Washington post has been becoming increasingly irrelevant. They went from 500-800k paid subscribers to less than 100k after Bezos started interfering editorially. Some of the most respected journalists left the paper. So I wouldn’t take WaPo as an indicator of anything; its a Bozos Vanity Project and nothing else.
Always happy for a new news source, I just took a look at the Atlantic. It doesn't seem to have any news, just articles about news. Interesting concept.
> It doesn't seem to have any news, just articles about news. Interesting concept.
Atlantic is/was a monthly magazine so they're not trying to do 'scoops' as much as a traditional daily or weekly magazine. Of course in the current age they do have to post regularly somewhat for traffic: but they've generally been about taking a step and perhaps looking a the bigger picture.
For example, on the politics side they have David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush (#43):
Does Powell make editorial decisions at The Atlantic ?
The problem I think is implied to be the choice to meddle with editorial not per se the choice for wealthy individuals to own such a publication.
I'd be interested with people who buy sports teams and interfere in running the team - does that go similarly poorly? Does it turn out that billionaires aren't great at choosing the team composition and strategy for NFL games ? Surprised Pikachu Face 'cos sure seems like Bezos doesn't understand how to write a great newspaper...
> Bezos doesn't understand how to write a great newspaper...
He's not trying to write a great newspaper, he's trying to write a newspaper that curries favor or at least doesn't raise the ire of the current administration.
> He's not trying to write a great newspaper, he's trying to write a newspaper that curries favor or at least doesn't raise the ire of the current administration.
And I think is a problem with news organizations that are part of larger conglomerates: it may be possible to use leverage on other parts of the business to affect how the news operations are done.
If (say) Bill Gates owned WaPo, he doesn't necessarily care much about how Microsoft is doing anymore. Whereas Bezos probably does still care about Amazon, as well as his space stuff.
What do you mean? A source says wapo has 130K print and 2.5M online subs.[1] Compare NYT with 660K print and 9.7M online[2] which I imagine have fallen off proportionally in line with wapo.[3]
The wapo still has over a million paid subscribers.
“The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik”
Argh… yes … I was being lazy, and definitely didnt want to spend the calories figuring out or coining the right classification for what the NYT is doing.
Yes, the crossword has existed for longer, but it was never the core source of funding.
It’s interesting, and I doubt it can scale - every newspaper has its own puzzle section?
Right I guess in the old model they were often syndicated. But as a kid I remember seeing things like the jumble, word search, cryptic something or other etc. in my local small-ish city newspaper
Yeah, they preach about truth, but the ink ran dry,
Bought the headlines, thought clout could buy the sky.
Bezos in the lobby, pullin’ strings, that’s the show,
Turned the Post into a post nobody wants to know.
Five hundred K deep, now it’s tumbleweed clicks,
Writers jump ship while the suits play tricks.
Never trust the press when it’s built on a throne,
Every page now reads like a PR zone.
Ad Homeminem, I don’t bow, I expose,
I talk numbers, they talk prose.
Media’s a mirror, cracked and vain,
You can’t buy truth with billionaire pain.
