses interest in it, at which point it ceases to be an effective tool and keeps being only a cost center.
WP used to be left leaning, and with bezos the move has gone right. So naturally all readers move on to some other medium. Business 101
That's about 3 years of his boat's upkeep, regardless if it goes anywhere or not.
Rich businessmen have expensive hobbies, and those can look a lot like real businesses. Jeff could also buy a couple oceanographic research vessels tomorrow, spend a few years looking for sunken Spanish treasure ships, then get bored and sell the whole "business" in a liquidation auction.
Yes, Jeff and his companies keep making idealistic, pro-social statements. Unfortunately, such statements are little more than socially mandated lies. Which millions of people really want to believe - so be cautious about calling them out.
About the same as Bezos invested in the Melania documentary, watched by about six people.
The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.
Leni Riefenstahl taught me everything I know about lighting and camera angles!
Blue Origin in theory could make money some day. WP definitely not
I'm sure he didn't bought the WaPo to make a profit. More like to have an influence.
It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
And influence he got. Gutting it was an act of influence and carried the message he wanted to carry across quite perfectly
His reason for buying it has been right there in front of us all along: Democracy Dies In Darkenss
It's just like "To Serve Man".
This is absurdly pedantic, but the fact that the Twilight Zone episode relies on a pun makes the two phrases somewhat different.
They would be alike if the book title had been "If Mankind isn't at the Table, Mankind is on the Menu"
Yea we should simply get more done with less money, why didn't I think of that? Dude's a genius
Maybe if we halved his budget he could be twice as productive too. Could you imagine? We could call it financial intermittent fasting
Looks like he intends to treat them like Amazon employees. I wonder if he'll do stack ranking as well. Or maybe they'll pee in bottles at their desks.
Jeffy wants to have his cake and eat it, too; a propaganda apparatus that turns a profit. The obvious solution would be to not own a spin machine if it's not turning a profit if you're looking to make money. But of course that would leave him without a mouthpiece.
I also wonder how much having his name attached to the thing is responsible for the awful balance sheet ca 2024. It may never turn a profit as long as it's a known Bezos operation.
Simple solution: quantify the value of the propaganda and add that to the Post's balance sheet. Problem then is that the worker bees might decide they should get a slice of that value, which would offend Jeff's core sensibilities.
I think you hit the jackpot here. Taking it further: the value of facts° presented henceforth by the WaPo should be traced back to explicit gains.
Not gains for the Post itself though, but for its owner, for example in regulatory capture.
Those can be computed pretty precisely or estimated. How is this income generation not then inputted to the owner as income?
It is said that the USSR failed because of incorrect accounting. Let's not let the Land of the Free fail in the same way!
Washington Post opinion section is just garbage. I would call it propaganda section.
It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” he announced Wednesday, leading to editorial page editor David Shipley’s resignation."[1]
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/26/jeff-bezos-washingt...
> It is explicitly that now. Bezos policy change back in 2025: "Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is directing the paper’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets"
That's about as uncharitable a take as you can possibly get. Bezos pushed the paper's editorial slant toward libertarian, and Shipley didn't like it, because it didn't fit his own political ideals. You could just as easily say Shipley was propagandizing a different philosophy before the change, it wasn't selling to the paper's target audience, and Bezos fixed the problem.
Regardless, editorial writers do not have a deity-given right to espouse their political opinions while collecting a paycheck -- particularly when their opinions aren't selling product. This goes all the way back to the very first news broadsheets. Throughout US history, newspapers have switched political philosophy as business needs dictated.
No, the opinion section was absolutely not pushed towards libertarianism.
Have you read it recently?
Yes.
Libertarianism is just an euphemism for "authoritarian righ-wing, but dont want to admit it out loud" in most cases.
by now [1], yes. but in my experience not a very popular view on HN. expect downvotes.
[1] i find peter thiel's speech at libertopia in 2010 a great early reflection of that shift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgH7Lv2gQdk
I like that you say that the opinion you quoted is uncharitable and then agree with it.
>Bezos pushed the paper's editorial slant toward libertarian
> I like that you say that the opinion you quoted is uncharitable and then agree with it.
To people who disagree with you, your opinion is always trivially dismissed as "propaganda". This is neither insightful nor charitable, and applies universally to actors on any side of a political debate.
The word propaganda has a meaning. In this case I think it was used correctly.
Propaganda as opposed to information (what one would naively expect from a newspaper).
While a regular newspaper article would inform, propaganda would deceive with the intention of convincing people of some idea.
And frankly, Bezos does very little to deserve charity when people evaluate his actions.
> Propaganda as opposed to information (what one would naively expect from a newspaper).
> While a regular newspaper article would inform, propaganda would deceive with the intention of convincing people of some idea
We're talking about the opinion section. The editorial board writes opinions. You're fundamentally just upset that they switched from writing about opinions you prefer, to ones that you don't like, but they've always been engaged in what you're characterizing as propaganda.
[flagged]
As far as I can tell, "left wing" or "leftist" mostly doesn't refer to any coherent ideology or group of people, so much as acting as a catch-all term for things the ruling class doesn't like or people who they'd prefer not to have a voice in media
And yet this incoherent group of people all vote for the same candidates...
> Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled
Sort of like Moore's Law. If he can do that every 18 months then in a few decades the newsroom will really fly! News flash: it doesn't work like that. :(
It is like a guy seeing headlines "wapo is losing" money and feeling ashamed in its "genius entrepreneur's ego / could never be wrong" and taking revenge on whoever he can take revenge and inflict pain just for the sake of it.
I wish Bezos would buy GRRM. I am sure it would result in top quality final books to Sing of Ice and Fire.
AI oh,
AI oh,
It’s off to work we (used to) go.
Jeff Bezos is an awful person.
Why doesn't he sell while he can still get something for it? Continuing the trajectory it has been on in the last two years will mean shuddering the paper or turning it into X hoping some users will switch.
Newspapers just aren't worth that much. They don't make money, in general. He was losing $100m a year at WaPo.
You buy a newspaper because you're rich and you want your opinions disseminated. Not because you think you'll make money. So the number of potential buyers is really small.
Their last peak of subscriptions was when Trump got elected in 2016. It was a good time for newspapers and TV. The NYT is having an even higher peak now[1]. Surely the Sulzbergers aren't the only family competent enough to run a newspaper. Lots of papers aren't owned by billionaires and manage to do ok. Wapo didn't have games in 2016 and people still subscribed. It just lost it's value to readers, so people unsubscribed. I certainly did.
Bezos is literally just showing his incompetence at this point in running a paper, and the NYT is probably loving it. Sure billionaires can buy social networks and papers, but people can also subscribe to and use things not owned by billionaires.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-sad-and-self-inflicted-decl...
The NYT almost went out of business before they were rescued by billionaire Carlos Slim. The NYT is probably doing okay because the local papers everywhere else are a pale shadow of what they once were, so people sign up for NYT looking for what they used to have.
But they did switch to a pretty good online presence, the NYT did games, others could try to go after classifieds or other online pastimes without neutering the news room like Bezos has done. Sure it takes investment, Bezos seems to have had no problems doing that with Amazon.
How many years was he supposed to lose $100m before deciding this just wasn't going to work?
He should've chosen to not make editorial decisions, and help with finding other revenue sources. Instead he lost revenue by making editorial decisions, and shows no signs of learning anything. He's lost more in market value at this point than yearly profit with his current strategy, which he can change anytime.
The last year it has really gone down hill — hard. Reporting is mediocre, photojournalism is forgettable, and the opinion section is absolute garbage.
That's not just WaPo. That's the newspaper business. The business model for newspapers just doesn't work anymore, and they've all been trying to come to terms with it since Craigslist launched in 1995.
[dead]
More with less, huh?
half budget
double productivity
4 x 'value'
so he wants AI written slop
i hope this ends badly
It will end badly, and destroy an American institution.
The big problem is that the greedy TechBros want to influence legislation and politics. Right now there is an orange TechBro in charge, so the oligarch mafia will succeed (aside from their own intrinsic stupidity) - but eventually voters in the USA need to decide whether they really want the superrich to pull all strings on the puppet.
It's the economy, s.....
Trump is a lot of things but he's certainly not a tech bro.
Fuck bezos and the rest of the oligarchs.
[dead]
There’s a typo in the headline. “ended”, not “upended”
He is a billionaire he owns the paper he can do whatever he wants with it. Who cares anyway today about newspapers and tv.
Public opinion is shaped by social media.
> Who cares anyway today about newspapers and tv
Maybe the subscribers of the Post? They (reportedly) left in droves after Bezos interfered to stop the opinion board from endorsing a candidate and more recently fired nearly all international reporters. (including those in warzones)
He owns the paper and can do what he wants within the bounds of the law, but anyone is also free to criticize the decisions he makes, and subscribers are free to unsubscribe.
Criticism is about what someone ought to do, not what they can do. (these are very different)
Obviously his strategy with WA post seems to be working (for him and his ventures). He secured contracts both for AWS and Blue Origin from a seemingly hostile gov. Even if everyone unsubscribes and journalists leave, it was still a good investment.
So the shareholders of Amazon are happy. He did the right thing.
Was it moral or good for the American republic? Again, he is not an elected official so it doesn’t matter. We opted to give him so much unchecked power.
There's some truth to this, but most of the news that gets disseminated on social media was originally gathered by a professional journalist somewhere.